It is shock therapy which finally lifts the bell jar and enables Esther to breathe freely once again. Ironically, that same electrical power which destroys the Rosenbergs, restores Esther to life. “…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. When an oracle speaks it is not for us to say thanks but to attend to the message. Sylvia Plath is one of those others, and to them our gratitude and our dismay are equally impertinent. 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. We are all dying, of course, banker and bum alike, spending our limited allotment of days, hours and minutes at the same rate. There are no easy answers for such questions, maybe no answers at all. 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? She wrote her novel and her Ariel poems feverishly, like a person ‘stuck together with glue’ and aware that the glue was melting. It is because she knew that she was ‘Lady Lazarus.’ Her works do not only come to us posthumously. 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. 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. It was a source of power in his later work. Scott Fitzgerald used to claim that he wrote with ‘the authority of failure,’ and he did. 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.į. 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. “ 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. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it. This made for some particularly interesting, albeit loaded, criticism.īelow, we look at four of the most intriguing reviews from that year. 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.īy 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. 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. She took her own life on February 11, less than a month after The Bell Jar first hit shelves. 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. 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. Today marks fifty-six years since the first publication of Sylvia Plath’s only novel.
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