Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

"Chapters In A Mythology" reveals that Sylvia Plath was more interested in the psyche than her biographers suggest. Sylvia's interest in psychology led her to read the work of Carl Jung and her husband Ted Hughes introduced her to the book "The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar Of Poetic Myth" by Robert Graves which is a study of the mythological and psychological sources of poetry in paganism. Ted Hughes suggests that Sylvia possessed the visionary faculty of a shaman, "In her poetry...she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and Holy men.." Judith Kroll explains Sylvia's fascination for the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico in the following terms, "For Sylvia Plath, the typical 'metaphysical' landscape provided a visual setting for the fixed, super-real, ominous, inaccessible drama of the psyche." She further praises Sylvia's "openness to contact with the unconscious are developed to an extraordinary degree." Kroll sees Sylvia's references to witches and Greek mythology as examples of paganism. For example, she argues that Sylvia viewed her nervous breakdown as a shaman's dismemberment and rebirth through ritual death of the psyche and recovery, "The dispersed 'stones' of the speaker's shattered self are gathered together and reconstructed, reenacting the myths of Dionysus (who is alluded to in 'Maenad'), Osiris, and other gods who undergo dismemberment and resurrection." Kroll reveals that Sylvia Plath had read William James' book "Varieties of Religious Experience", "The Ten Principal Upanishads" by William Butler Yeats, "The Tibetan Book Of The Dead", and possibly some books on Zen Buddhism. Sylvia was interested in states of consciousness in which the mundane self is felt to die and a higher and larger self recovered. Therefore she was not morbidly interested in physical death but rather in ego death which permits a rebirth as a mystic in life. Although there is considerable evidence that Sylvia experienced brief moments of ecstasy such as may occur during the manic phase of a manic depressive illness, it seems unlikely that she reached the spiritual attainment of enlightenment or mystical union with the universe or God because such mystical experiences would have given her a reason to live.