In the same vein, Sylvia Plath diverted the very essence of her agony, pain, and overwhelming shame into her art and penned it down raw, naked, and often bloodcurdling. Plath’s poetry and her novel The Bell Jar reflect a self-dissolution under a crushing weight of social expectations combined with mental illness and personal failure. Still, in... See more

For the artist, that means every brushstroke seems like a failure before it has even hit the canvas or page.

Take, for example, Virginia Woolf, who often wrote about the inner discontent and alienation that her experience with mental illness and societal expectations imposed upon her. The set-in shame she experienced was ironically heavily intertwined with her personally perceived inadequacies as a woman within a world bound by rigorous expectations of... See more