This may be an impertinent question. There is the equally valid litany of "what went right?" because Plath left behind a collection of impressive poetry, a novel, a distinguished academic career, a marriage to an important British poet, and two children. She was not a stereotypically brilliant but eccentric loner. Yet the shortness of Plath's life, plus her suicide, leads most of us to wonder about her tragic death.
Perhaps Plath was one of the first of the post-World War II, post-1950s era women who lived lives of intensity, creativity, and success, and died early of some kind of self-abuse. Sensitive artists, frustrated by a world that they found cruel, demanding, seductive and bewildering — these poets, musicians, and artists of varying kinds took excesses of different kinds of drugs. We witnessed the drug-related deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the suicides of Marilyn Monroe and the poet John Berryman, and the alcoholism of many creative men and women.
We look to modern society for the sociological causes for these self-destructive phenomena, to the human mind for the psychological causes, and to the individual characters of the personalities involved for the specific reasons for the early loss of our creative spirits. In Sylvia Plath, all these causes can be duly noted. But still we wonder: why? Is it not possible to have more specific answers, more scientific approaches?
One of the latest approaches to mental illness is physiological. It is now believed by a growing segment of the medical profession that serious psychotic disturbances, whether chronic or periodic in their manifestations, are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain and/or neurological systems. These various syndromes may be genetically, or chromosomally, transmitted. Manic-depression and schizophrenia are now suspected to run in certain families and are being treated with chemicals such as lithium with some degree of success.
