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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/ > > %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%