Initiation

Content Warning: This section includes a discussion of suicide, self-harm, and depression.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, to parents Aurelia Schober Plath and Otto Plath. Plath showed an early talent for writing and academic achievement, graduating from Smith College in 1955 and receiving a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge, where she met her future husband, Ted Hughes.

Plath experienced depression throughout her life, and many of her experiences and struggles reflect in her writing, including the death of her father when she was eight years old. Between 1953 and her death by suicide in 1963, when she was 30 years old, she underwent electro-shock therapy, a common treatment for mental health conditions in the 20th century. Her experience with therapy and the effects of mental health treatments on an individual’s identity and mental state is directly portrayed in her novel, The Bell Jar, through the character of Esther Greenwood. Many of her works have similarly been read as autobiographical, as characters such as Millicent in “Initiation” experience intense feelings of isolation and despair. Indeed, Millicent’s questions about acceptance and belonging mirror those Plath experienced as an intern at the magazine Mademoiselle, as fictionalized in The Bell Jar. Like Esther of The Bell Jar, Millicent experiences an intense desire to fit in with her peers despite finding interactions with those peers largely superficial and unfulfilling.

The fact that “Initiation” was published the year Plath turned 18 and The Bell Jar the year she turned 30 illustrates the continuity of this theme throughout Plath’s career. At the time that Plath first wrote “Initiation,” she was a high school student herself, navigating the cliquish waters of the lunchroom, football games, and sororities while trying to decide what to do with the rest of her life. Plath had always been ambitious but received frequent encouragement to follow a path more socially suited and expected of a young woman in the 20th century. Famously, the mother character in The Bell Jar (modeled on Plath’s actual mother) advises her daughter to take up writing letters for important men rather than continue her own studies. Millicent’s decision to go her own way and to be more like the heather birds than the sparrows mirrors Plath’s own choice to finish college, win a Fulbright scholarship to fund her master’s degree, and become a professor and world-renowned published author.