Sylvia Plath - 4 yrs before her suicide with susan smith nash/ video. feiden

Description: commentary on Plath, Sylvia. “15 July 1957-21 August 1957,” The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. 284-290. Perhaps the most telling passages in this set of journals revolve around Sylvia Plath’s deep need to write. She writes “the central need of my nature [is] to be articulate” ... “if I am not writing ... my imagination stops, blocks up, chokes me” “I will write until I begin to speak my deep self” (p. 286) Plath, who is best-known for her poetry and short novel, The Bell Jar, and for her suicide, which was followed by attempts by her husband, Ted Hughes, to suppress the publication of some work, rearrange others. Long vilified by her admirers as the true cause of Plath’s suicide, one finds a different story in her journals. In the voluminous writings, one gains insight into a maddeningly perfectionistic soul, whose conflicts with her mother and ideas about the father who died when she was young, are dealt with in agonizing detail. One sees first that Plath is brilliant and her ways of thinking are unconventional. Her life and times make her very existence problematic – what is she to do as a young woman, locked by societal constraints into profound conflicts of interest? She writes herself alive. Perhaps that is what is most valuable in the journals – the absolute affirmation that it is, in fact, possible to “write oneself alive.” (susan smith nash)
CREDITS:Susan Smith Nash PHD & Dave Feiden
www.beyondutopia.net www.elearningqueen.com
www.davefeiden.com www.snippetvideo.com
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actress/moderator: susan smith nash

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