Like Camus' absurd hero, Plath should have realized that life is a balance between hope and despair, between control and fate. Those who defend Plath's suicide by saying that she did not really mean to kill herself because a nurse was supposed to arrive on time to save her are also defending Plath's lack of a clear philosophy. Part of her life was a frenzied attempt to be in total control as besuits her German heritage, and part of her life was a total giving in to fate. Was Plath laboring under the illusion of Kant's categorical imperative, where all important moral points are matters of black and white? What absolute universal law is there that says if a creative soul is to live, the fates will make sure that they do? Plath never learned what was her responsibility to control, and every human being should accept some things as being beyond his or her control. We can be sorry for Plath, but we do not have to accept her point-of-view. Life, as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man says, is to be lived — not controlled. And living, of course, means exerting some control, sometimes much of the time. Despite all of Plath's discipline in her studies and her writing, she was not so disciplined in her life. Or perhaps she was just inept, or immature, at the art of living.
Interestingly, if Plath's last word to us was very dark, since that time women have gone on to say much more positive things. We can only wish that Plath herself might be here to comment on the really fine works of fiction from such writers as Oates, Mary Gordon, Gail Godwin, Joanne Greenberg, Alice Walker, and now a whole generation of women. Perhaps Plath's The Bell Jar, however slight a novel as it might be in the future, and as judged against those works that grew out of it and away from it, was really the watershed. And Plath's tragic suicide was the waste land from which contemporary women have, and will, free themselves.
