So far as I have been able to determine, Plath never felt any shame about her suicide attempt. Certainly she regretted the grief she caused her mother and others, but she did not regard the effort to die by her own hand as an unworthy act. Her letters show as much. She repeatedly referred to herself as a Stoic. As an undergraduate, she had read Marcus Aurelius, who had affirmed that suicide was a viable option, even a noble choice when circumstances made life intolerable and no longer susceptible to the ministrations of reason.
A decade later, after significant success as a poet, after a heady marriage with fellow poet Ted Hughes had broken down, in the midst of a bitterly cold British winter with power outages, with two very young children to care for and without a female circle she had hoped to fashion into a salon, exhausted by flu, on drugs that may have had a chilling impact on her psyche, and in the overflow of creating poetry that Plath announced as great—not only to her mother but to Hughes and her champion-critic, Alfred Alvarez, Plath quite deliberately decided to end her life, securing (she believed) her children from the harm of gas escaping her oven, where she had put her head in as far as it would go. Because the gas was so powerful in the ovens of those days that she would have lost consciousness and effectively died in less than an hour, it seems highly unlikely that her final act was a plea for help.
Why would a woman with two children she loved, writing at the peak of her poetic powers, want to die? That poetry had been the result of intense work in the early morning hours before her children awakened. It had been fueled by coffee and pills that kept her going and also depleted her. How long could she maintain that pace? She was seeing her doctor on an almost daily basis. Otherwise, she felt cut off, even forced to use a public call box after months of being unable to obtain a private line for her home.
Long before her last act, Plath had declared that marriage and children were not enough. They were the necessary but insufficient condition of her continued creativity. Assessing her perilous state, her doctor believed she should be institutionalized. She agreed, but then concluded that another stay in an asylum would deprive her of the independence on which her poetry had been founded. A decade earlier, she had Ruth Beuscher to rely on, but no one like that was at hand. Deeply read in psychology, in both Freud and Jung, Plath dreaded how the psychiatric professionals would treat her. She would become a patient and learn the dependent behavior of patients. Read Plath’s story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” and you will understand Plath’s horror derived not only from her own institutionalization but also from what she had learned by working part-time in a mental institution and taking notes on suffering patients.