Media Selection analized

Media Selection: The Novel Of Sylvia Plath's Crisis The Bell Jar

Before her death by her own hand, the poet Sylvia Plath made a 'name' for herself in the contemporary poetic community through such searing poems as "Daddy," an attack upon her stern, beloved German father, and her authorship of such classical poetic volumes as Ariel. (Plath, 1992) However, even before Sylvia Plath garnered such great fame as an American poet, she was also well-known as a famous Smith College intern for the now-defunct Mademoiselle magazine. After gaining a coveted job at the popular women's periodical, she attempted to commit suicide after her internship had ended and before the beginning of her senior year of college, resulting in a nationally famous 'manhunt' that ended at the young woman's home. The book the Bell Jar was written under a pseudonym, and as a novel. However, it chronicles many of the external internal conflicts of femininity, adolescent identity, and personality that remain relevant today, as well as the sensational story of Plath's suicide and recovery. The also provides a potent indictment of the ineffectuality of much psychological treatment during the 1960's for both men and women.

The Bell Jar is usually read as a purely feminist classic of identity struggle, on a biological level -- that is, society refuses to recognize female needs, and sees women as bodies, not as minds. Its heroine, Esther sees herself faced with many models of femininity during her New York internship that she finds unacceptable. On one hand, she is more sophisticated than the Mid-western farm girl Betsy, who is mocked by the more sophisticated and sexually forward Southern 'bad girl' Darleen. (Plath, 1999, p.6) in the first incident of the novel, Esther goes with Darleen to a party with two men, and finds herself sexually outclassed by her more provocative friend. Thus Esther concludes, "Deep down, I would be loyal to Betsy and her innocent friends. It was Betsy I resembled at heart." (Plath, 1999, p.23) but Esther finds such models of virginal womanhood unacceptable, as well. Even, upon returning home, to Esther's Wellesley suburb to live with her mother she becomes shocked by the sight of a Catholic housewife, pregnant with her seventh child. "Even six was considered excessive, but then, everybody said, of course Dodo was a Catholic. I watched Dodo wheel the youngest Conway up and down. She seemed to be doing it for my benefit." (Plath, 1999, p.117)

Esther sees herself torn between terrible choices, either spinsterhood and authorship on one hand, and marriage and maternity and a smothering of her intellectual impulses on the other, like ripe figs on a tree that wither away because of her indecision. (Plath, 1999, p.56) the forced and unacceptable choice, in such a feminist reading, drives her mad, with "the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not." (Plath, 1999, p.81) the consciousness of the taboo of female empower and its weight seem to press heavily on all women who disobey it, "and some form of apology, though tinged with irony, occurs in almost all of the women poets, as well as in many prose writers, whether avowed feminists or not," in all of Esther's speeches, as a kind of "anticipatory response to male prejudice against women writers." (Kaplan, p.68)

Another reading of the novel, however, on a socio-cultural level as a narrative of American adolescent development, is not to see the fig trees that wither upon the vine in Esther's imagination that symbolize Esther's apology and reticence towards the world. Rather, the difficulties of Esther's choices can be seen as a crisis unique to the American adolescent self in general. In such a reading, all modern adolescent persons must engage in the difficult developmental cycle of growth and pulling away from their families. For example, Esther is very intelligent, but she feels like a fraud because of her difficulties with coming up with a senior thesis topic on twins or doubles -- a symbol of her own torn and divided self of maturity and immaturity. Secondly, Esther's closeness to her own mother makes it particularly difficult for her to pull away and establish her own identity. She feels relieved when her boyfriend is taken away from her, thinking Buddy's tuberculosis "might just be a punishment for living the kind of double life Buddy lived and feeling so superior to people." (Plath, 1999, p.71)

Esther is jealous of her boyfriend Buddy's unusual certainty at late adolescence that he will become a doctor, in contrast to her own doubts if she should become a serious writer, an editor of a magazine, or commit to an academic life -- or become a more conventional housewife and mother. In short, her conflicts are not simply endemic to the female experience, but to an adolescent with a typically unstable sense of self, who has experienced the early loss of an idealized father figure, and has entered into a very close and symbiotic relationship with her mother figure. In fact, Esther sleeps in the same bed as her mother over the summer, during the summer of her crisis. This has caused Linda Wagner-Martin to characterize the Bell Jar as a quintessential Novel of the Fifties, or of a time when models of the self were not accommodated within the adolescent development process in a constructive fashion.

Only later, Sylvia Plath learned to "become a mother and a homeowner" after "she had learned to share her life," with Ted Hughes. Thus she came into a more secure sense of self, as a woman and a poetic voice. "In so doing, she had become a stronger writer. She knew that it would do no longer to write poems that are only exercises. Poems, like life, had to be honest and direct, arrow-like in their aim, relentless in their intensity. Sylvia had learned to write those poems-without advice, criticism, or lists of suitable subjects. She had learned to take the fury and the joy, the feelings she could both deny and boast of, and from them create art that spoke powerfully to readers." (Wagner-Martin, p. 243) in coming to herself as a professional poet and a person, the adolescent crisis was somewhat alleviated, although replaced by an adult crisis.