The Bell Jar

The difficulty of concluding what was wrong with Sylvia Plath resides, of course, in the complexity of Plath, as well as her situation, especially her situation as a woman, and the difficulty in any case of mental ill-health in determining the cause, much less the cure. Some day, there may be tests to determine chemical imbalances of the nervous system and specific remedies to right the body and mind. Until then, we must look at Plath's life as we would view any sad story and say that it was plagued by problems and some bad luck. For if she had had a different mother, or if her father had not died when she was young, if she had had more supportive female friends, if she had had different medical or psychiatric treatment, or different nutrition, would she be alive today? That is what tragedy is — the accumulation of many factors and causes which add up to a conclusion of futility. If we alter any one of them, the tragedy might not have occurred. The interesting question, then, is: if and when a cure has been found for various forms of depression, will that eliminate the tragedy of suicide? Probably not. But it might alter and prolong the emotional states and lives of certain sensitive people. For the present, unfortunately, we cannot discover what went wrong for Plath; we also cannot discover exactly what caused her creative output. We are left only with the portrait, the sometimes sketchy picture, of her life, with its early end. And, of course, we are left with its poetry, its art.