Death and Plathian life: thanatography and chronotope of suicide in the survival of the woman writer

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between thanatography and the chronotope of suicide in Sylvia Plath´s work. Through an analysis of The Bell Jar (1963), her diary entries, and the resonances of these themes in her poetry, we revisit a central thesis proposed by Virginia Woolf: the condition of the “uncommon woman”, that is, the woman writer. Throughout her trajectory, Plath mobilizes traces of pulsional forces within her creative process, interrogating the limits of writing and formulating a thanatographic conception of death-writing in both her autobiographical accounts and her fictional narrative. In her posthumous, stylized authorial image (Bakhtin, 2002, p. 212) – shaped by the mark of a self-inflicted death –, we analyze, from the perspective of the suicidal chronotope, the dialogic machanisms of biographical decomposition present in Plath´s writing. Thus, the discursive construction of life narratives and female authorship acquires new contours, articulated through thanatographic variants of madness, delirium, and the imminence of suicide: for some, of the character; for othes, of both author and character. By intertwining Bakhtinian interfaces with chronotopic dynamics, Plath´s thanatogaphy articulates a Thanatos and a graphē that render the suicidal act a structuring axis of self-conscious genre.