Today marks fifty-six years since the first publication of Sylvia Plath’s only novel. A haunted semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman’s spiral into depression and mental illness during a summer interning at a prominent magazine in New York City, The Bell Jar was originally published in Britain under Plath’s pseudonym, Victoria Lucas, before being rereleased under the poet’s own name in 1967. Plath, however, never got to witness the seismic impact her novel, as well as her now-iconic poetry collection Ariel (1965), would go on to have. She took her own life on February 11, less than a month after The Bell Jar first hit shelves.
Though often considered a lesser work than her poetry collections, in the years since Plath’s death The Bell Jar has become a totemic novel for teenage girls and young women around the world. Despite initially being rejected by American publishers (who complained that it lacked plot and cohesion), the book has now sold over 3 million copies in the US and is a staple of high school english classes countrywide.
By the time The Bell Jar finally finally reached American readers in 1971, it was impossible for critics to consider the novel outside of the context of Plath’s suicide and the mythos which had been built up around her tragically short life in the years that followed. This made for some particularly interesting, albeit loaded, criticism.
Below, we look at four of the most intriguing reviews from that year.
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
“The Bell Jar is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath’s 20th year: about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue. It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems—the kind of book Salinger’s Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell. It is very much a story of the fifties, but written in the early sixties, and now, after being effectively suppressed in this country for eight years, published in the seventies.
F. Scott Fitzgerald used to claim that he wrote with ‘the authority of failure,’ and he did. It was a source of power in his later work. But the authority of failure is but a pale shadow of the authority of suicide, as we feel it in Ariel and in The Bell Jar. This is not so much because Sylvia Plath, in taking her own life, gave her readers a certain ghoulish interest they could not bring to most poems and novels, though this is no doubt partly true. It is because she knew that she was ‘Lady Lazarus.’ Her works do not only come to us posthumously. They were written posthumously. Between suicides. She wrote her novel and her Ariel poems feverishly, like a person ‘stuck together with glue’ and aware that the glue was melting. Should we be grateful for such things? Can we accept the price she paid for what she has given us? Is dying really an art?
There are no easy answers for such questions, maybe no answers at all. We are all dying, of course, banker and bum alike, spending our limited allotment of days, hours and minutes at the same rate. But we don’t like to think about it. And those men and women who take the matter into their own hands, and spend all at once with prodigal disdain, seem frighteningly different from you and me. Sylvia Plath is one of those others, and to them our gratitude and our dismay are equally impertinent. When an oracle speaks it is not for us to say thanks but to attend to the message.
“…this personal life is delicately related to larger events–especially the execution of the Rosenbergs, whose impending death by electrocution is introduced in the stunning first paragraph of the book. Ironically, that same electrical power which destroys the Rosenbergs, restores Esther to life. It is shock therapy which finally lifts the bell jar and enables Esther to breathe freely once again. Passing through death she is reborn. This novel is not political or historical in any narrow sense, but in looking at the madness of the world and the world of madness it forces us to consider the great question posed by all truly realistic fiction: What is reality and how can it be confronted?
In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath has used superbly the most important technical device of realism—what the Russian critic Shklovsky called ‘defamiliarization.’ True realism defamiliarizes our world so that it emerges from the dust of habitual acceptance and becomes visible once again. This is quite the opposite of that comforting false realism that presents the world in terms of clichès that we are all too ready to accept.
“Esther Greenwood’s account of her year in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. It makes for a novel such as Dorothy Parker might have written if she had not belonged to a generation infected with the relentless frivolity of the college humor magazine. The brittle humor of that early generation is reincarnated in The Bell Jar, but raised to a more serious level because it is recognized as a resource of hysteria. Why, then, has this extraordinary work not appeared in the United States until eight years after its appearance in England?”
–Robert Scholes, The New York Times, April 11, 1971
To read the other reviews, click HERE.
https://bookmarks.reviews/the-first-american-reviews-of-sylvia-plaths-the-bell-jar/
In one of the most often cited passages from Sylvia Plaths 1963 novel, The Bell Jar, Plath's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, reflects upon the potential paths her life might take and her ultimate inability to make decisions about her future:
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. (Plath 1971, 62-63)
The passage is a favorite among literary scholars who consistently relate its significance to the larger themes of Plath s novel. Some critics, like Susan Coyle in "Images of Madness and Retrieval: An Exploration of Metaphor in The Bell Jar" see the passage as a metaphor for Esther s psychological deterioration; Coyle notes that Esther is "'starving' not simply from indecision but also from an increasing sense of alienation from self and alienation from the world and her potential goals" (1984, 165). Critic Marilyn Yalom in "Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, and Related Poems" explores the way in which the figs in the novel are used as "traditional symbols of female fecundity" (1985, 170) while Linda Wagner-Martin in The Bell Jar.vl Novel of the Fifties, grounds her reading historically noting that "Esther believed firmly that there was no way in the American society of the 1950s, that a talented woman could success fully combine a career with homemaking" (1992, 38).
To read the full article, click HERE.
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By Mark Davies
BBC News Online |
A new film on the life of Sylvia Plath has been released to poor reviews in the UK. Fair enough, say Plath fans from the US to West Yorkshire - but don't knock her poetry.
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In West Yorkshire, Elaine Connell adds comments from all over the world to her website on Sylvia Plath's work. In Northampton, Massachusetts, Shannon Hunt handles the peppermint-pink notepaper bearing Plath's poems as she helps to make her work available to scholars around the world.
The two are tied by a fascination with Plath which stretches beyond any sense of the poet as a cult figure or totem for adolescent angst.
A new film about Plath's life, Sylvia, with Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role, has been released in the UK to generally poor reviews.
Romantic view
And for Elaine Connell the concern is that as it only uses a little of Plath's poetry, it will merely add to her image rather than encouraging film-goers to assess her work.
It was a fear neatly summed up by Christopher Tookey, writing in the Daily Mail: "If you've long been fascinated by Plath's poetry, or if you're a teenage girl who's painted her walls black, has a romantic view of death and would choose Feelings as one of her Desert Island Discs, this movie is for you.
"Otherwise, it's hard to imagine who might constitute its target audience."
Elaine, who runs a website called The Sylvia Plath Forum from her home in Hebden Bridge, close to where Plath was buried after committing suicide aged 30, is one of those long fascinated by Plath's work - but she has no high hopes for the movie.
The film has received poor reviews
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"It's the sort of Marilyn Monroe, Diana, James Dean type of thing, with Che Guevara thrown in for good measure," she says.
"As a result, a lot of people don't then look to see what's behind the image."
So what is it about Plath's poetry which makes it worthy of further investigation?
Writer of rare distinction
Professor John Beer of Cambridge University first came across Plath when he read a short story she had published while a student at the university.
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 It is a very good illustration of a highly intelligent woman trapped in a time when the highest ideal was to be Doris Day Elaine Connell
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"I was immediately impressed by its extraordinary intelligence," he says. "I've thought of her ever since as a writer of rare distinction."
She and her husband, Ted Hughes, addressed "fundamental questions about the fate of humanity in the present age by acting out in their own careers and writings issues involving the relationship between consciousness and being that lie at the centre of literature".
This admiration is shared across the Atlantic at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Plath also studied.
Shannon Hunt, a Smith student who is responsible for processing Plath's manuscripts into an online register, says the poet is much admired at the college.
"Plath's Ariel poems prove especially intriguing," she says.
"She liked to use both sides of a sheet of paper, and so we have a first draft of "Daddy" written on the reverse of pages from Hughes's discarded play The Calm, as well as a number of poems penned on the backs of typed chapters from The Bell Jar."
To read the full article, click HERE.