Death by Domestication
By Kacie Fowler November 2024
Sylvia Plath’s life, and subsequent death, demonstrated the many of the struggles with societies norms, questions, and shortcomings that are bestowed upon women who find themselves living the ‘American Lifestyle’. Lady Lazarus is a poem that shows us just how mind-numbing and soul-damaging domesticity can be for those who do not want that life but find themselves placed within its towering walls to fulfill the hopes and wishes of others. With Sylvia’s Death, written by Plath’s close friend Anne Sexton, we see that not only was Plath not alone in the craving of death over this life, but that Sexton knew that the domestication of Plath is what drove her to suicide; the literal final nail in the coffin.
While domestication was not the only ‘issue’ Plath faced in her life, it certainly played a major role in her decision to take her own life. Written in 1962, a year before her suicide, Lady Lazarus compares her life to that of other oppressed people, like a Jewish person in Nazi-controlled land, in an attempt to drive home just how trapped and miserable she had felt in the monotonous life of homemaking and child raising. She later goes onto describing how society viewed her as if she were a main event in a circus, stating “for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge, for the hearing of my heart….and there is a charge, a very large charge, for a word or a touch, or a bit of blood” creating the feel of leering eyes from a crowd (society) and the feel that she is something to be taken apart and dealt out for public consumption; the idea that she does not belong to herself (Plath, lines 58-63).
In connection, in Sylvia’s Death, Sexton opens the poem with “O Sylvia, Sylvia, with a dead box of stones and spoons,” which is to be a reference to her home and domestic ‘life’ that has no life left in it, a life that has been reduced to the simple materials that construct its physical features (Sexton, lines 1-2). With this being the opening line of her poem of grief, Sexton is laying the blame, or the cause, of Sylvia’s depression to how empty her domestic life felt. Following these opening lines, Sexton writes of how Sylvia’s son and daughter may have served to be the catalyst for her death with the line, “with two children, two meteors” inferring that her children, while she probably did love them, created more tension and stress in her already anxious life (Sexton, line 3).
The very method chosen for her suicide says something about her feelings and view on her domestic life. Plath committed suicide in 1963, just over a year after her son’s birth and just two months after The Bell Jar was published. This is not to say that her son was the reason for her choice, but that having children added to Sylvia’s metaphor for her life feeling like living in a bell jar, of being trapped with no escape and little air. One could even state that her choice of suicide came from the harsh reviews of The Bell Jar, a book about expectations for women in society and how the pressures can lead to mental deterioration. These critics felt that the book was too disturbing and too close to Plath’s real life to be ‘a good book’, which probably solidified all of the feelings and anxieties she already had, but the more troubling issue with those critics is that they did not see the relatability for ‘domestic women’ in that book.
Between much of Plath’s work, and other authors including her husband, it is evident that Plath turned her pain and mental destitution into poems and stories with such depth and relation to the bell jar that so many women live in in their daily domesticated lives. She provided evidence that this is not the life for everyone, but when those who do not wish to have children, or even get married, state such, they are treated as lesser or unserious. My question then, is if we have seen what the social expectation of domestic life can do to a person, exemplified by Plath, then why do we treat that as the social norm? Do we wish for the downfall of all women?
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. Lady Lazarus. 1965. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus
Sexton, Anne. Sylvia’s Death. 1964. https://allpoetry.com/Sylvia’s-Death
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