I appreciate this post as I tend to agree and I believe it explained the
reasons for my agreement on this issue. Thank you for sharing your informed
thoughts JED
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 07, 2000 2:42 PM
Subject: Re: Plath: a sociological approach?
> As good a place to jump in as any.
>
> There are perfectly sane and defensible reasons for committing suicide. In
> Japan traditionally loss of face or disgrace were considered ok reasons,
> and suicide in the face of hopeless illness or, as in Benjamin's case, a
> hopeless situation that could only get much worse, is hard to criticize.
> Schizophrenics sometimes commit suicide because their voices tell them
> to--it doesn't happen as often as one might think, and it's not a good
> thing, but again it's hard to put a moral judgement on it. But the vast
> majority of suicides are histrionic passive aggressive acts on the part of
> very narcissistic people. The problem for the suicide, of course, is that
> he or she has forgotten that she or he won't be there to enjoy the
> results--the act does require at least a degree of delusion, or let's say
> extremely restricted focus. I suspect that Plath fell into this last
category.
>
> Suicide is the ultimate act of revenge--the survivor never recovers, is
> left with unresolvable anger--hard to answer back short of one's own
> suicide. And it's no coincidence that the survivors are far more likely to
> commit suicide themselves than the population at large. So the suicide has
> assumed an unusual power over the intended victim. Among the problems with
> this form of revenge is that the damage is spread much wider: let's say
> that Plath's target was Hughes. Those who suffered most and are
> statistically at far greater risk are her children.
>
> When I've been at least in fantasy on the brink (rather different than
when
> I really was during the long psychosis we call adolescence) what's pulled
> me back from even considering the idea seriously is what it would do to
> Carlos. That's because I'm not all that narcissistic--other people really
> do exist.
>
> Therapists rate the seriousness of suicide risk among other things on the
> basis of the method the patient proposes. The more violent, hence
> irrevocable, the means the more serious and imminent the threat. So
gunshot
> is near the top, then hanging (one could be found) then wrist-slitting
(one
> could be found and one could also call emergency) and pills and gas near
> the bottom--for the reasons given for wrist-slitting, but also because,
for
> pills, it takes a long time, dosage is uncertain, and one could vomit them
> up, for gas because few houses are that well-sealed and if one happens to
> fall away from the stove after passing out it really takes a long time,
> hence more opportunity for discovery. The histrionic suicide attempt--the
> suicide found in time--is passive-aggressive behavior in its purest form.
>
> It happens that women commit suicide by means of drugs or gas more often
> than men, perhaps because men are more likely to have weapons, because
> women who don't work outside the home spend more time alone inside the
> home, or because men are more likely to express themselves violently
> against self or others. There have been feminist explanations, but it's
> good to remember that the mortality from avoidable causes is considerably
> higher among young men than among young women. Women may commit histrionic
> suicide attempts more often, men tend to be more successful at dying.
>
> The practical application of the differential suicide screen is that if I
> find out that a patient is thinking about shooting himself and he (It's
> almost always a he) has a gun I'm likely to have him committed for suicide
> watch. If a patient tells me she's thinking of doing away with herself by
> pills I can often get her through it by provoking her anger or by
> contracting with me not to kill herself before speaking to me--me, not my
> phone machine--before she does anything. Believe it or not, that last
> tactic is close to infallible. If the patient won't contract it's straight
> to the hospital.
>
> It seems to be almost universally assumed in Plath's case that Hughes
drove
> her to it. I'm suggesting that Plath responded in only one of the possible
> ways. And I would doubt that her passive-aggressiveness was limited to her
> suicide. It's I think folly to speculate about what happens in the
intimacy
> of other people's marriages, but it's usually a safe bet that each partner
> gives as good as he or she gets, altho perhaps in different currency.
> Hughes and Plath had a marriage that became lousy and they each acted out.
> Plath's acting out was suicide.
>
> As to her hard row as a woman writer, there were many enormously powerful
> woman writers at the time. I'm thinking about Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth
> Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Doris Lessing, Hannah Arendt--it's a long list.
> Whatever impediments were placed in the paths of women some women
> notoriously got past them. I've never understood why this was truer of
> prose--as it had been from before the beginning of the nineteenth
> century--than of verse. One would think that the boys would have tried
> harder to control the money-earning areas of literature and would have
> relegated the women to the genteel poverty of poets. It may be that more
> talented, forceful women chose, in whatever sense one chooses, to write
> prose. That doesn't answer the why.
>
>
> At 12:16 PM 7/7/2000 -0700, you wrote:
> >Just a thought re Plath - can the hysteria in her
> >poetry, the sense of isolation, of terrible
> >alienation, the solipsism - be explained by reference
> >to the social conditions that obtained in her lifetime
> >in England and the US? She was really too early to
> >ride the wave of militant collectivist feminism, yet
> >in her life she seemed to encounter many of the
> >problems that drove that movement(maybe Ted Hughes
> >exemplified the reasons why the world needed, and
> >still needs, a feminist movement!). Perhaps her
> >terrible 'existential' isolation can be traced to the
> >huge and isolating obstacles placed in her way by a
> >sexist society? I am struck by the similarity between
> >Plath'
> >s nihilism and hysteria and the 'theoretical' work of
> >the 'Radical (separatist) Feminists' - most famously,
> >of Andrea 'all men are rapists and should be
> >eliminated' Dworkin - who emerged in the 80s, another
> >time of conservatism and attacks on womens rights in
> >the USA and the UK. Have any critics talked up this
> >parrallel (must admit I'm not much up on the Plath
> >lit crit )?
> >
> >Cheers
> >Scott Hamilton
> >
> >=====
> >"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the
> moon? And how
> >could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that
perhaps
> I have
> >been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it,
nothing
> be
> >explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life...
> Philosophical
> >problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas
> from life,
> >we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must
investigate
> the
> >application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig
Wittgenstein
> >
> >__________________________________________________
> >Do You Yahoo!?
> >Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger.
> >http://im.yahoo.com/
> >
> >
>
>
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|