The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar, and in essence Sylvia Plath, nestle in the arms of the feminist—a tender and catatonic parable of the American mid-century woman, caught between two worlds: the institution of the American family and the liberation of the independent woman, against a background of haunting, cold war politics.

In order to gain a more complete understanding of her poetry and prose in context, I hope to explore how certain aspects of her life illuminate interpretations of The Bell Jar, “The Rabbit Catcher”, “Berck-Plage”, and “A Birthday Present”, as well as how these pieces relate to each other.

This MA thesis approaches Sylvia Plath's only published novel 'The Bell Jar' with a New Critical viewpoint. Picking up some notable images: the bell jar, the flowers and the fig tree, I was attempting to enrich the analyses on the novel with more details found in the plot instead of performing parallel citations of the writer's (auto)biography.

The purpose of this Mémoire is to examine the way in which female authors who were young women in the 1950's have presented their own views of a gender restrictive era through semi-autobiographical novels. The choice to focus on semi-autobiographies is crucial, because those texts have an inherent power that historical accounts cannot convey: they carry the voice of a female individual who underwent the anxiety triggered by the restrictiveness of the era's expectations, and had to find a way around it. Moreover, by adding fictional elements to their stories, the authors can strengthen or reduce some facets of their stories so as to point to a particular moment of their lives, and the repercussions it had on their present self, offering the reader alternative versions for their life-stories
Both primary texts, The Millstone and The Bell Jar, have been chosen because they reflect on double standards and unfair treatments of women during the fifties. They unveil the difficulty to reconcile one's apparently contradictory desires, whether a husband, a family or a career. Both texts also enhance the idea that women have a superior role to play, but that they are deprived of their own possibilities: not by their husbands or men in general, but by the socially enforced cultural values, norms and morals that reduce them to their role as housewife or mother. This Mémoire will also reflect on contemporary media and political movements which contributed to the widely gender-centered organization of society: feminine magazines such as Mademoiselle or Seventeen and their ambiguous advice for young women, and political debates such as the Kitchen Debate of 1959. Then, with the help of Ian McEwan's novel On Chesil Beach, written in 2007 and looking back on the first years of the 1960's, it becomes obvious that constrictive gender roles were not specific to the Cold War era in America. They were indeed constitutive of Western cultural norms based on a patriarchal conception of society.

This study undertakes to analyze the creative oeuvre of Sylvia Plath, Anglo-American poet and prose author, inside the framework of theories of gender fluidity (Butler, Kristeva, Irigaray), autofiction as the genre of socially subdominant groups (Doubrovsky), and trauma theory (Freud, Lacan, Caruth, Felman). The aim of this study is to conduct a critical reevaluation of Sylvia’s poetry and only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), so as to position them as independent of her biography, and therefore valid on their own.
Sylvia Plath’s literary opus is explored through themes of an authentic female experience during the 1950s and 1960s America and Britain, related to processes of survival in a (literary) environment which emphasizes masculine discourse as the norm – in writing, as well as in life. By employing her late poetry and only novel as the setting for critical investigation, I explore the implications of Plath’s symbolic treatment of the father and husband figures, of the conformist and appealing mother figure, as well as motherhood in its re-conceptualized version through which the lyrical speaker frees herself from the aforementioned ideological influences. Furthermore, I have discerned the search for identity and its realization in the process of taking the Other as a self-governing force and rejecting the imposed label of otherness, which excludes women from the normative currents of life and literary achievement, to be the main motif that sets the foundation for Plath’s entire work. The oppressive impositions of a patriarchal society are in this study found to be the principal constricting force in Plath’s oeuvre, which she attempted to displace via her indigenous expression, which helped her outline the contours of a new type of femininity.
Special attention is afforded to displacing "Sylvia as author" from the interpretation of her work and establishing "Sylvia as sensibility", whose main features are a passionate devotion to life experience, demonic perfectionism, insatiable eroticism, and mystical martyrdom. Only through such criticism can we reach her genius which saw inspiration for literary creativity in the rebirth of the self. Her authentic voice is important to this day, reaching all those who immerse themselves in the contradictions of the contemporary patterns of reality in order to reexamine that reality and to, as individuals among others, survive.

Sylvia Plath’s roman-a-clef, The Bell Jar (1963), remains a commercial and critical success more than a half-a-century after its initial publication. I suggest that one of the reasons for the novel’s enduring popularity is Plath’s exploration of the connections between clothing and identity. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, fashion historians, and literary scholars, I contend that Plath uses protagonist Esther Greenwood’s vexed relationship with her wardrobe to demonstrate how the discourses of fashion that dominated American women’s magazines in the 1950s functioned to limit women’s personal and professional options. For Plath, I argue, Esther’s failure to find herself through fashion is indicative of white, middle-class women’s problematic position in a culture that defines them as both consumers and commodities in a male-dominated heterosexual marketplace.

Sylvia Plath’s roman-a-clef, The Bell Jar (1963), remains a commercial and critical success more than a half-a-century after its initial publication. I suggest that one of the reasons for the novel’s enduring popularity is Plath’s exploration of the connections between clothing and identity. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, fashion historians, and literary scholars, I contend that Plath uses protagonist Esther Greenwood’s vexed relationship with her wardrobe to demonstrate how the discourses of fashion that dominated American women’s magazines in the 1950s functioned to limit women’s personal and professional options. For Plath, I argue, Esther’s failure to find herself through fashion is indicative of white, middle-class women’s problematic position in a culture that defines them as both consumers and commodities in a male-dominated heterosexual marketplace.

When one imagines reading a traditional suicide note, the expectation is discovering why this human being would want to end her life and a list of those they love, all in a succinct letter; however, this is not always the case.  Many scholars believe that Sylvia Plath wrote the novel The Bell Jar to rid herself of depression by channeling a new persona and essentially writing an autobiography.  Plath skillfully forms the character Esther Greenwood through whom she weaves her own life story.  She uses Esther’s experiences of failure, depression, and suicide to reveal the deep-rooted misery in her own life. Plath did not write The Bell Jar solely for cathartic release; the distinct parallels between the novel and Plath’s life reveal the use of her writing as a cry for help and the content as a systematic suicide note.

This essay will explore the complex system of self-representation that Sylvia Plath employs for the composition of The Bell Jar. By way of a close reading of the novel, attentive to its relationship both to the Bildungsroman and to certain forms of (semi)autobiographical writing, the essay contends that, in Plath, writing acquires a symbolic function. The novel’s linguistic dimension, in fact, is not communicative, but rather poietic – a testament of the nascent vocation of writing to which Plath attributes a project of self-construction. By stressing the dialectic of birth, death and rebirth that permeates the novel, the essay attempts to reconstruct the stages of the battle that Plath fights to attain a more authentic subjectivity, a battle that takes the form of an ‘initiation rite’.

Sylvia Plath’s roman à clef The Bell Jar has largely been read as an autobiographical novel and as the key to understanding her suicide. The novel, however, presents an important political complexity—the contradictions Esther faces in post-WWII, 1950s American society, the unattainable and conflicting ideals of womanhood, and the political treason that betraying them implies, dealt with as madness. Esther Greenwood’s descent into madness is no more than the reflection of the sick, hypocritical society she lives in, and an attempt to escape from her obligations as an American woman. However, the institution of psychiatry was closely related to the politics of the time, and acted as a means of control over the population, especially women, through the use of treatments such as ECT and lobotomy. I would like to look at how Cold War politics, gender, and psychiatry interact in The Bell Jar in order to submit American society to the conformism and consumerism that dominated the 1950s.

Resumo: Este estudo tem o objetivo de revisitar o romance A redoma de vidro, de Sylvia Plath, publicado em 1963-ano em que a autora viria a cometer suicídio. Considerando o dado autobiográfico/autoficcional do romance, pretendemos deslindar os processos destrutivos entranhados em sua composição, que encontra ecos na condição da própria Plath de dezenove anos revivida na pele da protagonista Esther Greenwood. Palavras-chave: Sylvia Plath; A redoma de vidro; literatura e suicídio.