suicide writers
“dying is an art, like everything else, i do it exceptionally well”
maru delgado
Kaufman proposed the theory of “The Sylvia Plath Effect”, a study that shows how writers, especially women, are more susceptible to emotional disorders. Caught between the walls of reality and fiction and always attached to the rejection they faced while presenting their creative works, the star losing the capacity of separating emotions and personal feelings from their own fictional characters’ and invented stories and tragedies, which has lead them to a lethal destiny...
Lesbians, mothers, wives, virgins, daughters, anorexic ones… they’ve been born to consume the world’s depressions and their tragic endings confirm this. “Cursed writers of the solitude and grief” tied to the cliché of those who are suicidal, trespass the walls of fantasy to remain in the suffering of the lethal flesh. To all of them, enemies of life, we offer this piece as a gift.
It was the night on February 11th, 1963. Sylvia Plath, carrying this life full of frustrations and infidelities, was facing an unfixable reality, away from her husband, Ted Hughes (English writer); she looks at herself once again in the mirror, condemning the image that never smiles back. She walks, reads, cries and, leaving her last poetry work, “Ariel”, in which are gathered all the sensations and reasons that explain her own hatred, decides to write the final period to her own story. She seals her children’s door, leaving at the edge of their beds, some milk and cookies. She walks into the kitchen, opens the gas key and sticks her head in the oven. Finally, she dies asphyxiated.
Crossing the ocean, a woman takes a male’s name to freely write poetry, enjoying the streets of London and its bohemia; René (later on as Renée) Vivien, an alcoholic, drug addict and anorexic lesbian, used to find pleasure in those English streets and bars dressed as a man, with a constant rejection to food in order to get the perfect figure. She makes love with the death in a cheap hotel; she is seduced by a laudanum bottle and, lying on a couch, she places some violets on her chest, closes her eyes and, unfortunately… fails. Later on, it will be the death looking for her in the shape of pneumonia, which came as a lightning, as a consequence of all her excesses.
Narcotics are not the only exquisite way of heading to death. The schizophrenic madness that took over Virginia Woolf (British novelist) haunted her until her last whisper. Woolf suffered constant depressions, attacks, hallucinations and guilt. She used to listen to voices and had this uncommon fear to the unknown. In her brain, she could see her own demons, hunting her. She also used to hear the birds speaking in Greek and she used to talk nonsense. One day, feeling the death’s call, filled her jacket pockets with stones and threw herself to the Ouse River, drowning while being taken by the water flow.
Other female writers that were also victims of “The Sylvia Plath Effect” are: Iris Chang (Chinese writer) who shot herself in the mouth on a road, inside her car. The extraordinary Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentinian poet) was dealing with severe acne problems and haunted by the tendency to easily gain weight, had constant meltdowns which led her to take her life by taking 50 pills during a weekend that she had permission to leave the madhouse. In Europe, Sara Kane, after living with severe depression, and a constant feeling of solitude, hanged herself in the bathroom using her shoe laces at the age of 28; she was the youngest of all our writers when she died. And to finish this list we have Anne Sexton, Plath’s friend, who locked herself in the garage and following her colleague’s steps, died by breathing propane gas.
Something I found in common with all these writes, are lines in their creative work, patterns of language that put in evidence this sad destiny of death. All of them used references in the first person, (I, me, my) and present big identity problems in their messages where they have a constant battle with their other “I” usually presented as fatalist characters. An example of this is Sylvia Plath’s poem “Lady Lazarus” “Dying is an art, as everything else, I do it exceptionally well”; in these lines, Plath shows part of her own life and the several, unsuccessful suicidal attempts. Renée Vivien, in “La Fusée” says: “I was the extinct lightning and the destroyed dream” this clearly shows her ideas of destruction where the light is off in all its shapes. Alejandra Pizarnik writes: “I know how to scream until dawn, when the death lies naked in my shadow” morbid words from the poem. “The jail” in which Alejandra finds a sense for dead, the necessary strength to be and yell, she seduces and talks directly to the spectrum finding a strange pleasure hidden in this poet.
I could go on but the taste of these words may lead you all to find more of them and find in their work the richness and beauty of dark and painful thoughts. Let the poetry penetrate your skin and let them take you to these writer’s worlds full of madness, romance and contradictions running all together in unbearable speed. They lead posterity and give phrases away like breaking spells and these, dear readers, are the ultimate pleasure.
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