Plaths Bell JarBorn in the great depression of america massachusetts 1932, Plaths childhood was bought to a premature end, when father Otto died a week after her eighth birthday. At that young age Plath denounced her faith in God, and remained ambivalent towards religion for the rest of her life. Plath later described the first nine years of her life as having been “sealedoff like a ship in a bottle—beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth”. Her fathers early death affected Plath deeply, creating lines that would forever run jagged and empty on the landscape of her life, like permanent flashes of lightning intense against an indigo sky. Plath struggled with depression throughout her life, and tried several times to kill herself. Many of her later poems reference her abandoned childhood following the loss of her father, along with her suicide attempts which she wrote about with a harsh, precise awareness. This is also a subject found at the heart of ‘The Bell Jar.
On February 11th 1963, Plath succeeded in committing suicide at 4.30 in the morning.Plaths only novel ‘The Bell Jar is an intimate, controlled account of a mental breakdown. As the reader, you are compelled to journey along with the heroin of the novel Esther, who spirals out of the grips of reality, and the material world which she rejects, into the surreal, detached, and stifling conditions of the bell jar, which is a metaphor for her depression and the significant title of the novel itself.
‘To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.Instead of standing outside the bell jar and viewing Esther in her state of depression through a distorted lens, unable to really discern what is happening to her, the reader is inside the bell jar with her, seeing the world outside through her twisted glass. This gives you a clear understanding of whats happening to her and what she perceives is happening around her. It also makes the novel a lot more intimate and personal and helps you grasp and relate to esthers character.
Although ‘The Bell Jar is fiction, the events in the novel are based on Plaths own life experiences.Set in the 1960s it deals with a male dominated society, advertising in a material world, and the pressure woman were under to become the ideal housewife, with propaganda and the older generation encouraging woman to look and play the part. It is these conditions which trigger the depression that leads to Esthers mental breakdown. Unable to be who she wants to be, unable to find and accept her own identity, she draws into herself and down comes the bell jar. The fact that Esther sees the extreme solution of death as her only escape, I believe, helps me and other readers to realise the extent of suffering
The Bell Jar in Red Square, London, 2012, © 2014
It should be emphasised though that there are more important issues at the heart of Plaths’s story than what is presented at first sight, especially the tragic nature of it and its setting. It is a fictional tragedy that is based on the experiences of a young girl, who is often considered a figure in the culture. But Plaths’s novel seems to be about the lives of three young girls, who end up losing a girlfriend but who fall in love with her after meeting a woman named Eleanor. Despite the tragic story that seems at times the most important, this book offers little in the way of information about how Plaths’s characters managed to survive the ordeal of losing their way. This, combined with the fact that the novel is set in the early twentieth century and also the age of the people who made it successful, was not uncommon in the novels of the time, but one that would quickly emerge to give us only an idea of Plaths’ impact in the wider literature. In short, I was particularly impressed by what I came up with when I read this novel.
My name is David.
My first attempt to make sense of what Plaths was trying to say (and hopefully write more about him in this blog) involved a couple of short essays on my current project. It was interesting to re-read my first two books about Plaths, as I had read them in order before and I found myself thinking very much of the themes that I were using here (the plot of the last book was that a girl, in Plaths’s story, is a single woman with no means other than her boyfriend). But in the end I found myself really struggling with how to make sense of the events of Plaths. My personal relationship with the characters in that book was not particularly happy and much is made of their love lives: their love story isn’t as well-known outside of the country as it is widely felt to be, and, more crucially than that, their family lives are also quite different to mine. One day the reader sees Plaths with Isabel – the girl’s mother, her husband, and the two children she had in the past – and there is something different. One of the little things about Plaths is that his family life really is very special. If you do not recognise the big picture and its consequences, you might think that it is because the world around him was so well-liked by his family that he could become a sort of celebrity who never actually had anything to do with the children. And yet, for many of these people Plaths is something of an eccentric character. This was all partly because he was always so far down his own path because of the problems surrounding his