Confinements, a battle with one’s own demons, and the demens women marry and slave for. Is death a better alternative to a life one is not permitted to fully live for themselves? Throughout life every individual has felt persecuted, enslaved, or abused at least once. Women have experienced these things for a countless many years. Men have prevented women from pursuing their own curiosities, as shown over the course of history. Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf often invoke death within their poetry. For them leaving the living world is the only way they may finally achieve autonomy from men, and any overwhelming controlling presence in their lives.
Six days before Sylvia Plath committed suicide she wrote “Edge”. Death as an escape from life is clearly displayed in her poetry, this is seen in the lines “The woman is perfect, Her dead”; “Feet seem to be saying : We have come so far, it is now over”. Virginia Woolf wrote “A Room Of One’s own”. This is a short story about a young woman named Judith. Judith struggles through life and is jeered at by men for pursing her dream to become an actress. She becomes involved with a man and finally ” killed herself one winters night”. Ironically Virginia Woolf also took her own life. Emily Dickinson romances death in one single line ” because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me”. After reading several works written by women who seem to suffer, I have conclude that death should be embraced rather than feared.
I have realized that in death the chains that may weigh us down in life become broken, and only then are we truly ever free. Cynthia Ozick wrote ” The Shawl” a story that takes place during the holocaust. In this story an infant child named Magda, is thrown into an electric fence and killed by the hands of a Nazi. Magda was a starving baby there was no hope for her and her mother. Finding oneself inside of a concentration camp is a fate worse than death. Magda’s death while terribly heart wrenching, and sad, freed the child, and spared her starvation, pain, and any further abuses, she may have had to suffer at the hands of monsters.
For some letting go of life is a stronger show of character than holding on to that which births an immortal misery within our lives. I will never go to the extent of ending my own life. Yet, we all kill ourselves in some small way or another. We bury our hopes, dreams and desires for not only men, but also other influences in our lives. In doing so we chisel away at our souls, and kill what is truly inherent to us as humans. This is displayed within Emily Dickinson’s line “SHE rose to his requirement dropped the play things of her life”
For one who has a passion so strong that a flame burns deep inside them, to be stifled is to be dead. With no air, one has no potential to live, breath, and grow, such as a flame has no way to preserve its existence. Therefore, one who is the living dead would swiftly welcome death. How often have we had a thirst for death? How often have we wished to kill and be killed? I now understand that to desire both life and death is in fact natural. I want nothing more than to quench my thirst with life’s sweet taste, through my own experience and trials. If we are denied that which we want to touch, see, taste, smell and hear, than are we really living at all?