Sylvia Plath Is There No Way Out Of The Mind

Explore the presentation of disturbed minds in Macbeth and in the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

“Is there no way out of the mind?”

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 27th of October 1932 just before World War II into a German/Austrian family. Plath suffered from clinical depression and tried to commit suicide multiple times, she was successful on her fourth attempt, which ended her life in February of 1963. Macbeth was a tragedy play written by William Shakespeare, it was first performed in 1611.

In comparison of the texts there are many similarities, one of which being that Lady Macbeth and Plath both grapple with the loss of their fathers. Lady Macbeth references her father when she
She says ‘When I was ten they buried you’ She shows that she had to bury the feelings and thoughts of her father at such a young age, which has troubled her so much that she becomes depressed in her later teens. She talks about her father being close to her heart and then about how she never liked him and compares him to Hitler and the Nazi’s. This is shown when she says ‘ With your Luftwaffe and your gobbledygoo and your neat moustache’ She describes her father here as being a Nazi by showing him as being in the Air force for Germany during the war and gives and Hitler image of her father when she talks about his neat moustache. An image of Hitler is created in our minds as Hitler had a neat black moustache and so did her father. She also talks about her father being in Hitler’s supreme race. She describes her father to have ‘Aryan eye, bright blue’ this shows that Hitler would of considered Otto Plath to be part of his supreme race. Hitler considered those with blonde hair and blue eyes to be the supreme race of Germany, this was ironic because Hitler himself had brown hair and brown eyes. Plath talks about how much she wants to get back to her father, when she says ‘Get back, back, back to you.’ She talks about killing herself to get to her father, to meet him in the afterlife. The repetition of ‘back’
Lady Macbeth references her motherhood in the first act of the play when she says ‘ I have given suck and know How tender’tis to love the babe that milks me (1.7, 54-55)’ Lady Macbeth creates a tame image here of a mother nursing her child. This is juxtaposed by the following phrase ‘while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from its boneless gums And dashed the brains out (1.7, 56-58)’ which creates a violent scene of a mother brutally killing its child. This comes as a surprise to the reader because there is no talk about a child of Macbeth throughout the rest of the play; this is the only time Macbeth’s offspring is mentioned throughout the whole entire play. Macbeth makes references to the ‘fruitless crown’ and the ‘barren scepter’ in his ‘gripe’ manifests this sense of insecurity. There is a clear semantic pattern in Macbeth’s soliloquy, whereby Shakespeare has used a number of words relating to reproduction. The word choice ‘fruitless’ links to the common phrase ‘fruit of the womb’ to refer to a person’s child. The word also means useless or redundant. It follows, then, that Macbeth sees himself as redundant for being unable to produce an heir and therefore to secure a future line of kings from his offspring. Again, the same can be said for his use of the word ‘barren.’ Interestingly, this term is most common used to talk about women who are unable to