Time is Too Long to Wait and Death is Sweet

What do Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton have in common? They are the women writers who committed suicide to end their personal tragedies. Their adversary was time. It took too long to wait for death.

Women in difficult situations can’t endure another day or year. The ticking of their nautical table clocks, grandfather clocks or atomic clocks recorded the passage of time and presagedthe dawn of another agonizing day for them.

Gilman, Perkins, and Plath chose early death, yet the saga of their lives and their literary works endure and continue to preoccupy scholars. Most of their works reflected their rebellion against the stringent rules of society. What if these women chose life instead of death? They could have produced more work of literary distinction.

The Tragic Women Writers

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) - During her lifetime, she was a supporter for women’s independence and suffrage. She wrote tomes of books, which are being rediscovered for their educational and literary importance. She is noted for her Yellow Wall-Paper short story and her [spin]book|volume[/pin] - Woman and Economics, which was used as a textbook in Vassar College for a time. In 1932 when she learned she had cancer, she committed suicide by ingesting an overdose of chloroform in August 1935.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is the ideal heroine for a Greek tragedy, beautiful and smart. From a middle-class background, she was pushed into an alien culture in Smiths College. She could not handle the demands made on her and attempted suicide in her junior year. She survived after an overdose of sleeping pills and went on to graduate with honors. She won a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University where she met her future husband, Ted Hughes, an English poet.

The union was a rocky one and they eventually separated. Low on money and with young children to support, life was tough for Plath. Plath probably watched the hours on her desk clocks. She had to write a poem a day to survive. The strain propelled[/spin] Plath to make a devastating the lives of her family. She placed her head inside the oven, turned on the gas and died from the noxious fumes.

Critics compare her to confessional writers W.D. Snodgrass and Anne Sexton. Her diaries and stories unveiled her dark mind and negative personal motivations. Her poetry, over 400 of them is appreciated for their creative metaphorical lines.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) - A life-long battle with bipolar disorder paved the way to a literary career after the prodding of her therapist. Her poems were successful and were published in The New Yorker, Saturday Review and Harper’s Magazine. Like Plath, her works are of the confessional genre. Her last works revealed a uncanny hankering for death - The Awful Rowings Towards God and her The Death Notebooks. She died from deliberately inhaling carbon monoxide.

These women writers are long gone but the clocks of the world did not stop to grieve for them then. But time was kind; she gave memories to hold on to and shared the lessons from the tragedies of the lost icons of the 20th century.