"Drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness": Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how a range of lin-guistic methods can be harnessed in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the ‘lived experience’ of psychological disorders. It argues that such methods should be applied more in medical contexts, especially in medical humanities. Key extracts from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath are examined, as a case study of the expe-rience of depression. Combinations of qualitative and quantitative linguistic methods, and inter- and intra-textual comparisons are used to consider distinctive pat-terns in the use of metaphor, personal pronouns and (the semantics of) verbs, as well as other rele-vant aspects of language. Qualitative techniques provide in-depth insights, while quantitative cor-pus methods make the analyses more robust and ensure the breadth necessary to gain insights into the individual experience. Depression emerges as a highly complex and sometimes potentially contradictory experience for Plath, involving both a sense of apathy and inner turmoil. It involves a sense of a split self, trapped in a state that one cannot overcome, and intense self-focus, a turning in on oneself and a view of the world that is both more nega-tive and more polarized than the norm. It is ar-gued that a linguistic approach is useful beyond this specific case.

Keywords: corpus; depression; linguistics; medi-cal humanities; metaphor; personal narratives

Communication & MedicineVolume 11(1) (2014), 41–54Copyright © Equinox Publishing LtdSheffieldhttp://equinoxpub.comDOI: 10.1558/cam.v11i1.18478

Drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness: Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depressionZSÓFIA DEMJÉNThe Open University, UK

1. Introduction

In recent years, the value of first-hand accounts of illness experiences has increasingly been recog-nized (e.g. Greenhalgh and Hurwitz 1999), with studies showing that understanding a patient’s view of their illness can lead to better health-care and improved health outcomes (Kaptein et al. 2011). This ‘narrative turn’ (Charon 2006) can be seen as a reaction against the positivist, biomedical paradigms of some medical profes-sions (Roberts and Sarangi 2003; Crawford et al. 2014). Linguistic analysis, broadly speaking, has been among the more recent approaches taken to different physical and mental health contexts and problems such as doctor–patient interactions (Drew et al. 2000; Roberts et al. 2005), Alzheimer’s disease (Hamilton 2008; Ramanathan 2010), breast cancer, diabetes, autism (Ramanathan 2010), depression (Harvey et al. 2008; Charteris-Black 2012), genetic counselling (Sarangi 2013) and end of life care (Semino et al. 2014). This prevalence of linguistic studies is no acci-dent. Since various aspects of illness, and illness narratives in particular, are mediated through language, linguistic analysis can offer valuable insights into what being ill feels like (Sarangi 2004; Flynn 2010; Hunt and Carter 2012). The linguistic choices people make – how they say what they say – provide clues about the nature of their perceptions, experiences, attitudes and sense of self beyond the content of their propo-sitions (Gumperz 1999). Equally importantly, as the combination of methods below hopes

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to demonstrate, linguistic analyses can provide these clues in systematic, rigorous and empirical ways (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010), which cannot always be said of narrative approaches (Harvey and Koteyko 2013; cf. Atkinson and Delamont 2006). In this way, linguistic explorations of lived experience accounts can help bridge the gap between the sometimes differing epistemologies of linguists and medical professionals (Roberts and Sarangi 2003; Crawford et al. 2014). Finally, since language both reflects and influences reality, linguistic approaches can open up new avenues for intervention in healthcare contexts (cf. Charteris-Black 2012; Tay 2012) in addition to providing tools for analysis. This paper uses The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (Plath 2000) as a testing ground to demonstrate how a combination of qualitative and quantitative linguistic analyses can lead to a deeper understanding of the ‘lived experience’ (van Manen 1997) of mental illnesses such as depression. After an introduction to the data and relevant studies of the language of depression, I qualita-tively explore Plath’s use of metaphor, focusing on persistent patterns. I then look at her use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ for self-reference. In the final analytic section, I present statistically significant differences between Plath’s language and appropriate norms in terms of dichotomous structures, pronouns, self-references, verb types and negation, to complement the qualitative findings. Each section begins with an introduc-tion to the relevant linguistic techniques, includ-ing methods, and is followed by a discussion of findings.

1.1. The language of depressionSince mental health problems represent the largest cause of disability and almost half of all adults experience at least one depressive episode in their lifetime in the UK (Department of Health 2011), a focus on narratives of mental illnesses such as depression seems particularly pressing. The analysis here builds on a number of studies investigating language and depres-sion, but argues for (and demonstrates) a more comprehensive approach.

Pennebaker and colleagues, having developed their own quantitative tools for language analysis from a social psychology perspective – LIWC1 – demonstrated that the use of function words (grammatical words/particles) is indicative of personality traits and mental states. Stirman and Pennebaker (2001), Rude et al. (2004) and Bad-deley et al. (2011), for example, linked the relative frequency of first-person singular pronouns to depression and potential suicidal ideation. Rude et al. (2004), investigating the written language of depressed, depression vulnerable (formerly depressed) and never-depressed college students, found that the first-person singular pronoun was used significantly more frequently both by cur-rently and formerly depressed students, than by those who had never been depressed. Stirman and Pennebaker (2001) found that poets with suicidal tendencies used more first-person sin-gular references, combined with more references to death, than did non-suicidal poets. In a case study, Baddeley et al. (2011) additionally noted an association between suicidal ideation and an increase in negative emotion words. These were taken as indicators of a decreased interest in social relationships coupled with increased focus on the self and death. Again using the LIWC tool, Fekete (2002) investigated language use on three online self-help newsgroups for suicidal, depressive and anxious people. He also found self-focus to be indicative of depression, together with feeling expressions (‘like’–‘dislike’, ‘pleasure’–‘displeasure’, ‘attraction’–‘aversion’) and adver-bial intensifiers, increased use of polarized expressions (‘allness’ terms: ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘forever’, etc.) and frequent use of explainers and retractors (e.g. ‘but’, ‘however’, ‘although’, ‘except’). The suicidal group was characterized by similar patterns, but fewer explainers and a frequent use of negation. Although the link between self-focus and depression (and related disorders) seems to be strong, Hargitai et al. (2007) note that the content of the texts ana-lysed also potentially influences these frequen-cies: in narratives of achievement, self-focus may indicate self-control and autonomy, instead of depression.

Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression 43

These studies are innovative and exciting in many ways, but there are some limitations inherent in the methodology used. Computer programs in general cannot handle certain aspects of language use, such as context, irony and metaphor, and LIWC in particular relies on a limited static dictionary that may not account for all linguistic features of a text. A combina-tion of quantitative and qualitative linguistic approaches is necessary for a comprehensive account. Among the more qualitative linguistic approaches to depression are interesting studies of metaphor in published diaries (McMullen and Conway 2002; Schoeneman et al. 2004; Kiehl 2005; Demjén 2011a) and interviews with depression sufferers (McMullen and Conway 2002; Charteris-Black 2012). Examples of common metaphors for depres-sion identified by these studies include ‘physical pain and illness’ (Schoeneman et al. 2004; Harvey 2013), ‘darkness’, ‘descent’, ‘a bounded space’ that is unpleasant and/or difficult to get out of (McMullen and Conway 2002; Charteris-Black 2012) and depression ‘as a captor’ (e.g. ‘when I get depressed, I just am immobilized’; ‘I feel trapped’). The latter metaphors are also noted in Harvey’s (2013) study of two million words of electronic communications on healthcare by adolescents. He combined quantitative corpus tools with qualitative analysis to find out how adolescents describe their (feelings of ) depres-sion and found that severity and permanence of the state could be indicated by the difference between ‘I am depressed’ and ‘I have depres-sion’ and that metaphors of ‘force’, ‘isolation’ and ‘incarceration’ are commonly associated with depression. This paper draws from a similarly eclectic linguistic toolkit to show how quantitative linguistic analyses/methods can (and should) be combined with qualitative techniques to provide (1) analyses that are more robust and (2) linguistically grounded explanations for the significance of certain linguistic features being associated with illnesses such as depression. In this way, this paper hopes to promote linguistic analysis as a systematic approach to getting the most out of patients’ stories.

1.2. Data: Sylvia Plath’s journals and depression

Sylvia Plath was a writer and poet. She was born in 1932 in the United States, and later lived in the UK and married the British poet Ted Hughes. She published a novel, two major collections of poetry and a collection of short stories, though her oeuvre is sometimes overshadowed by – or at least interpreted in light of – the documented mental health problems she suffered from her late teenage years onwards. Plath was diagnosed with depression2 and attempted suicide at least once, before succeeding in 1963 (Kirk 2004; Cooper 2003). The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) consists of eight journals and 15 fragments, and much of the original formatting as possible has been retained (Brain 2006). Of the eight journals, only the first one, written between 1950 and 1953 (Plath 2000: 3–187), is used to demonstrate linguistic analysis in this paper. It spans the years Plath spent at Smith College, and is henceforth referred to as the Smith Journal or Journal. The Smith Journal consists of 152 entries appropri-ate for analysis, of varying lengths (about 25 to around 3,000 words) and amounting to approxi-mately 77,900 words. This excludes entries that are either draft poems or letters. Individual entries are mostly numbered (1–186) and sometimes dated. The Journal appears to have been written with relative regularity – reflecting positive and negative experiences, emotions and states – and encompasses a contained period of Plath’s life leading up to her first suicide attempt. While I find attempts to interpret Sylvia Plath’s creative output through the skewed lens of her personal tragedy frustrating, her personal journals can undoubtedly be seen as enlightening with regard to what it was like to be, among other facets, a person with depres-sive and suicidal tendencies. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that Plath’s Journal can only be considered a personal illness narra-tive to a limited extent: a self-aware artist such as Plath may have intended her journals to be published. However, journals, by virtue of often being written temporally close to the events they describe, are less likely to be refined/revised

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than, for example, autobiographies. Plath did not provide excessive detail for the benefit of a potential external reader, often making it dif-ficult to follow her narrative. In 1950–1953, she could also not yet be described as a ‘professional’ writer. Finally, while self-construction may be a part of journal writing, it is almost impossible not to put some of one’s true self on the page. Anaïs Nin, another published writer and diarist, is very clear about this: ‘my genuine self was in the diary’ (1975: 52). Nevertheless, Plath is admittedly an excep-tional case: highly articulate and always keen to play with language, her linguistic choices may not be representative of others with similar experi-ences. At the same time, Plath’s verbal skills are potentially also the greatest advantage in studying her writing: she may have been able to express what others cannot (Jamison 2006) and her status as a prominent writer means that the language of her experience may influence how some perceive their own experiences. In this way, although the Smith Journal is the voice of just one person, it may represent and influence many others. I now turn to a series of linguistic explorations – metaphor, pronouns and corpus linguistic insights – on Plath’s lived experience as pre-sented in the Journal. This is not intended as an exhaustive analysis, which will appear elsewhere (Demjén forthcoming), but as an overview of what a combination of qualitative and quantita-tive linguistic analysis can offer in the kind of context outlined above.

2. Manual analysis: Metaphor theory

Metaphor is ‘the phenomenon whereby we talk and, potentially, think about something in terms of something else’ (Semino 2008: 1). Usually, we describe impalpable, complex, subjective, sensi-tive and/or taboo things (the ‘topic’) in more concrete, tangible and simple terms (the ‘vehi-cles’, i.e. the metaphorically used expressions). For instance, in ‘Drowning in negativism’ in the title of this paper, ‘Drowning’ is metaphorical. In its basic (Pragglejaz Group 2007), or literal, meaning, it is the physical event of sinking (or

being forced) under water and dying (Macmil-lan Dictionary Online). However, Plath uses this concrete, physical sense to refer to her mental state, which is arguably impalpable, complex and subjective. Analysing persistent patterns of vehicles and topics in the language of someone with a mental disorder such as depression can be indicative of how they construct and experience their predicament, as these ‘systematic meta-phors’ are potentially representative of underly-ing patterns of thought (Cameron et al. 2010). Excerpt 1 below is from Entry 154, and is both relevant to mental states and typical of how Plath uses metaphor to describe her emotions. It was written on November 3, 1952 and details frustration and despair as Plath compares herself with the man she is dating at this particular point (cf. ‘his mind’ below). In the cited examples the relevant metaphorical words or phrases are in italics.3

Excerpt 1[... ] to feel his mind soaring, reaching, and mine caged, crying, impotent, self-reviling, an imposter. How to justify myself, my bold, brave humanitar-ian faith? My world falls apart, crumbles, ‘The center does not hold.’ There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid, I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb.

(November 3, 1952 [Entry 154], italics added [Plath 2000: 149])

Here, metaphors describe a broadly negative mental state that could be considered depression. In fact, positive mental states are not referred to metaphorically as much as negative ones in the Smith Journal, and when they are, the metaphors are often less complex. This in itself can suggest that negative mental states are more intense for Plath than positive ones (cf. Ortony and Fainsil-ber 1987). In the first sentence, the vehicles in italics construct the mind as a separate self that is upset (‘crying’), does not act when it should (‘impotent’) and has potentially destructive attitudes (‘self-reviling’) independent from the

Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression 45

rest of the self. The mind is even talked about as a separate person, an ‘imposter’, with con-notations of subversion and intentional deceit. This suggests a sense of inner split and conflict, which is reinforced by the use of ‘mimicking’ in the second sentence of the second paragraph. ‘Mimicking’ and ‘self-reviling’ could be seen as bullying behaviours, directed by the self at the self, that can be linked to conceptualizations of attacks by an internal aggressor that are normally associated with physical illnesses like cancer (e.g. Sontag 1991 [1979]). More recently, these have also been noted in connection with depression (Harvey 2013). The contrast between these and ‘impotent’ implies that, not only conflict, but also contradiction is involved in the experience of this mental state: the self is unable to act, but at the same time attacks itself. The inability to act, in this case due to confinement, is also evoked by Plath’s use of ‘caged’. ‘Caged’ is part of a systematic metaphor (Cameron et al. 2010) in the Journal, together with other vehicle terms, such as ‘prison’, ‘trapped’ and ‘sealed’, which are used in reference to Plath’s mental state. Cages and prisons are, by default, difficult to get out of, often unpleas-ant and with freedom of movement restricted. Semino (2008) and Charteris-Black (2012) note that depression can be conceptualized as an unpleasant space to be in, and McMullen and Conway (2002) note that it is difficult to get out of. Adolescents in Harvey’s (2013) study addi-tionally write more explicitly about a sense of ‘incarceration’. In Excerpt 1, these connotations are heightened, potentially suggesting intensity of experience, by the juxtaposition of Plath’s mind with ‘his’ (Plath’s boyfriend’s) mind in the first sentence, which is free and active. Expressions in italics in the third sentence make reference to some aspect of the environ-ment or the self becoming separated into parts instead of remaining a whole. Four separate vehicles repeat this idea (‘falls apart’, ‘crumbles’ ‘does not hold’, ‘no integrating force’), including one potentially intertextual metaphor (Zinken 2003). ‘The center does not hold’ is likely an allu-sion to Yeats’ poem The Second Coming, where the phrase reads ‘the centre cannot hold’. In the excerpt, the metaphor is preceded by a reference

to Plath’s ‘world’ coming apart, strengthening the allusion, as Yeats also refers to the world ending. However, in Plath’s case it is not the entire world that is coming apart, but only ‘hers’. Alluding to the phrase from Yeats in this context, where the actual world is potentially ending, elevates Plath’s experience from a personal level to the all-encompassing, suggesting a more intense experience once again. Heightened intensity is also suggested by the four-time repetition of related vehicle terms. These ‘coming apart’ metaphors indicate that the experience of depression involves a sense of chaos and a lack of control, since Plath is unable to stop the disintegration from happening; she appears helpless. It is also worth noting that of the few metaphors Plath uses to describe positive mental states, vehicles suggesting some form of wholeness are a significant proportion (e.g. ‘I talked, and began to remember how I was before, how integrated, how positive’ [Entry 155, November 14, 1952, Plath 2000: 152] underline added). As such, these two – ‘wholeness’ and ‘coming apart’ – can be understood as counter-parts to one another, suggesting a comprehensive systematic metaphor and therefore an important clue to the nature of the depressive experience. It appears to involve a sense of two selves, one potentially well while the other ill, an experience also described by William Styron in his journals (cf. Schoeneman et al. 2004; Flynn 2010). The second paragraph contains several lin-guistic expressions that can be related to some form of emptiness: ‘not solid’, ‘hollow’, ‘cavern’, ‘pit’, ‘womb’. This emptiness also involves the contrast of something being empty that is nor-mally expected to be full: ‘behind my eyes’ refers to the ‘location’ normally ‘containing’ thoughts, memories, intentions, etc. Reeves et al. (2004) associate similar examples of ‘emptiness’ meta-phors with suicidal ideation, which resonates with the statement ‘I want to kill myself’ in the final sentence of the excerpt. Emptiness vehicles co-occur with expressions such as ‘numb’ and ‘paralyzed’. These express physical states where perceptions are subdued or non-existent (although the latter also means not being able to move). Thus depression is not only a state where there is a lack of perceptions,

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thoughts and other mental content (‘nothing-ness’), but also a state where external stimuli are not perceived (‘numb’). Such a decrease in sensa-tions and perceptive powers has been associated with the phenomenology of depression (Kiehl 2005) and in this combination, ‘emptiness’ and ‘lack of sensation’ metaphors provide a more comprehensive sense of the depth and complex-ity of the described experience. Excerpt 1 also includes expressions that reflect a movement away from somewhere: ‘escape’ and ‘crawl back’. The use of ‘escape’ implies that some things need to be avoided, presumably as they are difficult or a struggle. In Plath’s case, on the numerous occasions that she desires to ‘escape’, she wants to avoid: herself, the rigid cage of routine, action, freedom and responsibility. McMullen and Conway (2002) and Schoeneman et al. (2004) note that depression can be conceptu-alized as a struggle, but in this case it seems more like Plath sees normal aspects of life as a struggle, which therefore needs to be moved away from. ‘Crawl back’ additionally seems to imply a sense of resignation and exhaustion. This exhaustion may also suggest a sense of helplessness in the experience of Plath’s mental state.

3. Manual analysis: Pronouns

Personal pronouns in English – ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’/‘she’/‘it’, etc. – are ‘function’ words that refer to people and/or things. In the simplest sense, first-person singular pronouns – ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’, ‘myself ’ – refer to the speaker/writer of a message, while second-person singular pronouns refer to the addressee, but exclude the speaker/writer (Quirk et al. 1985). In addition, second-person pronouns can be used to stand for people more generally, or used in self-reference, as the examples below will demonstrate. As expected, the majority of entries (75%) in the Journal are written using first-person pronouns. For example, ‘I went upstairs and fell into bed after they called roll. My nerves pained keenly’ (Entry 30, October 1950 [Plath 2000: 17]). However, just over 10% of entries are written using the second-person pronoun for self-address and these second-person entries

roughly coincide with significant and often nega-tive events in Plath’s life (e.g. first experiences of college and work, unwanted sexual contact, and mounting tensions and pressures) (Demjén 2011b). With a key example I would like to demonstrate and explain what such a shift in self-address can indicate about how Plath may have been experiencing her mental state. Excerpt 2 is from the penultimate entry of the Smith Journal, written on July 6, 1953. At this point in her life, Plath had had a number of professional achievements, but here seems to be summing up her own personality and giving orders to herself, trying to find the motivation to write. Shortly after this entry (on August 24) she tried to commit suicide and was then hos-pitalized for psychiatric treatment. This entry is written mainly in the present tense, and contains vocatives (e.g. ‘you fool’) and imperatives (com-mands/orders), the latter implying, though not requiring, the use of ‘you’. The self-referential second-person pronouns are in italics.

Excerpt 2First think: here is your room – here is your life, your mind: don't panic. Begin writing, even if it is only rough & ununified. First, pick your market: Journal or Discovery? Seventeen or Mlle? Then pick a topic. Then think. If you can't think outside yourself, you can't write. […] You fool – you are afraid of being alone with your own mind. You just better learn to know yourself, to make sure decisions before it is too late. 3 months, you think, scared to death. You want to call that man – You earned enough money to go. Why don't you go? Stop thinking selfishly of razors & self-wounds & going out and ending it all.

(July 6, 1953 [No entry number]; underlines in original, italics added [Plath 2000: 186])

There is a sense of emotional depth in this example, as one is exposed to what seems to be an interior monologue – though it is not really a monologue at all. Since one of the main functions of ‘you’ is to address someone we are speaking to, its use for self-address suggests the presence of two selves: the speaker and the listener or addressee. Plath seems to be in dialogue with herself, creating a sense of split, which bears similarity to Plath’s ‘coming apart’ metaphors discussed above. Imperatives, with their implied

Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression 47

‘you’, additionally create a sense of urgency; com-mands require immediate action. The fact that commands are necessary suggests that Plath is experiencing one half of herself as passive, unable to do the simplest task, and the other half of her is trying to get her going again. This creates a sense of inner conflict which becomes even more explicit through self-threatening (‘You just better learn […]’). The fact that there is a shift in narrative person at this point in the Journal is significant because of what it might indicate about a change in mental state (cf. Pennebaker 2011). This point is picked up again with the help of quantitative methods below. So far I have focused on what two linguistic devices, as part of qualitative analysis, can reveal about Plath’s experience of her mental state. Such analyses provide rich and subtle insights; however, they are difficult to generalize and in some cases only allow for very tentative inter-pretations. As such, I will now turn to the results of quantitative analyses to support some of the claims above and to present additional insights that can only be obtained from a mixed-methods approach.

4. Quantitative approaches

Quantitative methods in linguistics often involve the use of corpus tools (Rayson 2008; McEnery and Hardie 2012), which make it possible to study large quantities of language (a corpus) through the often automatic searching and comparing of electronic versions of texts. In automated methods, corpus analysis software such as Wmatrix (Rayson 2009) or WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004) perform statistical comparisons between two or more corpora, or statistically analyse the composition of one. Wmatrix, which this analysis relies on, additionally enables auto-matic grammatical and semantic annotation, or ‘tagging’, which means that additional metadata is added to texts during uploading. For example, ‘went’ is tagged as a verb, in the past tense (VVD), denoting ‘moving, coming and going’ (M1). The metadata enables the identification of trends that are invisible at the word level (Rayson 2008), as variants of a word (e.g. ‘go’, ‘goes’, ‘went’) and

related terms (‘walk’, ‘run’, ‘wander’) are grouped together. As a result, Wmatrix provides not only word-by-word comparisons, but also compari-sons in terms of grammatical (POS) and seman-tic composition. Since the relative frequencies of grammatical categories, including personal pronouns, negation and polarized language (‘all’, ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘everyone’, ‘nobody’ etc.), have been specifically shown to correlate with affec-tive states (cf. Fekete 2002), this functionality is invaluable. In the sections below, I compare the language of the Smith Journal with a baseline of linguistic normalcy represented by a small reference corpus of autobiographical writing (Semino and Short 2004). As personal journals are not readily avail-able, and blogs are a similarly different genre (cf. Rodriguez et al. 2010), this corpus provides the best alternative frame of reference. I will discuss some of the main statistically significant (key) differences between the parts-of-speech (POS) and semantic fields of the Smith Journal (77,900 words) and other autobiographical writings (see Table 1). Such statistically significant differences show us the ways in which Plath wrote about her reality differently from a norm, which might be indicative of how she experienced it differently. The statistical measure used in these compari-sons is log-likelihood (LL), a measure automati-cally calculated in Wmatrix. Various critical LL values (cut-off points) can be used as measures of statistical significance; however, especially for smaller-sized corpora it is important also to take into consideration the overall frequen-cies of words, phrases or tags. While there is little agreement amongst scholars as to what an appropriate cut-off point is, Rayson et al. (2004) provide a workable framework:

• For a confidence level of 95% (p ≤ 0.05), the LL cut-off should be 3.84 with a minimum frequency of 13

• For a confidence level of 99% (p ≤ 0.01), the LL cut-off should be 6.63 with a minimum frequency of 11

• For a confidence level of 99.9% (p ≤ 0.001), the LL cut-off should be 10.83 with a minimum frequency of 8

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The analysis here follows these guidelines. The LL value of 6.63 is used as the cut-off point for significance, with a minimum frequency of 11 in either corpus to ensure the reliability of results (p ≤ 0.01), unless otherwise stated. In addition to comparing the Journal with a corpus of autobiographies, I also discuss differ-ences between first- and second-person entries within the Journal itself (see Table 2). This allows me to comment not only on what is distinctive about Plath’s language overall, but also on what differences there might exist between her uses of language at different points in the text. This facilitates hypotheses about potential changes in her experience of her mental state. Note that, for exemplification purposes, I am only focusing on the most relevant statistical differences for depression (polarized language, self-references, verb types and negation), as established in previous studies (Stirman and Pennebaker 2001; Fekete 2002; Hargitai et al. 2007).4

4.1. Polarized languageA significant difference between Plath’s language and general autobiographical writing is the relative abundance of polarized language in the former. By polarized language (or dichotomous structures) I mean words and expressions that are generally used to describe the extreme ends of clines, for example: ‘all’ and ‘nothing’; ‘always’ and ‘never’; ‘everybody’ and ‘nobody’ etc. These types of words are captured in Wmatrix under the semantic categories of ‘Evaluation: good’

(LL=11.72), ‘Entire; maximum’ (LL=7.71), ‘Fre-quent’ (LL=9.42), as well as the grammatical cat-egory of ‘pre-determiner’ (LL=15.28) (see Table 1). The overuse of such polar opposites suggests high contrast and intense experiences (whether good or bad). It is as if Plath sees the world in a very harsh light and all experiences/emotions become intensified either towards the positive or the negative end of a cline. The intensity outlined here is similar to the kind noted in the discussion of some of Plath’s metaphors (e.g. repetition and juxtapositioning with ‘his mind’). The qualitative and quantitative results combined provide more substantial evidence for the intensity of Plath’s experience of depression. This may even result in a kind of instability and flux (due to alternation between extremes) leading to the kind of chaos that her ‘coming apart’ metaphors suggest. In fact, polarized language has been associated with the psychological defence mechanism of mental/cognitive ‘splitting’ (Fekete 2002).

4.2. Self-referencesA further set of statistically significant differ-ences between the Smith Journal and other autobiographical writings is somewhat surpris-ing. In the Smith Journal, Plath makes more references to herself using ‘I’ than is normal in the reference corpus (LL=16.79), which also consists of first-person narratives. She also uses the second-person pronoun ‘you’ more frequently. The significance of the latter was discussed in Section 3, but the overuse of ‘I’ is worth considering further. The excessive use of

Table 1. Selected differences between the Smith Journal and the reference corpus (POS and semantic tags combined)

Description Tag Freq. 1 % 1 Freq. 2 % 2 LL Example ItemsBase form of lexical verb VV0 1820 2.45 481 1.17 234.49 hate, know 2nd person personal pronoun PPY 1080 1.45 243 0.59 189.52 you1st person sing. subjective

Personal pronoun PPIS1 2410 3.24 1149 2.8 16.79 I

pre-determiner capable of pronominal function

DB 355 0.48 133 0.32 15.28 all

Evaluation: good A5.1+++ 83 0.11 21 0.05 11.72 perfectFrequent N6+++ 95 0.13 28 0.07 9.42 alwaysEntire; maximum N5.1+ 502 0.68 222 0.54 7.71 all, complete

Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression 49

‘I’ is a documented characteristic of depression (Rude et al. 2004) and implies self-focus. There seems to be an inability to distance oneself from personal concerns (Fekete 2002). This suggests that all experiences are interpreted as being about the self: everything becomes personal. Bearing in mind the aforementioned polarized language, this can be a potentially self-defeating combination. Negative experiences, for example, are likely to be interpreted as more severe and as attacks on her person rather than circumstantial. Indeed metaphors like ‘my world falls apart’ seem to support this interpretation. Given the importance of these pronouns for depression, I also explored whether there was a significant difference in frequencies between first- and second-person entries in terms of self-reference. Establishing this required a creative manipulation of the data, as the words used for self-reference (pronouns and verbs) are different in the two types of entries: first-person pronouns (and respective verb forms) vs second-person pronouns. To enable comparison, the self-referential pronouns and corresponding verbs were changed to their first-person equivalents in the second-person entries. For example, ‘you are’ was changed to ‘I am’, wherever it referred to Plath. In fact, both the subjective and objective pronouns (‘I’ and ‘me’ referring to Plath after the pronouns were changed) were used significantly more frequently in previously second-person entries than in the rest of the Smith Journal (LL=23.77 and LL=16.04, respectively, see Table 2). This suggests that Plath focuses even more intensely on herself in entries written in the second person. Potentially, then, second-person

narration may not only be an indicator of emo-tional upheaval and a sense of split, as proposed in the qualitative analysis, but may also be an indicator of increasingly severe depression.

4.3. TransitivityA further significant feature of both the Smith Journal and second-person entries within it was the overuse of lexical verbs (which denote actions, activities and events) at LL=234.49 (Table 1) and LL=26.13 (Table 2). On its own this difference is difficult to interpret; a closer look at the verbs themselves is necessary and one of the best tools for analysing actions, activi-ties and events in language is the framework of transitivity. Essentially, transitivity is part of systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and focuses on ‘who does what to whom’. The framework divides actions and activities (commonly denoted by verbs) into six process types (and associated participants): material, mental, relational, behavioural, verbal and exis-tential. Material processes, the most frequent in various genres (Eggins and Martin 1997; Hussein Norouzi et al. 2012), are normally creative or transformative in some way: they bring entities into existence or change existing ones through effort and expended energy. This implies that there are usually two participants involved: the actor or agent and entity being acted upon (‘I actually hugged him impulsively’ [Entry 160, January 19, 1953, Plath 2000: 161, underline added]). Behavioural and mental process types generally each have only one human participant – the sensor (‘I think I am mad at times’ [Entry

Table 2. Selected differences between second-person entries and the rest of the Smith Journal

Description POS Tag

Freq. 1 % 1 Freq.2

% 2 LL Example Items

Base form of lexical verb VV0 267 3.33 1552 2.34 26.13 remember, dance, see2nd/1st person sing. subjective

personal pronounPPIS1 379 4.74 2375 3.58 23.77

I2nd/1st person sing. objective

personal pronounPPIO1 81 1.01 400 0.6 16.04

meNegation XX 96 1.21 619 0.93 4.86 no, not, n’t

50 Zsófia Demjén

31, No date, Plath 2000: 24, underline added]) and behaver (‘I smiled with impersonal tenderness’ [Entry 28, No date, Plath 2000: 22, underline added]), respectively. Relational processes denote attributes or identities (‘what an ego I have’ [Entry 35, No date, Plath 2000: 29, underline added]); verbal processes are to do with communicating such as ‘say’, ‘report’, ‘ask’; and existential pro-cesses denote existence (‘there are a few rooms lit’ [Entry 63, No date, Plath 2000: 56, underline added]). Individual activities can be more or less prototypical of any of these types. In the case of the entire Smith Journal, over a third of these frequently used verbs denoted mental process types such as ‘think’, ‘believe’, ‘know’, ‘hate’, ‘feel’. This could be seen as a feature of journals, which deal with the inner world of their writer. However, additionally about 17% are behavioural processes (e.g. ‘stop’, ‘pull away’, ‘pretend'). Contrary to expectations, therefore, these two process types made up over half of all process types (instead of material processes) in the Smith Journal. As outlined above, mental and behavioural processes do not bring about a change in the environment through the expend-ing of energy and involve no external party. Lexical verbs are also significantly more fre-quent in second-person entries than in the rest of the Smith Journal. While in the Smith Journal overall, just over half of processes (where Plath is the agent) have no effect on external things, the percentage is around 70% in second-person entries. This suggests increased self-focus in the same way as the use of pronouns did and may provide further evidence of the helplessness noted in Plath’s metaphors of ‘emptiness’. In addi-tion, the higher prevalence of such process types in second-person entries when compared with the rest of the journal also indicates a potential change in the severity of the mental state.

4.4. NegationA final significant difference that I would like to discuss concerns the comparison between second-person entries and the rest of the Journal, which revealed an overuse of negation in second-person entries (LL=4.86; p ≤ 0.05).5 Negation refers to words such as ‘no’, ‘not’, ‘never’,

‘nothing’ etc., that describe how a state of affairs is not (examples in Figure 1). Negation can be evidence of a negative outlook and a depreciation of the world, but in combination with increased self-references it has also been associated with depression with a tendency towards self-harm (Hargitai et al. 2007). Fekete (2002) additionally noted that in combination with dichotomous structures (among others) it can indicate suicidal ideation.

Figure 1. Concordance of Negation in the final two entries of the Smith Journal

These links are important given that the final two entries in the Smith Journal are written in the second person and therefore are part of the group of entries that contain increased self refer-ences and negation (compared with the rest of the journal). These entries, like the rest of the journal, also contain dichotomous structures (or polarized language). This means that there is ten-tative evidence of a potential for self-harm and suicidal ideation, as suggested above by Plath’s metaphors to do with emptiness and the womb. Significantly, the evidence seems to compound in the final two entries, which were written only a few weeks before Plath’s first suicide attempt.

5. Conclusions

This paper aimed to illustrate how a range of linguistic methods can be used to investigate the ‘lived experience’ of depression, as a case study. In particular, it hopes to have demon-strated that relatively reliable interpretations can come from a combination of qualitative and quantitative linguistic methods, which might help to bridge the divide between humanities and medical approaches to health (cf. Crawford et al. 2014).

Linguistic insights into Sylvia Plath’s experience of depression 51

Manual qualitative analyses of metaphor and personal-pronoun use highlighted the intricate and subtle nature of Plath’s experience of depres-sion. Plath seems to have experienced her mental state as chaotic and at times contradictory – impotent and in the process of self-attack at the same time. There was a sense of confinement and exhaustion, which suggests that the mental state is unpleasant and difficult to overcome. The repetition of relevant metaphors in the Smith Journal suggests that this was a significant aspect of Plath’s experience. Some metaphors also suggest an absence of control and a sense of split. The use of the second-person pronoun to refer to the self also suggested a sense of split, as ‘you’ was directed at the self. The series of commands directed at the self further implied a sense of conflict, which may be a more general characteristic of depression, but it is less fre-quently reported. In addition, a further possible significance of second-person narration was suggested by an intra-textual quantitative com-parison. The quantitative analysis showed that self-focus is increased in second-person entries, providing potential quantitative evidence for a more severe depressive state. In addition, suicidal ideation, an interpretation tentatively suggested for Plath’s ‘womb’ and ‘emptiness’ metaphors, was given more substance by her statistically sig-nificant overuse of negation and self-references in second-person narration, especially in the final two entries (written just before her first suicide attempt). Abundant dichotomous structures, as iden-tified through corpus methods, suggested that Plath potentially experienced the world in a more polarized way than the average person. Certain ways in which she used metaphors (juxtaposition and intertextual allusion) also seemed to point to intensity of experience. These may be examples of what Tay (2012) calls ‘maladaptive concep-tualizations’, i.e. Plath’s seemingly categorical worldview and aversion to ‘normal’ aspects of everyday life potentially contribute to her depression. These attitudes could be addressed in therapeutic contexts. As depression is a relatively well-researched condition, the insights I have described above may not seem revolutionary. However, what I

have tried to demonstrate is that the lived expe-rience of depression is implicit in the language of its ‘patients’. Even with depression, linguistic analysis can potentially enrich our understanding of the condition. For example, it may be worth exploring whether a sense of inner conflict and contradiction, as outlined in both the metaphor and the pronouns sections, is common among sufferers of depression. Similarly, monitoring patients’ use of pronouns and negation could potentially function as a kind of diagnostic tool or early warning system, highlighting individu-als who may be at risk of moving towards more severe depression or suicidal ideation. But more importantly, linguistic clues can and should be used to study mental health problems that are less well documented.

Notes

1. See http://www.liwc.net/liwcdescription.php.2. For the purposes of this paper, depression is

understood as ‘a profound and persistent feeling of sadness or despair and/or a loss of interest in things that were once pleasurable’ (Fundukian and Wilson 2008: 339).

3. Although I only describe these key examples of metaphor, my interpretations draw on extensive analyses of metaphorical patterns in the Smith Journal (Demjén forthcoming).

4. A full analysis can be found in Demjén (forthcom-ing).

5. The LL cut-off point for Journal internal com-parisons is lowered to 3.84 (p ≤ 0.05), as there were fewer results at higher levels of significance. The minimum frequency was also adjusted in accordance with the recommendations to ≥13 (Rayson et al. 2004). This ensured the reliability of the data, even at a lower level of LL.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Elena Semino, Srikant Sarangi and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

52 Zsófia Demjén

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Zsófia Demjén is a Lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at The Open University, UK. Her research interests include health communica-tion, metaphor and especially the intersections of language, mind and health(care). She is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (forthcoming) and her most recent projects involved investigating metaphor in end of life care discourse and language in the representation of voices in an autobiography of a schizophrenic. Address for cor-respondence: Department of Applied Linguistics and English Language, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Stuart Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. Email: [email protected]