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Sylvia Plath's the Bell Jar : Understanding Cultural and Historical Context in an Iconic Text

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Sylvia Plath's the Bell Jar : Understanding Cultural and Historical Context in an Iconic Text Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar: Understanding Cultural and Historical Context in an Iconic Text Iris Jamahl Dunkle Sylvia Plath’s first and only published novel, The Bell Jar, was con- troversial, influential, and culturally relevant when it was first pub- lished, and it remains so five decades later. Prior to writing the novel Plath had published only poems and a few short stories, but writing a piece of long fiction or a novel was something she had always intended to do, as she stated in a 1962 interview with Peter Orr. “I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel,” she said, adding that novels are able to convey “what one finds in daily life.” The Bell Jar, set in 1953, chronicles six months in the life of twenty-year-old Esther Greenwood: her internship at Ladies’ Day magazine and experiences in New York City; her return to the suburbs; her breakdown; her suicide attempts, one of which almost succeeds; her hospitalizations; and her recovery and return to college. Through- out these trials, she struggles with the cultural conventions of the 1950s as she attempts to pursue a course that is considered “un- American” and “unfeminine” at the time: her commitment to becom- ing an intellectual, her resistance to marriage and motherhood, and her desire to become a poet. In her letters, Plath called her work an “autobiographical apprentice work.” She loosely based the novel on the twentieth year of her life. During this period, Plath experienced a breakdown, attempted suicide, and was hospitalized at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, until she recovered and returned to college. Plath’s letters and journals document the turmoil of this period in her life.1 Plath began working on The Bell Jar in 1961, shortly after the publi- cation of her first book of poems, The Colossus. That year, she also gave birth to her daughter, Frieda Rebecca, and suffered a miscarriage. In 1962, Plath gave birth to a son, Nicholas Farrar, and decided to sepa- 60 Critical Insights rate from her husband, Ted Hughes; she moved to an apartment in Lon- don with her children. As Hughes later recalled, Plath wrote The Bell Jar quickly and with little revision: “In the spring of 1961 by good luck circumstances cooperated, giving her time and place to work uninter- ruptedly. Then at top speed and with very little revision from start to finish she wrote The Bell Jar” (2). Plath wrote the novel under the sponsorship of the Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, which was affiliated with the publishing company Harper & Row; however, when she sent the manuscript to the Saxon committee for review in late 1962, the committee rejected it, calling it “disappointing, juvenile, and over- wrought.” Plath then sent the manuscript to a British publisher, Wil- liam Heinemann. On January 14, 1963, the first edition of The Bell Jar was published in England under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas.” It is possible that Plath used a pen name to protect individuals portrayed in the novel. As Hughes puts it, the book “dramatizes the decisive event of [Plath’s] adult life, which was her attempted suicide and accidental survival” (2). Upon its release in England, The Bell Jar received a limited num- ber of reviews, most of them positive. Laurence Lerner of The Listener observed that it offered intelligent “criticisms of American society” and managed, unusually, both to be “tremendously readable” and to achieve “an almost poetic delicacy of perception.” But the limited critical reception disappointed Plath. The book launched what was to be the final phase of Plath’s literary career. On February 11, 1963, a few weeks after the novel appeared, Sylvia Plath committed suicide. Given that her tragic death followed so soon after the publication of The Bell Jar, and given the thematic content of the book, the novel is often misunderstood as being alto- gether autobiographical. Many have also argued that publishers used the press attention generated by Plath’s death to market the novel. As Marjorie G. Perloff points out, the dust jacket of the later American Harper edition melodramatically invites the reader to read about “the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously tal- Cultural and Historical Context 61 ented, successful—but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time” (507). There is little direct evidence to indicate whether Plath in- tended the book to be read autobiographically. The publisher’s note is- sues this disclaimer: “All characters and events are a product of the au- thor’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” In 1965, Hughes edited and published Plath’s most famous and final book of poems, Ariel. As she was writing these poems, Plath described them in a letter to her mother as some of the “best poems of my life— poems that would make my name” (Letters 468, 477). Some that were later published as part of Ariel were written on the backs of draft pages of The Bell Jar. Ariel remains a huge literary success almost five de- cades later. Before she died, Plath had prepared the manuscript for publication; however, Hughes did not follow Plath’s wishes and pub- lished the poems in a different order. In 2004, Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, reissued the collection in the order her mother had intended. On September 1, 1966, Faber republished The Bell Jar in England, crediting Plath as the author, and shortly afterward, American publish- ers declared interest in publishing the work in the United States. Much concern arose after Plath’s death over publishing the novel in her na- tive land. Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia, recalled shortly before the book was published in the United States, in a letter to her daughter’s editor at Harper & Row in New York: I do want to tell you of one of the last conversations I had with my daughter in early July 1962, just before her personal world fell apart. Sylvia had told me of the pressure she was under in fulfilling her obligation to the Eugene Saxton Fund. As you know, she had a miscarriage, an appendectomy, and had given birth to her second child, Nicholas. “What I’ve done,” I remem- ber her saying, “is throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown. ...I’vetried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.” 62 Critical Insights Aurelia went on to plead with the publisher not to publish the book, be- cause of her concerns that the real people upon whom the characters in Plath’s novel are based would be offended, but the book was published nevertheless.2 The Bell Jar was first published in the United States in 1971, ex- ploding onto the best-seller charts. Since that time, more than two mil- lion copies have been sold in the United States alone. Bantam Books brought out an initial paperback edition in April 1972 with a print run of 357,000 copies. That initial printing sold out, as did a second and a third printing, within a month, and Plath’s novel remained on the best- seller lists for twenty-four weeks. The Bell Jar has been translated into nearly a dozen languages and was made into a feature-length film in 1979 starring Marilyn Hassett. Another film adaptation of the novel starring Julia Stiles is scheduled to be released by Plum Pictures in 2012. References to the novel have appeared in numerous movies, songs and television shows, including Gilmore Girls and The Simp- sons. The book itself has made cameo appearances in American mov- ies as disparate as the teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), where it is shown being read by the cynical feminist protagonist, Kat Stratford, and Natural Born Killers (1994), in which the book appears face down on the bed next to Mallory Knox a few moments before she murders her abusive parents. Often when the novel appears in Ameri- can films and television series, it stands in as a symbol for teenage angst, often on the part of a female protagonist. In one episode of the animated TV show Family Guy, the teenage daughter, Meg, is seen reading The Bell Jar instead of attending a spring-break party. As Janet Badia points out in an essay on pop culture appropriations of the novel, “perhaps Family Guy uses the comical image of Meg reading The Bell Jar [instead of attending a party] to pose a serious question about whether it is fair to diagnose a young woman’s mental state from the book she chooses to read” (154). Whatever the intent, it is worth noting that, fifty years after it was written, the book is still invoked as shorthand for teen angst. Cultural and Historical Context 63 Beginning in the 1980s, The Bell Jar was introduced to many young readers in secondary and postsecondary English and language-arts curricula across the United States. The book has been compared favor- ably to some of the most acclaimed coming-of-age novels, including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. As a coming-of-age novel, or bildungsroman, the book had great cultural significance for the generation that first read it in the 1970s.
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