Quote of The Day: Want Everything And Nothing (Continued)

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This is the 2nd part of the story. The 1st part is here.

I finally finished the two books “The Red Comet” and “The Silent Woman”. And now let’s proceed to continue the book review.

In college, Plath got a chance to become an intern at the Mademoiselle magazine headquarter in New York City. It’s a prestigious internship, which could lead to many other opportunities in the publishing industry. However, she had a bad time. One would either love or hate New York City, and Plath happened to be a person who hated it. She felt that everybody was fake, and everybody had an agenda, and everybody wanted to use everybody else. Also the city was unclean and people were so rude. Her boss selected Plath as her personal assistant and forced her to work really hard, which made everything worse. She had dreamed of New York City before the internship, but now she was disillusioned.

After the internship, when she went home, she was so depressed that her mother brought her to see a well-known but incompetent psychiatrist, who administered the electric shock (electroconvulsive therapy) on her which was a standard practice at the time. It is said in those days, angry wives and screaming women were routinely brought to this psychiatrist to be electrocuted. The book mentioned a very well-known couple. When the wife found out about the husband’s affair, the wife went berserk and the husband sent the wife to this psychiatrist to be treated. It is said the electricity applied to patients would induce seizure and was really painful. I somehow suspect that this treatment was invented by a sadistic doctor who tried to keep his wife quiet and obedient. It is probably just my imagination, but you know what I mean.

The therapy made Plath even more depressed and she committed suicide by swallowing her mother’s sleeping pills. She was promptly discovered. After being brought back from the brink of death, she stayed in the psychiatric quarter of the hospital for six months to recuperate. Fortunately, Plath’s sponsor was a wealthy woman who went through depression and treatment herself. She understood Plath’s plight and continued to support Plath to finish her college. So Plath returned to Smith College and finished her senior year. Plath’s psychiatrist told her that it was OK to say, “I hate my mom,” which could help her release a lot of cooped up tension. Actually Plath’s mom was a wonderful woman and a very responsible mother, but she couldn’t understand Plath’s strive for intellectual freedom. Her motherly obligation of pushing Plath to get all the awards, wishing her (not forcing her by any obvious means) to date a medical doctor or a Harvard man with a good economic prospect, and wanting her to dress up well and be proper were very oppressive to Plath and almost choked her poetic talent.

I think the family’s lack of money was also a very oppressive factor. If Plath went to public universities, she would have no problem in this aspect. But in Smith College, she had to be social with people who were very wealthy, which dampened her spirit. Once she won $100 for her poem–$100 was a big thing in 1950s–she used it all on her dress and outfit. She had to make herself presentable, which was, and will always be, such a luxury for poor people.

Plath took a Fulbright scholarship, which allowed her to go to England to study at Cambridge. Actually a couple of universities in America offered her full scholarship too to continue her study after Smith, but she turned them down, knowing that her mother would press her to marry or criticize her life choices. Escaping across the Atlantic seemed to be a better way. And as she was graduating from Smith, she met Richard Sassoon, who was in every way a great man–he was a struggling writer, he came from a good family, he was passionate at heart. The only problem was that he was very short and didn’t conform to the “male beauty” standard if you know what I mean.

Still, the two had a full blown relationship. They traveled together and slept together–Richard’s family was wealthy–which irked Plath’s mother Aurelia incessantly. She considered their relationship immoral and cursed Sylvia in her words, “no daughter of mine”. This relationship contributed to Plath’s decision to go to England, which had a reputation of allowing poets and artists certain kind of freedom that one couldn’t find in America at the time. Richard also took a position in Paris. I guess the two understood their unsuitable physical attributes in the conventional eyes, and wanted to see what would happen next in their relationship by staying close but not too close geographically. If Richard Sassoon was several inches taller with more muscles, life would turned out to be very different. Plath had an emotional connection with Sassoon, which she never had with Ted Hughes. However appearance matters in this world, often to an annoying degree, often making suitable people unsuitable and unsuitable people seemingly suitable.

(To Be Continued Here)