The Saturday Night Live Cold Open.

This blog began by stating we’d be walking through the darkest of shadows, but with a flashlight to lead the way and a bit of humor to make the unsettling darkness a bit easier to navigate. In our first book, Lie Down in Darkness, we detailed the blog’s concepts. Fiction gives us windows. The windows allow us to look through different places and see different things—to stare at different possibilities and to look into different minds. But sometimes they also give us reflections, and serve as mirrors for ourselves. That’s why the spot here is called The Inner Landscape, and that’s what we dwell on here in this particular realm.

Styron’s book was a tough one but necessary. It was our foundation—the map we’d be using throughout our journey. Then we moved on to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where we still had windows, but they served as a trap door. For those who had begun the journey with us and wondered where our humor was, you were reminded that this journey is always rocky, and sometimes we might stumble, which will leave a few scars. We can make the walk through the shadows with a flashlight more bearable and survivable, but it is still the dark.

The next book, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, sought out a new land—one where we didn’t have the darkness trying to seek us out, but what happened when someone actually purposely sought it out on their own by design. Tartt’s book, a masterful Gothic haunting through the colleges of the eighties, definitely turned out not pretty, despite claiming to be viewing the picturesque. So then we wondered if we could get to people that had a potential to be consumed by darkness—what would happen getting to them before their innocence was entirely lost? We looked at John Knowles‘ A Separate Peace.

We’re going to continue to hunt and seek out the darkest of shadows, carrying our flashlight and trying to find moments of amusement. But now we return to those not hunting shadows willingly, and are diving down to the most deepest of levels. By circling back to Lie Down in Darkness, where Peyton Loftis jumped out the window seeking to fly.

It’s time to look at Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar to see if it’s truly possible, when haunted by shadows: is it always the decision to jump out the window yourself. Or is it possible to be pushed?

Part One: The appliance joke.

At the end of last week’s post, I spent time betting against myself on whether I could avoid a household appliance joke. But Sylvia Plath herself makes that a losing wager. Writing about her is like trying to repair a 1953 Frigidaire while the kitchen is on fire and the manual is written in code. In the world of The Bell Jar, women were expected to be as functional and silent as a toaster—plugged in, polished, and ready to pop out a perfect slice of domestic bliss on command. But Plath wasn’t a toaster; she was a high-voltage industrial engine forced into a breadbox. By the time we get to her New York City internship, the Golden Girl mask isn’t just cracking—its short-circuiting.

Part Two: The encroaching sunset.

I also stated last week: can a writer know too much about their source material? Usually, I like to let the work speak for itself for two reasons. One, academics can go too far—take a college literature course to find out if you have any questions about that. Discover how trees have bizarre meanings or clothes worn have intended meanings no person can foresee. On the other hand, as a writer who sometimes likes to posit thoughts and questions in their work, I can be mystified by what people don’t see, as well as what they think they do.

With Sylvia Plath, the work and the woman are so tangled up it is impossible to pull one string without unraveling the other. For the first time on the blog, we’re going to perform multiple autopsies—diving into the airless rooms of The Bell Jar while simultaneously looking at the life of the woman who wrote it, testing the theory that sometimes knowing the truth behind the fiction makes the story even more haunting. And then we’re going to turn the flashlight out completely. Or maybe we’ll actually train it on ourselves.

Part Three: It was a man’s man’s world, and it still is.

It is one of history’s great ironies that Sylvia Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, spent decades trying to curate her ghost and manage her memory, only to find himself relegated to the role of a footnote in her legacy. He was the established star of the time, the one with the titles and the traditional power, writing those important man-works of poetry. The truth today is that nobody cares jack shit of his work. There is only the persistent, ugly rumor that Hughes did more than just curate Plath’s final days; he performed his own brand of surgical editing on her journals to ensure his side of the story—that masculine, sweaty male version—was the only one that survived.

While it’s true that no one is responsible for another person’s suicide—you can’t pull the trigger or turn the gas dial for someone else—you can certainly spend a lifetime making the air inside the The Bell Jar unbreathable. He might have spent his nineties as a Poet Laureate, but in the court of public memory, he’s been demoted to a dustbin. He tried to hide the truth in the oven with her, but the cream always rises, and Plath’s voice is the only one we still hear ringing.

Trigger warning: It’s time to pull off the bandaid.

Part Four: The blog point where we’re hitting the mental illness, wandering the dark desert part.

We can’t talk about Plath without talking about the exit door she eventually took.

As someone who has lived in the shadows of that particular geometry, I can tell you that suicide is rarely the lightning bolt people think it is. It’s more like a slow leak. It’s the result of an environment where the clinical air has become unbreathable.

I once knew a woman who handed me a complete instruction manual. But I wasn’t equipped or able to read it at that time or in that particular moment. It was a trilogy—her own map of sorts—one of structure and safety. She was laying out a request for total power: a TPE dynamic that I simply didn’t have in me the necessary power to give or understand at that specific instance. Looking back at it now, through the airless rooms of Sylvia Plath’s world, I finally see it for what it was. It wasn’t about sex or wanting obsessive, dominant control. It was structure, it was certainty, it was a promise: just the moments of needing to be on the couch with someone’s arm around them that spoke more volumes than any words: you’re safe with me, and I’ll keep out the world’s dangers and, most importantly, I’ll keep out the darkness. It was about an anchor.

When the depression is heavy enough, the world becomes darkly bizarre: both claustrophobic and terrifyingly loose. Some people seek out a human being to become that frame. They seek a total power exchange, not out of a desire for subservience, but out of a desperate need to outsource their very own survival. They want someone else to take the wheel because they can no longer trust their own hands to steer. But here is the tragic geometry of the missed signal: you cannot be a harbor for someone else if you’re still a ship searching for the seafloor yourself, waves lapping over the sides from a violent, unyielding storm

Part Five: Missed signals.

Plath’s search for her own anchor didn’t start with Ted Hughes. It started with The Colossus. She had spent her career trying to reconstruct the ruined statue of her father, spending her days with gluepots and Lysol, trying to patch the cracks of a man who had been gone for decades. She was looking for a monument to own her reality. When she met Hughes, she thought she had finally found a living version of that statue—a Colossus who could provide the total power required to keep the Bell Jar from dropping entirely. But you can’t build a life inside the ear of a statue, and you certainly can’t find safety in a someone who is as broken as the very ruins you’re trying to escape.

The difference between survival and the descent often comes down to who is in the room with you. Plath had Dr. Gordon—a silk-tied specialist who didn’t listen and told her to buy new shoes while her world was turning gray. I’ve been thinking a lot about that contrast for this essay. When I look at a note I recently received from someone at my clinic. It was not a dismissive, simplistic statement of the shallow, but a handwritten reminder that I have a family there who enjoys seeing me on my good days but, ever more so importantly, wants me to know I can lean on them with total trust during the bad ones. One is a catalyst for the vacuum; the other a strong tether to the world.

Part Six: It’d be so great to have had more Plath writing, and also, if only I had known…

Sylvia Plath didn’t have a tether. She had a Colossus that crumbled in a world that wanted her to be a toaster. But she left us with a vital and important work of literature. The Bell Jar serves as a warning and must and should be read by all. It’s a surgical report from the inside of a short-circuiting brain, but more importantly, a short-circuiting life.

We owe it to her to read it—all of us. It’s a manual she left behind, even if it makes some of us bleed out much more deeply than others to do so.

Next Time: Must we take these looks into our own shadows? Indeed. For if we don’t, and we let the shadows swallow us—whether we may think by the hands of others or by our own—we will realize we eventually end up in our own actual graveyard. Next time, we look at Juan Rulfo and Pedro Páramo.

We move. We must. We march:

Onward.

(The Inner Landscape is taking a short break. Weekly posts will finally(!) resume April 24)