"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. he gives you illusion in the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
Tennessee Williams
"The Glass Menagerie"
The truth that Williams told can be found in his writing. Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams. In his play, The Glass Menagerie, the protagonist (or leading character's) name is Tom. In the play, Tom's sister, Laura, is physically and emotionally damaged. Through the character of Laura, Williams presents his own sister, Rose, to the world and plays out in literature the feelings of grief he must have suffered when his sister Rose underwent a frontal lobotomy. Like Laura, she was physically and emotionally damaged. For further reading click here or refer to The Last Frontier of Bohemia: Tennessee Williams in New Orleans by W. Kenneth Holditch, a wonderful researcher.
This woman is one of my favorite writers because she tells the dark truth about her life. Notice that I defer to her life in the present. I believe that literature that stands up to time stays in the present tense, and even though Plath is dead, her work lives on.
Take, for instance, her poem Daddy. The truth lies in Plath's mix of love and hate that is conveyed through her poetry. Certainly, the poem is dark--black truth penned out about her father-- but I feel the confusion of emotions is evident by what is not said. In order to hate someone I believe love must be, or have been, present. One strong emotion has the opposite pull in order to sustain force. See for yourself...
• Daddy •
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot...more
The truth? I don't think Plath ever resolved her emotional anger toward her father who was a German immigrant and by heredity was linked to one of the world's greatest cruelties to mankind--the Holocaust. Plath's poetry gave her a vehicle for expressing her emotional grief towards her father who passed to her a genetic guilt, then abandoned her by death at an early age. Plath's pain is paralleled to a horrible time in history, a time no one should forget, lest we repeat the experience. Perhaps for Plath, or for any Holocaust survivor, resolution does come, but it is a long process and there is always another loose emotional thread left dangling.
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
Sylvia Plath
The Journals of Sylvia Plath