DAY 7: AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY...

From 9:00 to 19:00 = 1960 to ? (Postmodernist Period)
Introduction: This is the last day of our Seven Days of Suicide Tour, and we will end it with a bang: The Postmodernist Period. This could be described as the fallout of the Second World War, because the horror and violence of that war had a profound effect on the literature of the age: this literature was filled with black humour, irony, paranoia, fragmentation and the impression of lost innocence. Particularily during the seventies and eighties, the excluded groups of the time (women, racial minorities, etc) were finally brought into the heart of the literary world. The heroine of female writers everywhere was Sylvia Plath, and it is her life and death that will be the climax of this tumultuous tour, which has revolved on something that has been referred to as "The Sylvia Plath Effect." This term describes the tendency of creative writers to suffer from mental disorders, addictions and self-destructive behaviour. So, with no further ado, let us dive into Sylvia Plath's saddest story: her own.
Locations: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) Our first location in this author's life will be her childhood home in Winthrop, Massachusetts, which the family moved to when Plath was only four. The crashing waves of the close by Atlantic Ocean, which we will dip into if the weather is warm, fascinated her from a young age. But it was in this home that a tragic event that traumatised her deeply occurred: her father Otto, who had been suffering from diabetes for years, died a week and a half after her birthday. The same year, Plath's first poem and drawing was published in a Boston newspaper. Throughout the years she attended school, she was awarded scholarships and countless accolades for her budding talent in writing. Sadly, talent was not the only thing that Sylvia was slowly developing...
The second location in her life will be where she attended, and taught at one point: Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Although in her youth she appeared to be a relatively carefree student, she struggled with what we now call bipolar disorder or manic depression: frequent extreme mood swings from darkest suicidal depression to euphoric and uncontrollable mania. In the midst of her academic success in Smith College, she experienced her first mental meltdown. Institutions and EST followed. She described her hospitalisation as a "...time of darkness, despair and disillusion -- so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be -- symbolic death, and numb shock -- then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration." She tried to kill herself with sleeping pills when she was twenty one, but recovered and lived to graduate summa cum laude.
Cabridge University will be our third location, and where we will eat lunch after once again exploring the enormous library for a couple hours. It was here, while she was at Newnham College, that Sylvia Plath met British poet Ted Hughes. By then, Sylvia had begun to write in earnest, as she would throughout her life. She and Ted married when she was twenty four, but the marriage (although intense) was not a happy one. They had a one daughter, a miscarriage, then a son. Her worsening mental state and Ted Hughes' philandering ways both contributed to their seperation in 1962, and Syliva took the two children with her to...
Our fourth location: a flat (in the house Yeats once lived) at 23 Fitzroy Road, London. This is where, on the morning of the 11th of February 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself by inhaling the gas of her kitchen oven, which led to asphyxiation. Her two children were playing in the next room. She was only thirty years old.
Heptonstall church, West Yorkshire will be our last location on the tour. Here, at the end of a long and fulfilling journey, we will find the gravestone of Plath which reads: "Even admist fierce flames the golden lotus may be planted." Here, in her husband's cemetary, is where we might illegally smuggle in some candles and picnic baskets for dinner. As the sun sets in the cold English sky, we can toast to Sylvia Plath: May her memory never die.

Above: Sylvia Plath

Above: Ted Hughes

Above: The last door Sylvia Plath walked through at 23 Fitzroy Rd, London

Above: The "Hughes" that her husband ordered to be put on the grave is regularily scratched off by fans

DAY 3: REVOLUTIONS, RESTORATIONS AND THE MOTHER OF THE MOTHER OF FRANKENSTEIN

Day 3: From 9:00 until 19:00 = 1660 - 1798
Introduction: From the optimistic, baroque, Shakespearian (Christopher Marlowe wouldn't approve of me saying that!) and unashamedly "art-y" Renaissance, we travel to the years of political turmoil: The Restoration Period. Sometimes called the Neoclassical Period, this stage in our language's developement was a bit more... restrained. Society in general was busy trying to repress the memories of the nasty things that had happened in the past. Writers of the time loved the sharp pen of wit, and used it with an ordered and structured style that was a deliberate turn away from the grandeur of the Golden Age. Not to say that this period was boring: this was the time of John Milton (poor devil, ha ha), Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Writers such as those, in the midst of all the chaos that they revelled in or hated at turn, still suffered most keenly from the wounds of life... which tragically led some to attempt to or succeed (?!) in ending their own.

Locations: 1. The life of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Beginning the day bright and early, we will journey into the life of Mary Wollstonecraft: a writer, philosopher and feminist. Our first location will be where she was born... Spitalfileds, London. We will travel the streets she once did and visit the house she was forced to leave after her abusive, alchoholic father squandered the family savings. If time allows us (for we have so far to go, and so little time to get there!), we might visit the tavern he frequented for most of her youth. Jumping ahead in her troubled life, we will visit the school for young girls that Wollenstonecraft and a childhood friend set up in Newtington Green. She later abandoned the school, devastated by her friend's sudden death, for a job as a governess. Near that building, which still stands today and whose history books read fondly of "Mistress Mary", we will have a picnic in the flowering gardens.The next location will be even more grim: after multiple rejections and broken relationships, she attempted to poison herself with laudanum in her small apartment in London, which we will visit. Next, we will walk along the River Thames in which she had jumped and was subsequently saved by a stranger. But her soulmate, the solemn William Godwin, prevented further attempts at suicide: she died, at the age of thirty eight, a week after giving birth to a child called Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin... later Mary Shelly, authoress of Frankenstein! At the end of a very long and eventful day, we can eat supper at her memorial site at Old Saint Pancreas Churchyard, where this poem by William Roscoe can be read:

"Hard was thy fate in all scenes of life
As daughter, sister, mother, friend and wife;
But harder still, thy fate in death we own,
Thus mourn'd by Godwin whose heart seem'd of stone."


Above: Mary Wollstonecraft


Above: Woodcut by William Blake for Mary Wollstonecraft's "Original Stories From Real Life"



Above: William Godwin never recovered from his wife's death