Sylvia Plath Research Paper

Sylvia Plath and Her Importance for the American Poetry
Sylvia Plath had a short, but a productive life as a poet, short story writer and novelist. The woman was born in the USA (Massachusetts) in 1932. Her first poem was published in The Boston Herald in 1940 when Plath was only eight years old. The woman engaged herself with the poetry in the high school and after the graduation. Plath reflected many important events and common principles of that period of time in her works. Her life experience suggested Plath had a sensitive mind or some kind of psychical disorder. She committed her first suicidal attempt in 1953, after months of the electroshock therapy. Plath was sent to this treatment after her mother saw she cut her legs. After the suicidal

Most of her works includes autobiographical moments and help not only to know about some features of that period of time, but also understand the attitude of contemporaries to them. For example, Plath reflects elements of the war propaganda in her poem The Thin People: “They are always with us, the thin people… On a movie-screen. They Are unreal” (“The Thin People” l. 1, 3-4). The author included her experience with the electroshock therapy in her novel The Bell Jar. The work also describes more general problems of that period of time. Plath mentioned the execution of Rosenbergs – a family that spied for the Soviet Union, at the beginning of her book. The book also mentioned a common issue that women did not want “to accept the prescribed role of the time of becoming a submitting housewife” (DIMIR). Here Plath sowed women, who replaced men during the wartime on workplaces, did not wish to return to their dependant roles. The Bell Jar provides readers an insight into the psychiatry of the 1950s, when doctors prescribed the shock treatment in spite they did not know about all its impacts on person’s health. “The ways Plath highlighted the injustices of sex-based roles and psychiatric care make her important to all of American history”