I am, I am, I am. Sylvia Plath's heart was beating and she translated it the best way she knew how. For a woman who was self-aware to an unusual degree, what else could that sound be other than a relentless reminder of her own existence? Many have pointed to his constant self-examination and introspection as evidence of a peculiar narcissism. However, it is clear that these tendencies were simply part of Plath's lifelong struggle to understand herself. Knowing she was alive wasn't enough: she had to know who she was and what she was supposed to accomplish during the short time she was allowed to be sentient. Reflecting on his childhood, this incessant desire to identify himself more explicitly, which at first appears to be a selfish pursuit, begins to appear more reasonable. After her father's death when she was eight, Plath devoted herself to education, earning high grades and a scholarship to Smith College (O'Reilly 356). There, he continued to achieve academic success, and many of his short stories and poems were published in various magazines. However, in 1953, Plath's carefully constructed world began to disintegrate over the course of a summer that she would later immortalize in The Bell Jar. She was refused admission to a writing course at Harvard, began to suffer from insomnia, and felt increasingly overwhelmed by her inability to live up to the high standards she had set for herself (O'Reilly 356). These mounting pressures, combined with the terror and depression Plath felt following the failure of electroconvulsive therapy, led her to attempt suicide on August 24 with an overdose of sleeping pills (O'Reilly 356). Although he survived, returning to Smith and graduating summa cum laude two years later, he lived in fear that his life would spiral out of control once again (O'Reilly 356). In trying to understand exactly how she had failed, Plath made a clear distinction between the inner and outer self. He decided that his efforts to maintain a flawless personality were in vain from the beginning, not because of any mistake on his part, but for the simple fact that his weakest and most imperfect self remained inside, struggling under the weight growing of its built structure. mask. To achieve her original goal, Plath had to do more than pretend: she had to become the ideal, building a perfect self from the inside out. From that point on, everything she wrote reflected the process through which she attempted to recreate herself. Motivated by the intolerable feeling of disconnection between her outer persona and her inner self, as well as a persistent sense of “facelessness,” she began by isolating herself emotionally, striving to purify herself by deepening the gap between Self and Other. . At the same time, he began to project facets of his personality onto people he felt exemplified similar traits, mentally transforming them into one-dimensional characters and stripping them of their humanity. Then, he rejected those individuals from his life, hypostatizing the process of exorcising his own unwanted characteristics. However, Plath was never able to complete this process and emerge from the chaos fully formed. At the time she was living in Devon, England with her husband and two children. After learning of [her husband's] affair with a mutual friend, she insisted that they separate and move to London, frantically writing poems that would later be considered among her best (O'Reilly 357). Once again, circumstances combined to overwhelm her, and after struggling to overcome a final depression, she committed suicide on February 11, 1963 (O'Reilly 357). The permanent search for Sylvia Plathof a clearly defined personal identity led her to take care of her own character, deliberately isolating the Self from the Other, dehumanizing and subsequently rejecting other people as a metaphor for the selection of her own various selves, and starting to build a definitive identity, a a process that is clearly reflected in his autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, in his collection of poems and in his personal diaries. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Plath's all-consuming need for a concrete identity was ultimately rooted in the disconnection she felt between her outer and inner selves, a division she used as a major theme in nearly everything she wrote. However, it is important to note that Plath originally viewed this sense of lack of identity as a motivating force, an emptiness that served to inspire rather than destroy. During his time at Smith, he wrote: "So you'll rot in the ground, and then you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to just live a life, which could be typed, which could be thrown away in a thumbnail sketch... 'She was the kind of girl...' and end in 25 words or less" (Journals 64). These feelings are much more optimistic than those that follow, but they too reveal the beginnings of instability and a desperate desire to succeed. As time passed, his need to define himself became even more pressing. In her poem "Three Women", she wrote: "There are the clothes of a fat woman I don't know. There are my comb and my brush. There is a void. Suddenly I am so vulnerable", revealing her belief that one cannot be resilient or fulfilled without first knowing one's identity (Collection of Poems 184). Elena Ciobanu states that in Plath's work "suffering manifests itself poetically as a fissure... between the physical and psychic planes" (Ciobanu 128). It was during Sylvia's time at Smith that this concept emerged as a major theme in her writings. For example, surrounded by other students in the library, she writes: "I sit here without an identity: without a face... Yet I know that at home there is my room, full of my presence. There is my appointment this weekend : someone believes that I am a human being, not simply a name. And these are the only indications that I am a complete person," demonstrating that she felt others saw her as a cohesive individual, unable to perceive the warring selves she saw so clearly ( Diaries 26). Believing that others didn't understand the separation he felt, the distance between his inner self and the person he appeared to be on the surface widened. On pages 148 and 174 of The Bell Jar, Esther, Plath's imaginary double, refers to her reflection as "the person in the mirror," an alien image that she cannot reconcile with the person she feels she truly is. Plath's situation was aggravated by the inevitable feeling that time was running out. He captured this concept best in The Bell Jar, writing: "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig in history. From the tip of each branch, like a great purple fig, a wondrous future beckoned and winked ... I saw myself sitting on the fork of this fig tree, starving, just because I couldn't decide which of the figs I would choose" ( Bell Jar 77). It is clear that her inability to act, and the resulting anxiety she felt, pushed Plath to begin her desperate search for identity. After trying to distinguish between Self and Other as an attempt to more clearly identify herself, Plath found herself emotionally isolated. . She decided that previous attempts to understand herselfthey had failed because of the sheer difficulty of discriminating between the thoughts, feelings, and characteristics that came from her organically and those that had originated elsewhere. On page 47 of his complete Diaries, an entry reads: “How much of my brain is voluntarily mine? How much is not a stamp if what I have read, heard and experienced? Of course, I make a sort of synthesis of what I encounter, but is this the only thing that differentiates me from another person?” Clearly, Plath was concerned that she was too intertwined with the rest of the world to understand who she was without her relationships.influence, outside of the context lent by others. He then begins to create a clearer distinction between the Self and the Other, "purifying" himself to observe the result. Here one can see the origins of Plath's "ideal of a self untainted by others" (Bonds 50). However, this distinction did not lead to the clarity that Plath had hoped for, but rather to the sense that she was "like a numb trolleybus" and "very still and very empty" ( Bell Jar 2-3). Later, in "Two Campers in Cloud Country," he recalls this feeling, saying, "I lean on you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here" (Collection of Poems 144). Although he initially correctly perceives this distance as isolating, he eventually comes to see it as a positive step towards discovering his own identity. By becoming "numb as a fossil," putting the emotional equivalent of millennia between herself and the rest of the world, she has moved to a place where nothing can influence or distort her character. From that point on, purity becomes an important theme in much of his work, initially represented as something desirable. After experiencing a distressing evening, Esther Greenwood of The Bell Jar says to herself while taking a bath: "New York is dissolving, they're all dissolving and none of them matter anymore. I don't know them, I've never known them and they're very pure" (20). However, as time passes, purity often becomes associated with illness and instability. In "Fever 103°", the delusional narrator states: "I am too pure for you or anyone else", and in "Tulips", set in a hospital, she writes: "I am a nun now, I have never been so pure" (Collection of poems 161/232). Eventually, Plath realized that even when she was free from new influences from the outside world, she still carried old imperfections within her. She refers to this feeling in "Olmo", saying: "I am inhabited by a cry. At night it comes out, seeking, with its hooks, something to love. I am terrified of this dark thing that sleeps in me" (Collection Poems 193 ). Now that she had defined herself as she existed, she could begin the process of eliminating the "dark things" within her and become a version of herself without such flaws. Through a process of dehumanizing, or "flattening", others and subsequently rejecting them as a means of abandoning the parts of herself they had come to represent, Plath believed that she would be able to construct an identity free from external influences and imperfections. This view of others as tools to be used to achieve her goal is amplified in The Bell Jar, in which Esther displays a general disdain for others, often describing them as one-dimensional doubles for her various selves. In particular, the magazine's other guest editors Doreen and Betsy come to represent two warring sides of Plath: her brash, worldly side and her purer, almost saccharine side. Although Esther initially believes that Doreen is closer to representing the person she wishes to be, saying, "Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight from my bones," she ultimately disposes of both, refusing to emulate the one or the other( Bell Jar 7). Similarly, in “Fever 103°,” she renounces the men of her past and the impurities they represent, writing, “Not you, not him, not him, not him. (They dissolve me, old whore petticoats) – in Heaven " (Collection of poems 232). Plath clearly believed that the next step in perfecting one's identity was to reject impure and imperfect people. His diaries reflect that he took this approach not only in his writing, but also in reality, assessing the suitability of men based on how well they fit a highly specific, pre-constructed mold, and making little effort to differentiate them. As a result, those who read his diaries will notice that the names eventually begin to blur, a faceless parade of identical memories. As time passed, her poetry became imbued with the idea that she had a "good" and "bad" self, conflicting sides that began to put her in danger. “In Plaster” reflects this new concept in the most direct way, as Plath writes: “There are two of me now: this new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, and the white person is certainly the superior one… He wanted to leave me, yes she thought superior, and I kept her in the dark, and she resented it" (Collected Poems 158-159). In Plath's reckless rejection of everything she deemed unsuitable, she had done more than dehumanize others: she had begun to dehumanize herself, dismembering her identity almost beyond recognition. She wrote: “I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a paper-cut shadow between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, and I have no face, I wanted to erase myself” (Collection of Poems 161). His efforts to reject all external bonds in order to preserve the self had left him without others to nurture and protect him when Sylvia refused to do so (Bonds 52). Although Plath finally felt that she had removed her imperfections and could begin to build a new identity, she was unaware of how unstable her foundation had become. Although Sylvia's writings reference the concept of rebirth and new beginnings, it is clear that she was never truly able to construct her ultimate identity. Despite the astonishing clarity with which Plath describes Esther's descent into madness, her reappearance into society in the final pages of The Bell Jar rings false, as if the author lacks the personal knowledge that gives the rest of the novel its disconcerting quality realistic. Esther enters the world again, admittedly reborn, but the reader cannot help but feel that she is far from healed. An unstable new beginning is also referenced in "Three Women", as the narrator says: "I'm myself again. There are no loose ends. I'm bled white as wax, I have no attachments. I'm flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened that cannot be erased, torn and demolished, begun again… This woman who meets me at the windows - she is clean” (Collection of poems 184) Although here the poet still clings to the patina of recovery, another the verse reveals the truth: "I am a wound coming out of the hospital. I am a wound they are letting go of" (Collected Poems 184). Clearly, Plath was extremely vulnerable and far from perfect, feeling abandoned by others and betrayed by the mind she had previously relied on for success. retained during the last years of her life were destroyed by her husband after her death, only her last poems remain as clues that she began to see death as the only way to become a complete person if perhaps she failed to embody perfection in life he could do it with memory. After all, others had never been able to see beyond his inner chaos.The last poem Plath ever wrote began: "The woman is perfect. Her dead body wears the smile of realization... Her bare feet seem to say: We've come this far, it's over" (Collection of poems 272). He had finally understood that the Self could only escape being “stunted, narrowed, deformed, through… outcroppings of heredity” achieving a semblance of perfection in death, free from the contaminating influence of life (Diaries 31). Six days later, Plath ended her life. Her failed efforts to identify herself and achieve perfection left Plath with no external ties upon which she could rely, as the process by which she attempted to achieve her goals required her to depend solely on herself. However, his fate makes it abundantly clear that an identity formed entirely from rejection of the Other cannot survive hardship or allow it to be resilient because it is simply the byproduct of a negative reaction rather than honest self-discovery. Through her writings, Plath unintentionally revealed that her attempts to purify herself had resulted in a dismemberment of her identity, a fundamental disturbance in the necessary relationship. between the Self and the Other (Legami 52). However, it is also likely that Plath's perfectionist tendencies contributed to her feelings of failure and isolation. No matter how others perceived her, she remained perpetually unconvinced that her identity was strong, flawless, or sufficiently cohesive. One diary entry, dating back to 1952, reads almost like a premonition of what was to come. "I'm afraid. I'm not solid, but empty... I don't know who I am, where I'm going and I'm the one who has to decide the answers to these horrible questions" (Diaries 149). Undoubtedly, his efforts to destroy bonds with others and aspire to perfection led to failure. However, earlier writings suggest that perhaps if he had chosen to cultivate these same bonds, he could have succeeded. The young Sylvia Plath was brilliant and full of vitality, despite her imperfections. If she had chosen a less destructive path to self-discovery, perhaps she would have been able to remain as she felt at Smith: “…young, beautiful, and perhaps not too damned” (Journals 140). Clearly, Sylvia Plath's desperation to identify and repair the disconnection she felt between her outer persona and true self led her to isolate herself and reject others in an attempt to purify and perfect herself, a process that is displayed in all his writings. Striving to understand herself better, she eventually lost herself completely. Although the inner workings of Plath's mind will continue to be arcane, it is possible to speculate that she was ultimately unable to accept that her goals were impossible to achieve. The disconnect between who she was and who she wanted to be would always exist, and the world would never fully understand it, because she couldn't either. Plath herself explains it best: "Outwardly, all that could be seen passing by was a tanned, long-legged girl in a white deck chair, drying her light brown hair in the late afternoon July sun, dressed in aqua shorts and a white shirt. The sweat stands out in wet, shiny drops on her bare, slender belly, and drips periodically in sticky streams under her armpits and behind her legs, you couldn't tell much by looking at her: as in a short month of life began, loved and lost a job, found and foolishly and willfully cut off several unique friends, met and charmed a boy from Princeton, won one of two $500 prizes in a national college fiction contest, and he received..