Plath

Research project:

My topic for the independent research project is Sylvia Plath, her life, her novel The Bell Jar and her poem Daddy, and how they are all related, and the connections that I have found amongst them. Plath was a troubled woman who lived in London, England with her two children, she was married for a short time to the British poet Ted Hughes. She studied at Smith College on a scholarship, and she wrote over one hundred poems during her time at Smith. She tried once to kill herself with sleeping pills, but was unsuccessful, during her recovery time she underwent electroshock therapy and psychotherapy. We see the links from the Bell Jar, where Esther tried to kill herself while on break from an internship with sleeping pills. She then goes to a mental hospital, or a mental car facility where she undergoes electroshock therapy much like Plath does. Her poem Daddy was written for her father that, many people feel, may have had a negative impact on her life. She compares her father to Hitler and her ex-husband to prove her distaste for the man. He passed away when she was ten, and she resents him for not being there, and for not getting to talk to him before he passed away. Finally in 1963 she killed herself, just about a month after her novel was published, she put her head in her oven and killed herself with cooking gas. Her life was full of experience; it was a tragedy that she had to die so young.

This is a video of Sylvia Plath reading her poem Daddy, you can pick out from the way she talks how much she dislikes and how much pain she feels towards her father.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM