ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES RJES 19 /2022 DOI: 10.2478/rjes-2022-0009 SYLVIA PLATH’S LAST LETTERS GABRIELA GLĂVAN West University of Timișoara Abstract: Following the publication, in 2018, of a consistent part of Sylvia Plath’s correspondence, scholars interested in her complex biographical and literary story found new opportunities to read the American poet in a new light. I shall explore the letters she sent to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, while also critically observing their relevance in understanding Plath’s oeuvre. Keywords: literature and medicine, mental health, depression, suicide, letter-writing, biography, confession. 1. Introduction Sylvia Plath’s death by suicide at age 30 is now part of modern literature’s mythology. Her autobiographical works consistently contributed to the myth, adding numerous shades of meaning to the short and bright career of a woman writer who had faced dire adversity since childhood: her father’s death when she was just nine, an ambivalent relationship with her mother, and the passionate but troubled marriage to English poet Ted Hughes are the landmarks that shaped her life. Since her involvement with clinical psychiatry is well-documented in her biography and literature, a particular type of Plath scholarship emerged, documenting her “recurrent severe disorders of mood (depressive and/or manic)” (Cooper 2003:296). According to Brian Cooper, a researcher and psychiatrist, they could be understood as a clear indicator of clinical pathology – “apparently spontaneous in onset, the depressive phase being accompanied by psychomotor retardation, feelings of guilt and unworthiness, early-morning waking and somatic changes” (Cooper 2003:296). In the weeks preceding her death, her London GP, Dr. John Horder, remembered that Plath’s mental health was severely affected: “I believe, indeed it was repeatedly obvious to me, that she was deeply depressed, ‘ill’, ‘out of her mind’, and that any explanations of a psychological sort are inadequate...” (Horder qtd in Cooper 2003:297). The clinical case of Sylvia Plath is as relevant and worthy of academic interpretation as the Romantic myth case of Plath, complementing it, highlighting its meaning and depth. Her psychiatric illness lies at the core of the dark melancholy defining her poetry, it is the accelerator of her untimely demise. Her posthumously published journals and letters home, a semiautobiographical novel, the 11 volumes of memoirs by family and friends, a biographical volume and the biography of her husband, Ted Hughes, all are essential material in reconstructing and outlining the complex life story that fueled her prodigious creativity. Among them, correspondence plays a crucial role in delimiting the importance of biography in Plath’s oeuvre, being a cardinal resource in documenting her mental struggle. On a wider scale, it has been a reliable tool for scholars in mapping and exploring literature. The fine line separating private writing from writing for a certain audience is often fluid and blurred; revealing details concerning the writer’s worldview or specific attitudes towards their own art are often expressed in letters to friends, family or editors. Aesthetically and stylistically, correspondence could be understood as a separate literary genre, despite the relatively few theoretical approaches to the issue (Hewitt 2004:3). Moreover, letter writing has long proved to be an essential resource in mapping an author’s intellectual territory and inner world, both essential for a coherent approach to their work. Plath’s correspondence is challenging and unusual, as it bears the indelible markers of her tragic suicide. 70 ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES RJES 19 /2022 It is a cornerstone of the mythology that nourished a constant interest in her work, both from literary scholars and the general public. I shall focus on a particular area of Plath’s correspondence – the fourteen letters she sent to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, between February 18th, 1960, and February 4th, 1963. Dr. Beuscher treated her after her first suicide attempt, at age 20, ten years before her death. The Beuscher letters are revealing from multiple perspectives – they offer a dramatic view of Plath’s state of mind in the months preceding her suicide, while also highlighting the events that may have precipitated it; they facilitate a unique insight into some of Plath’s most important relationships – with her psychiatrist, who treated her after her first suicide attempt, and with her husband, English poet laureate, Ted Hughes. However, they are particularly challenging if read as a personal text, written for private purposes, addressed to a specific reader with whom the writer had a private relationship. I shall investigate this set of texts, questioning their significance as a specific type of literature, one that aims to replace therapy and essentialise a specific form of confessional discourse. My intention is to question the value of these letters as literature, that is as a distinctive part of Plath’s work, worthy of academic attention that goes farther than the sensational aspects of her marital and existential troubles. In her letters to Beuscher, Plath created a narrative of her life that was, at the same time, descriptive and analytical. Her efforts to interpret, understand and internalize her own thoughts and actions and those of her closest family members and friends articulate a subjective view and, at the same time, a story that the writer articulates as a distinct discourse in her oeuvre. Private literature cannot be excluded from any author’s work, as it often sheds light on essential aspects of their worldview; a writer cannot escape the writerly condition, even if the literature they write is intimate, concerning no more than a single reader. As it has been argued before, “the study of these new documents makes the object of ‘a case study in Plath’s legacy’” (Chiasson 2018). According to the same critic, “the Beuscher letters are among the most revealing pieces of prose that Plath ever wrote” (2018). 2. The Lifeline of Letter-writing The trajectory to publication of the letters is a story in itself. In 1979, Dr. Beuscher gave the 14 letters to Harriet Rosenstein, a feminist scholar who was working on a biography of Plath. She later abandoned the project, but kept the letters in her personal archive. In 2017, a book dealer put the letters up for sale, creating a wave of intrigue and controversy that ended once Smith College, Plath’s Alma Mater, bought the letters and Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter and literary executor, decided to publish them. They were included in the second volume of Plath’s correspondence, published in an updated version in 2018. Upon reading them, before making the final decision to have them published, Frieda Hughes noted: “I decided to let people make up their own minds and, hopefully, find the kind of understanding that my mother was working towards near the end, despite the return of the ‘madness’ that took her anyway.” (Hughes 2018:17) The Reverend Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, M.D., as she liked to be referred to later in her life, met Plath in September 1953, while she was a resident at McLean Hospital, the renowned mental institution outside Boston. Barnhouse (her name at the time) was assigned to treat Plath, who had attempted suicide in August after a breakdown and a poorly administered set of electroshock treatments at another clinic. Close in age (Beuscher was 30 at the time, Plath almost 20), the two developed a connection that later became a complex friendship Plath greatly cherished. What is problematic in this relationship is the fluid boundary between the personal and the professional. Although Plath considered Beuscher her analyst, the doctor’s training and experience as a psychotherapist was rather limited. The medical field of psychiatry is a rather different practice, implying different approaches to mental health. For literary purposes, one might consider Beuscher Plath’s confessor and confidante, despite her insistence that the doctor should charge her money for their “sessions” in correspondence. Financially aware and responsible, Plath had strong ethics 71 ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES RJES 19 /2022 concerning money, as a woman writer who took several jobs in order to sustain her family’s expenses. It is significant that here, in her correspondence with Beuscher, Plath empowers money with the authority to turn their exchange of letters into a therapeutic act: “Nobody else is any good to me, I’m sick of preamble. That’s why I thought if I paid for a couple of letters I might start going ahead instead of in circles” (Plath 2018:754). In the autumn of 1962, she clearly expresses her belief that payment would reinforce an “official” character of their interaction and that would be beneficial for the therapeutic nature of their dialogue: “I’d be awfully grateful just to have a postcard from you saying you think any paid letter sessions between us are impractical or unhelpful or whatever, but something final. Believe me, that would be a relief. It is the feeling of writing into a void that never answers, or may at any moment answer, that is difficult.” (Plath 2018:753) What seems to define these letters is Plath’s only focus – her relationship with Ted Hughes. All the other aspects of her life – her small children (Frieda and, from July 1962, she mentions newborn Nicholas), her relationship with her mother, who came to live with them in Devonshire in the summer of 1962 – are mentioned only in connection with the all-absorbing center of Plath’s life, her marriage. This is just an illusion of perspective though, caused by the intensity of Plath’s scrutiny of this fundamental relationship that overshadows all others. She repeatedly reinforces the fact that she cannot discuss her marital troubles with anyone else but Dr. Beuscher. The fact that Beuscher was also a theologian and, later, an Episcopal priest is not without relevance to the present analysis. Despite the lack of any religious references in Plath’s confessions to Beuscher, a reading of the letters as part of Plath’s literature cannot ignore this significant detail, although absent from the only perspective we have access to – and that is Plath’s. Confession, in its primary sense, bears the connotation of trust in a higher authority, one that may help unload the burden that weighs down on its bearer (Taylor 2012:7). Therapy loosely preserves at least the suggestion of this connection. Plath’s correspondence has proved essential to understanding her creative contexts, the dramatic biographical shifts and turns that have consistently impacted her work. The seismic force of the changes in her life reverberate throughout her later work. As Linda Wagner-Martin notes in her study concerning Plath’s women-themed poems, “The truly dramatic changes between those college-era poems, like ‘Circus in Three Rings’ and ‘Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea’, and such late poems as ‘Applicant’, ‘Purdah’, and ‘Lady Lazarus’ were both shocking and inexplicable” (Wagner-Martin 2007:198). While criticizing the manners in which the biographical element has been interpreted by various authors (Wagner-Martin included), Harold Fromm concludes that Plath’s “problem” – her inability “to forge a coherent self from the multiple and warring fragments of her psyche” (Fromm 1990:251) – is clearly outlined in her private writings: “Her journals and letters home are blatant documents of this phenomenon, which is the most pervasive characteristic of all her writings” (Fromm 1990:251). Plath scholarship, in general, often relies on her journals and letters either to support arguments concerning her literary works, or to identify the sources of the transformative storms her imagination seems to undergo in her writings from 1962. However, an exclusive focus on the biographical can be detrimental to a comprehensive reading of Plath’s work. As David Young warned, there are numerous examples of such excesses: “before one has read much of her work, one has tumbled into the gossip, into the tabloid flattening of her artistic accomplishment, and the poems have begun to line up as lurid illustrations, vivid diary entries, exhibits for the defense or the prosecution if she or her former husband, her mother and father, or anyone else, happens to be on trial” (Young 1998:18). Upon their publication in 2018, the letters written to Dr. Ruth Beuscher seemed to confirm previous speculations concerning the volatile nature of her relationship with Ted Hughes. Frieda Hughes feared that long-buried family secrets and feuds would erupt again and taint the memory of her parents. Indeed, it is Beuscher that Plath entrusted with the confession of the violent moments that had occurred in her marriage. What I consider to be the central quality of these letters is the fact that they testify to the writer’s intense longing for an interlocutor that might offer insight 72 ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES RJES 19 /2022 and possible answers to her increasingly torturous feelings of inner dissolution and abandonment. The writer sees in Beuscher a maternal figure (as opposed to the paternal obsession that plagued her relationship with Hughes), a professional who contributed to the medical effort to save her after her first suicide attempt. In her eighth letter, from September 1962, she praises their rapport: “I turn to you again, because you are the one person I know who will not advise me to numb or degrade or give up or diminish myself. I am really asking your help as a woman, the wisest woman emotionally and intellectually, that I know. You are not my mother, but you have been the midwife to my spirit” (Plath 2018:762). Frieda Hughes was fully aware of the impact these fourteen letters would have on Plath’s readership; therefore, she chose to give them proper attention. Her own reading, understandably biased and emotional, signals the pitfalls of this single-perspective narrative: the reader only has access to the writer’s point of view, the “truth” of the facts presented remaining elusive and difficult to discern from subjective impressions. Frieda Hughes tries to present an objective synthesis of the letters: Those fourteen letters were snapshots of my parents’ passionate relationship and subsequent marriage; the finding of a city home, the birth of children, their move to the country and the adoption of what would be an unsustainable idyll, followed by my mother’s suspicion of my father’s affair, the confirmation of that suspicion, her decision to separate, the strengthening of that resolution, the apparent realization that they had been living in what I think of as a hermetically sealed bubble in which they ran out of oxygen, then the decision (following Ruth Beuscher’s written advice) that divorce was the best option, and finally, the letter I feared most, the letter in which my mother’s madness returns just before she kills herself. (Hughes 2018:7) Her immediate reaction is only natural: “I simply wept over the contents” (Hughes 2018:3). What distinguishes these letters in the greater corpus of Plath’s correspondence is her inclination to consider this particular type of confessional narrative a form of therapy. She tends to analyze herself, her thoughts and actions according to an already familiar psychiatric therapeutic framework. Her observations concerning Hughes, her mother, her dead absent father, even Beuscher as friend and maternal figure support the argument that, for the author, these letters were the closest she could come to a therapeutic act, given the circumstances. Isolated, sick and overwhelmed by domestic duties and financial constraints, Plath seems to resort to a desperate form of confronting her chronic issues, thus complementing the minimal psychiatric treatment she was receiving from Dr. Horder. Her correspondence with family and friends is often instrumental and her epistolary style unequal, yet her letters to Ruth Beuscher seem to subvert the classical rules of the art and culture of letter-writing. As a writer of letters, Plath was aware of the functional use of correspondence. In this sense, she briefly outlined her belief in her journal that the letters to her mother were a way in which “we could both verbalize our desired image of ourselves in relation to each other” (Plath 2000:449). As much as she may have desired to conjure an unreal, fabricated self in her correspondence to others, she was probably aware that the same strategy would hinder communication with her therapist. On the contrary, she seems to act subversively in the sense that she aims to replace realtime verbal therapy with asynchronous narratives. Firstly, Plath seems to turn the act of writing a letter to her psychiatrist into a voluntary therapeutic act, one that confirms her commitment to address her dramatic state of mind, her depression, and ultimately, the fear that her “madness” could return. Secondly, her trust in Dr. Beuscher seems unabated, since the young psychiatric resident helped her recover after her first suicide attempt ten years before. Plath appears convinced that even an epistolary contact with the possibly providential presence in her life would prove vital and could “save” her again. No less important is the fact that Plath seeks to receive concrete answers to her growing sense of dissolution and helplessness. It was, in fact, Beuscher who convinced her that she could survive a divorce from Hughes, that she could, in fact, regain control of herself and her identity. The apparently authentic wave of enthusiasm that electrifies some of her last letters could be read as an answer to Beuscher’s impulse. From a literary perspective, the confessional quality of Plath’s writing seems thoroughly articulated, as this private narrative was 73 ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES RJES 19 /2022 meant to translate the writer’s inner world, its turbulence, irrational crises and despair. Although not intended to fictionalize Plath’s experiences, the letters were meant to represent, as faithfully as a real-time therapy session, the inner workings of the patient’s mind. Uninterrupted and isolated in her own discourse, Plath’s letters aim to recreate the privileged verbal intimacy between patient and therapist, although unavoidable parameters such as distance and inevitable delays in receiving an answer in due time gravely impact the quality of the remedial process. Given the dynamics of Plath’s life events in the months preceding her death, an increased responsiveness could be regarded as essential. The breakdown of her marriage to Ted Hughes came as a rapid succession of decisive moments and their mounting conflicts severely affected Plath, as she states this directly, in plain terms. One could only speculate if the catastrophic outcome of those events would have been different if Plath had attended therapy sessions in London, in real time, instead of relying on the imperfect solution of writing to her doctor in the United States. As J. Ellis noted in his study on Plath’s letter-writing (Ellis 2011), correspondence is a recurrent theme in her poetry, particularly in Collected Poems, where the poem The Rival has the letter addressed to the writer’s other self, the one who writes and creates literature. Plath’s metaphor could also be read as a sinister premonition of a suicidal act, as the letters she receives from this unseen entity are “white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide” (Plath 1981:167). Other examples mentioned by Ellis are Burning the Letters and Letter in November, both reflecting anxieties and destructive tendencies summoned by a consciousness in crisis, for whom this type of communication is a double-edged essential gesture. However, the critic doubts the presumed spontaneity of Plath’s letter-writing, remarking that “Plath’s letter-writing self is equally in control and just as staged” (Ellis 2011:16) as her literature-writing self. Indeed, in her final letter, dated February 4th, 1963, Plath seemed to accept the final cut from Hughes. Having read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, Plath admits her “idolatrous love” for Hughes. As it was clear from the beginning of her narrative of her marriage, an important part of the relationship concerned the intellectual and existential becoming of the two writers. Living and working together in a closed ecosystem seemed to fulfill Plath’s fundamental need for presence, closeness, friendship, devotion, and erotic exclusivity. For Hughes, however, who had apparently peaked sexually and wanted to “experience everything and everybody”, the marriage had become a suffocating prison he gladly escaped. As letters from the summer of 1962 show, Hughes plainly left for London one day “on a holiday”, assuring Plath of his love and devotion for her and their children. It was the culmination of a betrayal that had been unravelling for months, and it marked the demise of the Hughes’s union. The Plath/Hughes doomed marriage has been the subject of public scrutiny and indiscreet fascination for decades. His decision to destroy his wife’s last journal, containing notes that led up to her death on February 11th, 1963, was widely criticized by Plath scholars and feminist academics as a final act of abuse. His uncontrollable outbursts, revealed by Plath as concrete physical violence in the Beuscher letters, appear rather edulcorated by their daughter Frieda in her preface to the second volume of Plath’s correspondence. In choosing to see her parents as a couple who loved a lot and fought a lot, she seems to be willing to accept a very personal version of the past. In her first letter to Dr. Ruth Beuscher, dated February 18th, 1960, Plath was in her ninth month of pregnancy with her daughter Frieda (although she didn’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl: “So baby and first book are well on the way” (Plath 2018:413). Her first volume of poetry, The Colossus, was about to be published by Wm. Heinemann, who also published Maugham, Caldwell and DH Lawrence. Plath seemed content, excited and at home: “I can’t think of anywhere else in the world I’d rather live & have no desire to return to America at all.” (Plath 2018:413) On a similar note, her second letter, from April 2nd, 1960, is a confession of the experience of labor and birth and Plath seems overjoyed by the congratulatory atmosphere: “I don’t know when I’ve been so happy. I am surrounded by flowers & telegrams & being tired, bloody & without apparent stomach muscles” (Plath 2018:435). By the third letter, from January 4th, 1961, the tone shifts 74 ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES RJES 19 /2022 towards familial issues, namely Plath’s strained relationship with her sister-in-law, Olwyn. Ted’s sister was an unpredictable character, a woman who nourished a significant underlayer of resentment and bitterness towards Plath and, later, her children. During the winter holidays of 1960, Plath became fully aware of the severity of Olwyn’s resentment and lost any hope that the relationship could be mended: “…this Christmas some small spark touched off the powderkeg & she made obvious to Ted & his mother what I’ve known all along: that her resentment is a pure and sweeping and peculiarly desperate hatred” (Plath 2018:540). Plath stresses that her life was blooming into the idyllic scenario that she has envisaged for her future with Ted and Frieda: “We want a town house, a Cornwall seaside house, a car & piles of children & books & have saved about $8 thousand simply out of our writing in the past five years toward these dreams & feel in the next five years we may nearly approximate them.” (Plath 2018:541) In dissecting Olwyn’s erratic behavior and pathological attachment to her brother, Plath takes the place of the analyst and performs a demonstrative dissection, in writing, as if she asked to be validated as an analyst by her own analyst. The letter clearly tries to convince Beuscher that Plath was confident and in control, capable of identifying abnormal tendencies in others and of managing the crises they cause. There is a two-year gap in this correspondence – Plath’s third letter, from 27 March 1962, reaffirms Sylvia’s desire for domestic bliss. Moving into Green Court and giving birth to Nicholas in January 1962 seemed to fulfill her projected pastoral: “I have never felt the power of land before. I love owning bulbs & trees & all the happiness of my 17th summer on a farm comes back when I dig & prune & potter, very amateur” (Plath 2018:695). Then, rather abruptly, she writes: “I had lost the baby that was supposed to be born on Ted’s birthday this summer at 4 months, which would have been more traumatic than it was if I hadn’t had Frieda to console & reassure me. No apparent reason to miscarry, but I had my appendix out 3 weeks after, so tend to relate the two” (Plath 2018:695), a detail she will later rethink while accusing Ted Hughes of having beaten her. Although Frieda Hughes questions “what […] would qualify as a physical beating? A push? A shove? A swipe?” (Hughes 2018:13), she reinforces her opinion that, given the “vital” context that Plath’s marriage was collapsing, she was more inclined to hyperbolize its shortcomings. She also announces the imminent publication of The Bell Jar, of which she says “It is a serio-comic (if that’s possible) book about my New York summer at Mademoiselle & breakdown, fictionalized, but not so much that doing it & coming back to life is due so much to you that you are the only person I could dedicate it to” (Plath 2018:693). Starting with the fourth letter, the writer’s marital and mental crisis becomes evident and increasingly difficult to manage. After discovering Hughes’ love affair with Assia Wevill, she repeatedly asks for help from Beuscher, while also reaffirming her belief that divorce was unthinkable. From his remark that “he wanted to experience everybody & everything” (Plath 2018:731), to the bitter questioning of their solidarity in marriage – “why should I limit myself by your happiness or unhappiness” (Plath 2018:731), Sylvia sees her husband’s behavior change, as he was distancing himself from the marriage and Plath’s idealizations. While her husband had become a celebrity with admirers, Plath does not hesitate to label herself negatively – “I have been a jinx, a chain.” (Plath 2018:731) –, as she asks rhetorically: “How could a true-love ever want to leave his truly-beloved for one second? We would experience Everything together” (Plath 2018:736). Plath evokes a clear psychoanalytical rhetoric as if to declare herself aware and in control in front of the psychiatrist: “For fear he would desert me forever, like my father, if I didn’t watch him closely enough.” (Plath 2018:738). Pouring her hatred of Hughes’ mistress into a letter to Beuscher could be read as an act of defiance towards the rules of epistolary exchange, as Plath uses a rhetoric that is no longer dialogical – Plath gives in to a primitive urge to insult and belittle her love rival: “What has this Weavy Asshole got that I haven’t, I thought: she can’t make a baby (and really isn’t so sorry), can’t make a book or a poem, just ads about bad bakery bread, wants to die before she gets old & loses her beauty, and is bored” (Plath 2018:738). 75 ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES RJES 19 /2022 Plath resorts to a verbal strategy that amplifies her self-awareness and her connection to her biographical puzzles when she declares that her marital crisis has cathartic powers for her: “this great shock purged me of a lot of old fears. It was very like the old shock treatments I used to fear so: it broke a tight circuit wide open, a destructive circuit, a deadening circuit, & let in a lot of pain, air and real elation. I feel very elated” (Plath 2018:738.) She even stimulates a sense of her erotic worth, while she frankly talks about sex – “I have in me a good tart, as distinct from a bad tart” (Plath 2018:738). However, Hughes’ confession of the affair, his “truth about the femme fatale, which freed my knowledge to sit about in the light of day, like an object, to be coped with, not hid like some hairy monster”, reopens the conversation about her (self-)destructive mental constitution. “And I didn’t die”, she concludes the paragraph referencing Hughes’ admittance of the affair with Wevill. What becomes striking, as her marital agony progresses, is Plath’s willingness to make the situation acceptable in discourse. As a verbal projection, her inner life becomes more stable and anchored, the more she becomes aware of its pitfalls. Her ability to diagnose herself remains doubtful, despite her certainty that she no longer feels suicidal: “I don’t think I’m a suicidal type any more, because I was really fascinated to see how, in the midst of genuine agony, it would all turn out & kept going. I really did believe it was the Worst Thing that could happen, Ted being unfaithful; or next worst to his dying. Now I am actually grateful it happened, I feel new” (Plath 2018:737). Plath surrenders to melodrama when she says that “All the stupid little things I did with love – baking bread, making pies, painting furniture, planting flowers, sewing baby things – seem silly and empty to me without faith in Ted’s love” (Plath 2018:738). It is also a confession of the void the marital crisis has caused her. In the summer of 1962, Plath’s marriage starts to dissolve progressively, in a painful process that triggers a fundamental breakdown: “I have been at a nadir, very grim, since my last letter to you” (Plath 2018:742), she writes in July that year, and two months later she bitterly remarks: “a legal separation may just set Ted whirling into this wonderful wonderful world where there are only tarts and no wives and only abortions and no babies and only hotels and no homes” (Plath 2018:757). 3. Conclusion “Do write”, Plath begs her former psychiatrist later that autumn. “If only a paragraph. It is my great consolation just now, to speak & be heard, and spoken to” (Plath 2018:764). For Sylvia Plath, whose end-of-life period was marked by hostile communication and often by a complete breakdown of connection and mutual understanding, letter-writing became the substitute for numerous psychological and intellectual needs that could no longer be fulfilled. “I keep your letters like the Bible” (Plath 2018:779), she wrote to Dr. Beuscher in October 1962. A literary genre in itself, correspondence took, in the case of Plath, a protean form that evolved long after she died. What stands out like a tragic conclusion to these letters and, ultimately, to Plath’s life, is the clear affirmation of her greatest fear – the return of a devastating depressive episode: “What appalls me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst – cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies” (Plath 2018:882). The continent of mental illness is a savage country, where all rules that regulate normality are futile. Despite her efforts to stand and fight the storms of her young life, Plath seems to have been defeated by an enemy that still is, as we speak, rather poorly understood and dangerously underestimated. References: Chiasson, Dan. 2018. “Sylvia Plath’s Last Letters”. The New Yorker, 26 October, online: https:/newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/05/sylvia-plaths-last-letters. [accessed September 10, 2022]. Cooper, Brian. 2003. “Sylvia Plath and the Depression Continuum”. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Jun; 96(6): 296-301. 76 ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES RJES 19 /2022 Ellis, Jonathan. 2011. “‘Mailed into Space’: Sylvia Plath’s Letter Writing” in Representing Sylvia Plath. Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fromm, H. 1990. “Sylvia Plath, Hunger Artist”. Hudson Review 43(2):245-256. Hewitt, Elizabeth. 2004. Correspondence and American Literature 1770-1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Frieda. 2018. “Foreword” to The Letters of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper Collins. Plath, Sylvia. 1981. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber; New York: Harper & Row. Plath, Sylvia. 2018. The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Volume II. New York: Harper Collins. Taylor, Chloë. 2012. The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault. New York: Routledge. Wagner-Martin, Linda. 2007. Plath’s Triumphant Women Poems, in Blooms’ Modern Critical Views. Sylvia Plath. Updated Edition, Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom. Infobase Publishing. Young, David. 1998. “Tree with an Attitude: Reading Plath Irreverently”. Field, Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 59:18-23. Note on the author Gabriela GLĂVAN is an Associate Professor at The West University of Timișoara, Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, where she teaches Comparative Literature. She is the author of a book on Romanian modernism (2014) and of a critical essay on Franz Kafka’s short stories (2017). She has published numerous academic studies on modernism, the avant-garde and postcommunism and is a contributor to several cultural magazines. 77