LaReeca Rucker

One of my recent thrift-store finds was a 35-cent copy of The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. Having read The Bell Jar and knowing the tragic circumstances of Plath’s death, I hoped the book would help me understand what her own “bell jar” looked and felt like — and how it finally became impossible for her to escape.

The book offered some interesting insights into her relationships with her therapist; her poet husband, Ted Hughes; his lovers; and members of her family. Still, it never quite told the story I was hoping to read.

For me, it would have been more compelling if it had relied less on academic analysis and more on chronological storytelling, introducing each person as they entered the final chapter of Plath’s life. When I finished it, I knew more about the events surrounding her death, but I did not feel that I knew much more about the woman living through those last days.

I did come away with the impression that Hughes was exactly the kind of person who could make an already vulnerable person question her worth and her grasp on reality. The book also made me wonder whether Plath might have survived in our post-Oprah, pop-psychology era — an age in which we have a broader vocabulary for depression, trauma, emotional abuse, betrayal, and the complicated trials of modern love. We still do not always know how to save people, but perhaps we are better equipped to recognize when someone is disappearing beneath the weight of her own life.

Sylvia Plath died at 30, never having the opportunity to learn whether the emotional extremes that helped shape her poetry could be understood, treated, or made more bearable. Thirty is far too young — not because she “gave up,” but because despair convinced her that the future had nothing left to offer.

Perhaps that is the cruelest thing about the bell jar: it does not merely trap a person in the present; it hides the possibility that life outside it might someday feel different.