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As an exploration of duality in women, “Two Sisters of Persephone” is significant to Plath’s place in the literary canon. She was widely believed to have undiagnosed bipolar disorder. A famous entry from her journal reads, “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” The essences of both “sisters” in the poem were within the poet; duality was a reality of her daily life. In fact, the controversial link between mental illnesses and creative fire has been called the “Sylvia Plath Effect” (Smith Bailey, Deborah. “The 'Sylvia Plath' effect.” American Psychological Association, 2003).
The concept of duality continues into the divide between Plath’s creative youth and her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes. She began publishing her poetry very young, and writing was an integral part of her young identity. This poem was written in the same year as Plath’s marriage to Hughes; the two sisters of the poem are a metaphor for the two stages of Plath’s life and the two potential roads she might take. Viewed through this context, the poem contains a degree of fear and a warning: “While flowering, ladies, scant love not” (Line 30). As she prepared to leave one chapter of her life behind for another, Plath might have feared ending up like the woman in the poem who is buried alone, or she might have feared what would happen if she set her career aside for love.
“Two Sisters of Persephone” is a loosely allegorical poem, following the reference in the title to the myth of Persephone and Hades. In this myth, Demeter’s young daughter is tricked into marrying Hades, the god of the underworld, by eating a pomegranate. However, because she only consumed six of the blood-red seeds, her mother argued that she should only be beholden to Hades six months out of the year. Demeter, who was an agricultural deity, suffered such sorrow at the loss of her daughter that the world turned dark and cold—effectively creating autumn and winter.
Whether Persephone grew to love Hades in time is a question long debated by scholars, historians, and storytellers. Through this story, we understand Plath’s interpretation as a study of the turning point between youth and the age of marriage and motherhood.
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By Sylvia Plath