Exposing the suffocating pressure to conform

Born in 1932 in Boston — Sylvia Plath was an American poet whose words still crackle with electricity nearly sixty-three years after her death. Quite simply, she was extraordinary: a writer who braved it out to expose the bleeding truth about what it meant to be a woman trapped in the

suffocating cage of 1950s domesticity.

Imagine, a brilliantly clever young woman who won prizes and scholarships, attended the prestigious Smith College, and even secured a glamorous internship at a fashionable magazine in New York. Yet beneath this

glittering surface, something dark was stirring.

Plath wrote in a style called “confessional poetry” — an approach that revealed the messy, terrifying truth about mental illness, depression, female rage, and the

impossible expectations placed upon women.

During the post-war era when American housewives were expected to find complete fulfillment in spotless kitchens and perfect children, Plath dared to scream that the emperor had no clothes. She fought against patriarchal oppression, the silencing of women’s

ambitions, and the dismissal of their intellectual capabilities. In her astonishing poem Lady Lazarus, she declared with defiance: “Dying/Is an art, like everything else/I do it exceptionally well”.

Why do young people, particularly those wrestling with their own darkness and confusion, clutch Plath’s work so desperately to their chests? Well, because she gives voice to what they feel but cannot articulate: the suffocating pressure to conform and the desperate search for authentic identity in a world that demands artificial smiles. Her 1963 novel The Bell Jar, a

semi-autobiographical work about a young woman’s descent into depression, remains startlingly relevant today precisely because it refuses to offer easy answers.

On the 11th of February, 1963, following a prolonged battle with depression and the devastating collapse of her marriage, she took her own life at the age of 30 in her London flat. Days earlier, she had composed her final poem, Edge, whose opening lines now read like a terrible prophecy: “The woman is perfected/Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment”. Her death robbed literature of one of its most electrifying voices, yet her legacy endures for her ferocious courage which transformed personal anguish into art of searing honesty.

As she herself wrote in Lady Lazarus: “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air”—words that continue to resonate with readers who recognise in her work a refusal to be silenced, even by death itself.