The Bell Jar is an
autobiographical novel that conforms closely to the events of the
author’s life. Sylvia Plath was born to Otto and Aurelia Plath in 1932 and
spent her early childhood in the seaport town of Winthrop, Massachusetts.
Otto Plath died when Plath was eight years old, and she moved with
her mother, younger brother, and maternal grandparents to Wellesley,
an inland suburb of Boston. Plath excelled in school and developed
a strong interest in writing and drawing. In 1950,
she won a scholarship to attend Smith College, where she majored
in English. The Bell Jar recounts, in slightly
fictionalized form, the events of the summer and autumn after Plath’s junior
year. Like Esther, the protagonist of The Bell Jar, Plath
was invited to serve as guest editor for a woman’s magazine in New York.
After returning to Wellesley for the remainder of the summer, she
had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide.
Plath went on to complete a highly successful college
career. She won the prestigious Fulbright scholarship to study at
Cambridge University in England, where she met the English poet
Ted Hughes. They married in 1956, and after
a brief stint in the United States, where Plath taught at Smith,
they moved back to England in 1959. Plath
gave birth to her first child, Freda, the following year. The same
year, she published The Colossus, her first volume
of poetry. Her second child, Nicholas, was born in 1962.
Hughes and Plath separated shortly afterward; her instability and
his affair with another woman had placed great strain on their marriage.
Plath and her children moved to a flat in London, where she continued
to write poetry. The poems she wrote at this time were later published
in a collection titled Ariel (1965).
In February 1963, she gassed herself in her
kitchen, ending her life at the age of thirty-one.
Plath most likely wrote a first draft of The
Bell Jar in the late 1950s. In 1961 she
received a fellowship that allowed her to complete the novel. The
Bell Jar was published in London in January 1963 under
the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Plath chose to publish the work under
a pseudonym in order to protect the people she portrayed in the
novel, and because she was uncertain of the novel’s literary merit.
The novel appeared posthumously in England under her own name in 1966,
and in America, over the objections of her mother, in 1971. The
Bell Jar has received moderate critical acclaim, and has
long been valued not only as a glimpse into the psyche of a major
poet, but as a witty and harrowing American coming-of-age story.
Plath is primarily known not as a novelist, but as an outstanding
poet. Ariel cemented her reputation as a great
artist. Her other volumes of poetry, published posthumously, include Crossing
the Water (1971), Winter
Trees (1971), and The Collected
Poems (1981), which won the Pulitzer
Prize.
Sylvia Plath’s literary persona has always provoked extreme reactions.
Onlookers tend to mythologize Plath either as a feminist martyr
or a tragic heroine. The feminist martyr version of her life holds
that Plath was driven over the edge by her misogynist husband, and
sacrificed on the altar of pre-feminist, repressive 1950s America.
The tragic heroine version of her life casts Plath as a talented
but doomed young woman, unable to deal with the pressures of society
because of her debilitating mental illness. Although neither myth
presents a wholly accurate picture, truth exists in both. The
Bell Jar does not label its protagonist’s life as either
martyred or heroic. Plath does not attribute Esther’s instability
to men, society, or Esther herself, although she does criticize
all three. Rather, she blames mental illness, which she characterizes
as a mysterious and horrific disease.
