Eleanor Bergstein and Sylvia Plath -- Part 5

This post continues from Part 1,  Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

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When Sylvia Plath went to New York City to work as an intern at Mademoiselle magazine in 1953, she squandered a great opportunity to begin a writing career. Before television became common, people read short stories. If a person had a half hour free, he might read a short story in a magazine. Practically every popular magazine, including Mademoiselle, featured a short story or two. Some writers earned good money by writing short stories and novellas.

After television became common, a person with a half hour free would watch a television show, and so short stories gradually disappeared from periodicals.

During that summer of 1953, Plath might have made contacts and learned some tricks of the trade useful for launching a writing career before she graduated from college. However, she squandered her summer internship, as she tells in her novel The Bell Jar.

Plath suffered from a manic-depressive order. During that summer, she apparently went through a manic phase.

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A young woman named Samantha Adams maintains a YouTube channel called rawsammi, where she talks about her manic-depressive disorder (she prefers that term to "bipolar disorder"), which is the most severe Type 1. (Type 2 is a milder disorder.) She describes herself as follows:

This is the personal YouTube channel of a socially anxious introvert who has been diagnosed with Bipolar 1 disorder. Welcome!

I talk about my experiences in life, answer viewer questions, and attempt to give occasional advice. I also make fun videos such as beauty, fashion, hauls, unboxing, gaming, and review videos. I am still figuring this YouTube thing out, so feel free to provide suggestions on content you would like to see or stuff you would like to know more about. I am 29-years-old and have university degrees in philosophy and public health.

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In the following video, she tells how she feels while she is in a manic phase.

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In the following video, she tells about writing while in a manic phase.

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In the following video, she tells about being hypersexual while in a manic phase.

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In the following video, she tells about her triggers for her manic and depressive phases.

Watch Adams' videos and then re-read The Bell Jar

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In the following video clip from the Sylvia movie, Sylvia Plath is talking with her poet friend (later the author of The Savage God) Al Alvarez in 1962. She recently has written -- probably in a somewhat manic phase -- her manuscript for her novel The Bell Jar, which she calls a potboiler. Now she wants to begin a sexual affair with someone (with Alvarez?).

Plath and Alvarez talk about past feelings of feeling suicidal.

After the scene with Alvarez, the following scenes show Plath sinking steadily into a depressive phase.

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I will continue this article in Part 6.