Hitler isn't here to defend himself either ...
Does depression excuse anything a person might do?
If you bothered to have a clue about the person you are addressing, you would know that I am about the first to argue that there are many degrees of responsibility, and that "choice" is often a somewhat meaningless concept, where the range of choices available to someone -- or
that someone perceives as available to him/her -- is narrower than it would be to ourselves or to the general population. Responsibility
is diminished by things like traumatic experience and intellectual and emotional limitations.
Were Plath's ideas about womanhood and herself as a woman purely conditioned by the 1950s? Or was a woman with a Fulbright scholarship someone from whom a little more insight and action can be expected?
Were her desperate straits in the months before her suicide a result of abuse combined with mental illness, or a result of her conscious choice to hitch her life to a man and make herself dependent on him for all of her needs - both material and emotional? Oh, except that she insisted on maintaining the self that was a writer. Again: the conflict that all women experience, resulting from the irreconcilable demands coming from outside and inside, and the pain that all women experience when they are measured or measure themselves and find themselves wanting, regardless of whether they accept the standards? or -- a choice to define and measure her own self according to both standards, external and internal, and thus create her own conflict?
Ordinary women -- and we are all ordinary women -- when faced with abandonment and hungry children, would go out and get a job. Sling hash. Whatever. Plath, if you want my opinion, was enormously self-centred. Womanhood/motherhood (inseparable for her) and writing poetry, those were to be her life. It seems to me that the children were just the trappings of it. She wanted them, and she wrote poetry about them. She really didn't seem to think that feeding and clothing and housing them was her job.
And yes, I know: depression, to an outsider, is very easily mistaken for self-indulgence. But this was no unexamined depressive life. This was a woman who thought and spoke and wrote constantly about her
choices.
I found this somewhat unsatisfying, but for want of time it's what I just had a look at:
http://www.sapphireblue.com/writing/plath.htmlThis seems to be at the very crux of the claiming of Sylvia Plath by the feminist establishment: that the author was painfully aware that to become all she wanted to become would be to break the binds of stereotype and sexual double standard, and that society would not make it easy for her. But where her writing speaks of her inner dualities, and sometimes even to extreme resentment and jealousy of men for what they had that she did not, it also speaks of a woman who did want to be fully a woman, in many contrasting senses of the word, and to claim as hers some of the very things that so many women who call themselves feminists have rejected in their own searches for completion: love of a man, the raising of children, the creation of what she could create to leave her dual stamps of Woman and of Wit in indelible imprint on her world.
A fair bit of straw being chucked around there.
Leaving one's stamp is all very well. Taking responsibility for one's self and the children one creates - and indeed, the man (or woman) one loves - is what just seems to me to be missing from Sylvia Plath's equation.
But hey, don't feel compelled to actually discuss any of the questions that arise when we think about Sylvia Plath. I'm sure the whole thing is just black and white and I'm missing it.
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