Plath’s protagonist wasn’t looking to kill herself. She was looking for a way to kill herself. And not just any method would do. That’s the point of coupling: behaviors are specific. She needed to find a method that fit. And on that cold February night, the method that fit for Sylvia Plath happened to be right there in her kitchen.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
This is “A Birthday Present,” written in September 1962, at the beginning of Plath’s anguished final months in London:
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles…
Take a look at the following graph showing suicide rates from 1958 to 1982 for British women ages twenty-five to forty-four. (Plath was thirty when she died.)
In the early 1960s, when Plath committed suicide, the suicide rate for women of her age in England reached a staggering 10 per 100,000—driven by a tragically high number of deaths by gas poisoning. That is as high as the suicide rate for women in England has ever been. By 1977, when the natural-gas changeover was complete, the suicide rate for women of that age was roughly half that. Plath was really unlucky. Had she come along ten years later, there would have been no clouds like “carbon monoxide” for her to “sweetly, sweetly…breathe in.”
7.
In the fall of 1958, two years after their wedding, Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, moved to Boston. The poetry that would make her famous was still several years away. Plath worked as a receptionist at the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. In the evenings, she took a writing seminar at Boston University. There she met another young poet by the name of Anne Sexton. Sexton was four years older than Plath—glamorous, charismatic, and strikingly beautiful. She would later win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Live or Die, establishing her reputation as one of the most formidable contemporary American poets. Plath and Sexton became friends. They would linger after class, then go out for drinks with another young poet, George Starbuck.
“We would pile into the front seat of my old Ford, and I would drive quickly through the traffic to, or near, the Ritz,” Sexton recalled, in an essay written after Plath’s death:
I would park illegally in a LOADING ONLY ZONE telling them gaily, “It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!” Off we’d go, each on George’s arm, into the Ritz and drink three or four or two martinis.
Sexton and Plath were both young, preternaturally gifted, and obsessed with death:
Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at length, in detail, and in depth between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with a burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb.
Sexton came from a family with a history of mental illness. She suffered from wild mood swings, anorexia, depression, and alcoholism. She attempted suicide at least five times. She stole a bottle of the barbiturate Nembutal—deadly in large enough doses—from her parents’ medicine cabinet and carried it around in her purse. As her biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook explains, Sexton wanted “to be prepared to kill herself anytime she was in the mood.”
In her early forties, she went into decline. Her drinking got worse. Her marriage failed. Her writing deteriorated. On the morning of October 4, 1974, Sexton had breakfast with an old friend, then lunch with another friend, as if saying goodbye.
Middlebrook writes:
She stripped her fingers of rings, dropping them into her big purse, and from the coat closet she took her mother’s old fur coat. Though it was a sunny afternoon, a chill was in the air. The worn satin lining must have warmed quickly against her flesh; death was going to feel something like an embrace, like falling asleep in familiar arms.
She poured herself a vodka and took her own life. Like her friend Sylvia Plath, Sexton will forever be in the category of doomed genius. “No one who knew Anne Sexton well was surprised by her suicide,” Middlebrook writes.
I hope by now, however, that you aren’t satisfied with this account of Sexton’s death. If suicide is a coupled act, then Sexton’s character and pathology should