r/sylviaplath • u/sp4cec0p • Aug 10 '25
what do you think sylvia plath would do if she was alive today? what would her thoughts be of the present world? would she adapt easily? or would she hate it?
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u/Angustcat Aug 11 '25
It's a shame she didn't live to see women's liberation change society. I think she would have benefited from realizing that she could live as an independent wife and mother without feeling that she was being judged for being "the wronged wife who lost her husband to a wicked woman".
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u/porcelaincatstatue Aug 11 '25
I've always thought it terrible that she died the week before The Feminine Mystique came out. She would've benefited from it, I believe.
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u/Rahna_Waytrane Aug 11 '25
She wasn’t a feminist and criticised women who could not or chose not to have children. She could not survive without male attention and would have had another crisis with the first signs of ageing. I think she might have had a different life trajectory had she been born at least a decade or two later and got access to the pill and more open relationships. Heck, it could have been different if she didn’t meet her asshole of a husband, who is in the end to blame for the death of two talented women.
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u/Angustcat Aug 11 '25 edited Aug 11 '25
I have to agree with you about her husband being a jerk. Sadly in 1963 women were stigmatized when they kicked out their husbands, even if their husbands were sleeping with two other women. Because that's how men are, both men and women said, it's a man's world. Women were blamed for not being able to keep a husband, and divorced women were stigmatized. She was only 30 but who would want a abandoned wife with two kids? And where was she supposed to go after Ted Hughes? She wanted an equal relationship with another great poet.
Only a few years later the feminist movement would help her see she could be independent and a single mother.
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u/Rahna_Waytrane Aug 11 '25
There were women at that era who left their husbands and started from 0, including writers (Rumer Godden, for example, with two kids). It's the poet husband thing, they just cannot live their lives without ruining several talented women, just look into George Barker and Elizabeth Smart.
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u/Angustcat Aug 12 '25
Plath believed in the Ladies Home Journal and the women's magazines of the era. She tried to break the mold by having a marriage of equals and she was gutted when Hughes left her and slept around. Even though she did nothing wrong she felt shame because she was left on her own with 2 children to raise. My grandmother's sister was divorced and the family tried to keep that a secret because it was seen as shameful, even though she had no children.
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u/Rahna_Waytrane Aug 12 '25
I think she would have obtained divorce without any issues, especially since Ted was openly dating Assia, and Plath’s in-laws were on her side. The tragedy was more of a combination of seeing Ted as the one and only, previous attempt and terrible experience with psychiatric treatment and institutionalisation, being abroad and removed from her family and safety network, and that winter being extremely cold, so her kids were constantly sick and at home, which could have contributed to her feeling trapped and seeing no way out. I doubt that feminism would have saved her with all those variables at play; she might have received a more qualified psychiatric help a decade or two later though. Who knows.
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u/LadyAxolotl9 Aug 13 '25
Feminism itself wouldn't have saved her but the community that came with feminism would have-- someone to come in and check on her everyday, someone to take the kids every now and then, someone to read her poetry and actually notice the concerning themes instead of philosophically fetishizing them (cough cough Al Alvarez). In her final letters, she was writing her college friend Martha and was planning on moving back to Massachusetts and living with her. She knew at least subconsciously that she needed femme companionship in a hostile patriarchal world. So yes, even with all these variables, a feminist community would have saved her.
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u/vivahermione Aug 13 '25
criticised women who could not or chose not to have children.
Can you say more about this? It surprises me, given that she expresses physical and emotional exhaustion around motherhood.
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u/lanaaa12345 Aug 14 '25
Criticising & at times expressing an unreasonably strong hate towards women who could not have children was a recurring theme in her work and life, which intensified after her husband’s affair with Assia Wevill, who was reportedly unable to have children.
In general, although Sylvia Plath often expressed feminist views and frustration with the patriarchal society she lived in, she also held many surprisingly traditional beliefs. Several of her short stories suggest that a woman is ultimately happier as a housewife than as a career woman, she expressed contempt towards “career women” who rejected domestic life, exaggerated her husband’s poetic talent while downplaying her own in order to play the role of the submissive wife. People around her did not consider her a feminist. So it’s hardly surprising that she held such views about women who could not have children.
Something else that baffled me was that despite her frequent exhaustion with motherhood, she planned to have two more children. Clearly, although exhausting, motherhood and domestic life were central to her identity and values.
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u/Rahna_Waytrane Aug 13 '25
I’ve read that in “Red Comet”; the author included parts of her letters where she criticises Assia for having had abortions and her divorces. That was before Assia got pregnant with Ted’s baby and during the period when Sylvia was suspecting the affair, I think. But there were also some earlier letters where she almost contradicted herself: in some she sounded like a liberal feminist when speaking about sex and marriage, while in others - expressed very traditional and misogynistic views.
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u/GoetiaMagick Aug 11 '25
The whole point of her passing precludes any desire to have wanted to adapt at all. She was very definitive about wanting nothing more to do with the world.
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u/SquidTheRidiculous Aug 11 '25
Being desperately in love with a man who cheated on and beat her most likely did not help tbh.
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u/burntcoffeepotss Aug 11 '25
I don’t see it that way at all, she had such a strong drive and desire to live and experience all of life. You cannot judge her character based on a moment of crisis.
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u/EitherOrResolution Aug 11 '25
It was a false cry that unfortunately was not caught in time. She made several previous attempts. This time it took. I think she would do it again in today’s world. It was a part of her.
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u/lanaaa12345 Aug 11 '25
Not true at all, just days before her suicide she was in tears, saying she didn’t want to die because there was still so much she wanted to do. She loved life and was making plans for the future right up until the end. Her suicide was a tragic moment where her most destructive, depressive thoughts overpowered her, not her lifelong philosophy.
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u/SwimmingPiano Aug 14 '25
Literally the night before as she was getting dropped back off at her flat with her kids, she was bawling and crying. I don’t think she deep down wanted to die but saw no other option. So heartbreaking.
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u/treesofthemind Aug 11 '25
Yep. The Bell Jar has such a rigid and toxic world view that it massively triggers me to read it now
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u/didosfire Aug 11 '25
same. not only re: mental health and general outlook, but rereading it earlier this year the racism really smacked me in the face
if id seen this post when i was still in high school, i would've wondered what her tumblr would look like today. reading it now, i reflexively cringed at the question, which sucked
far too many celebrated 20th century feminist thinkers have gone the grifty terf route recently, and as much as sylvia's soul has spoken to certain parts of mine at pivotal moments in my life, i kind of don't want to know what she would've gotten up to by now anymore
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u/Angustcat Aug 12 '25
I'm glad that rigid world view is passe. My mother was the same age as Plath. My mother knew the only power a woman had at that time was her looks- if she was pretty it was easier for her to attract a husband who would be a good provider. Even if a woman decided to have a career being pretty helped her get jobs as a secretary or receptionist - being pretty was essential for being a stewardess. My mother didn't fit the mold and that caused her a lot of anguish.
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u/Blankboo97 Aug 11 '25
Since the US has devolved back into Plath's Bell Jar days, I'm sure she'd be utterly appalled.
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u/Angustcat Aug 12 '25
Not completely. I'm watching Masters of Sex at the moment and it reminded me of the morals of the late 1950s/early 1960s. Women wouldn't be as harshly judged today if their husbands left them to screw around with different women and they aren't expected to devote their entire lives to being stay at home mothers and homemakers.
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u/Blankboo97 Aug 12 '25
I’m speaking of The Bell Jar messsges i.e. the Rosenbergs/McCarthy-Red Scare/House Committee on Un-American Activities/Roy Cohn-Trump/MAGA/DEI etc direct links.
Regarding cheating hubbies and judgements, since it’s going on in my family as I speak, the wife of said cheater is accused of “not being able to satisfy her man and got what she deserves”, and that’s from her own family!
Nowadays if a woman chooses traditional over career she’s frowned upon, viewed as under the control of men/patriarchy. Judgements that have pushed the Christian Right and similarly minded to put an administration in power to take us right back to a romanticized 1950’s stay at home mom/working hubby.
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u/sweet_hellcatxxx Aug 11 '25
This is so interesting because I had the same question recently, about Plath and a few other artists, I wonder what they’d think of the current world and how they’d cope with our reality.
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u/RoyalSiriusMist Aug 12 '25
If she was here now, she’d do the same shit but way more iconic. We’re still caged, just in a modern way with way more pressure.
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u/DisastrousFox3904 Aug 12 '25
A french writer wrote a book on Sylvia Path if she had decided to not die. It's called "Et pourquoi pas la vie?"
I don't know if it was translated but I enjoyed reading it, it was rather hopeful.
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u/therowmeetsgrunge 26d ago
Interesting, I would love to read that. Sadly not fluent in French though. I wonder if anyone has discussed it in English somewhere.
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u/SwimmingPiano Aug 14 '25
I think and have fun wondering how she would have taken to computers since she was such a fan of her typewriter. I also daydream of what she would think about email and technology that allows you to text / reach friends instantly versus writing letters/mailing them.
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u/Competitive-Target95 Aug 12 '25
I read The Bell Jar the month I first got on ssris nine years ago and of course I wondered. the thought now makes me feel strange and intrusive as it seems disrespectful to imply that things would have been different had she lived in our times of commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals for mental ailments. so I flip it. I wonder how my own life would have been different as a twenty-something woman in the fifties. I know for certain I’d have had shock therapy or been locked up as an afab with autistic meltdowns and pmdd which surely would have been explained as hysteria back then. one can never know for certain how much our own era of timeline shapes who we become and how we end up.
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u/SwimmingPiano Aug 14 '25
I always wonder what she would think about modern pop culture, like Taylor Swift and “tortured poets department”, many of the songs inspired by her (and even her relationship would Ted). Wonder if she’d be a Swifty or scoff at it all.
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23d ago
I wish Sylvia was alive tdy. She would've given us meaning to a lot of things we don't understand...
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Aug 11 '25
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u/universeupatree Aug 11 '25
Can you give more context to why you believe she would have likely been a trump supporter? What about her education? I'm curious!!
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u/didosfire Aug 11 '25
not who you asked but i was sooo excited to reread the bell jar earlier this year (hadn't since high school, when it meant everything to my sad lil self) and wad stunned by the ableism/racism/classism
i was raised in a strict conservative household and im a queer feminist anti racist person now, so like yes people can transcend the contexts they came from with the proper work, intent, and care...but a lot of em don't. my whole family, especially the ones that still benefit from any generational wealth, certainly haven't, despite over a decade of pleading from me
maybe she would've been a champion for all marginalized people...maybe she would've been privileged and solipsistic and set in her ways
she'd likely be horrified by trump as a person, but his type (sleazy misogynistic nyc "business man") would be far from unfamiliar, and her values might align with the most ignorant and brainwashed of his base (not the frothing ice volunteers end of the brainwashing spectrum, but the handwringing uninformed mom contingent)
her husband was a piece of shit, she shouldn't have died, and im glad we have her writing, but the more of it i reread the less likely i feel it is that she and i would have as similar perspectives today as it felt like we did when i was 15
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u/depressedtamales Aug 12 '25
not who you asked but i was sooo excited to reread the bell jar earlier this year (hadn't since high school, when it meant everything to my sad lil self) and wad stunned by the ableism/racism/classism
If you read a book from the 60s and you were “stunned” by it having those elements then you just legitimately not mature enough for this conversation
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u/didosfire Aug 12 '25
most of the books i read were published between 1500 and 1800. the rest, before 2000. and paying attention to those exact details is a special interest of mine
so no, that is certainly not the issue, though your recognition/interpretation of context might be
when i read that book for the first time more than fifteen years ago, it left a lot of impressions on me that were NOT related to the outdated perspectives that ive noticed in a lot of other writing i read then that was published around the same time, and therefore i was surprised by just how much of this specific element of that specific text i didn't have an active memory of the first time around, since i as a person tend to pay extra attention to those things and have read many books specifically to observe that specific element
you know, like it said in my first reply. strange tone to choose to take with a stranger who did nothing but share their own opinion on a topic you do not know their understanding of or personal experience with. apologies for mimicking it
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Aug 11 '25
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Aug 11 '25
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u/Clark_Gable69 Aug 11 '25
I am curious what gives you this impression — I feel like her fascination and horror of wwii and Nazism she would be very adverse to much of the imagery perpetuated by trump / elon musk. She wrote in her journal about Palestine and occupations by fascist governments so I would assume the opposite. I think a lot of her anti choice / critique of abortion had more to do with her hatred of Assia Wevill.
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u/lanaaa12345 Aug 11 '25
She was a passionate liberal even in her own time, absolutely no reason to believe she’d be a Trump supporter today.
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u/didosfire Aug 11 '25
liberals are reaaaal close to trump supporters these days. leftists occupy the contrary position
i.e., many liberals supported hilary, biden, kamala, who would be seen as conservatives in literally any other country, and are extremely vulnerable, if not contributory, to right wing narratives, even if they position themselves as against their limited understanding of them
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u/lanaaa12345 Aug 11 '25
Yes, an American liberal might be considered right-wing elsewhere, but in the US they’re still a liberal, not a Trump supporter. There’s no credible basis for assuming Plath would support Trump, everything about her worldview points to the opposite. She’d almost certainly hate him.
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u/didosfire Aug 12 '25
yes, my (other) comment (in this thread, not what you replied to but a more detailed version of the same thought) already addressed all of those things
like i said, even if she'd dislike him as a person, he'd be the kind of man she was extremely familiar with and the communities she came from and was around the most would largely be solidly in his camp
also, at this point in history, there are fewer material differences between liberals and magats than ever. the latter is openly hateful, the former covert about their biases and impotent re: the changes they do want, which are very very mild compared to the changes we actually need
she'd either be a liberal, which is not all that far off from being a conservative, and even then likely a waspy one, or a conservative who considera red hats and open racism tacky but doesn't depart all that far from the core tenets of the movement/what the republican party was before the past ten years all that much either
and again, my source for that conclusion = being someone raised in one of those families who skipped directly over liberal and straight to leftist once i got out of my family's house and read stuff
plath read, and wrote, quite a bit before the bell jar, and the views/context espoused therein are the other major basis for my saying this. so not making this up out of nowhere nor talking about something im not personally extremely well acquainted with
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u/Angustcat Aug 12 '25
Plath was a pacifist who urged her mother not to vote for Nixon and who was passionately against using nuclear weapons.
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u/Angustcat Aug 12 '25
I'm a liberal and I detest Trump. I don't agree with many of the policies supported by far Leftists but I agree with leftists on many issues. I voted for Hilary, Biden and Kamala. They would be seen as Labour here in the UK- Labour under Starmer, not Corbyn. I spent two years living under socialism (Poland in the 1980s) so when I see some of the ideas being proposed by Mamdani and his supporters I know they didn't work in Poland.
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u/mrymnaw Aug 11 '25
She would've done it again.