The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath has become the darling of those very ladies' magazines that she satirized so mercilessly in The Bell Jar, critics have begun to question her claims to literary eminence. Irving Howe, for example, in ["Sylvia Plath: A Partial Disagreement"], a recent reconsideration of Sylvia Plath's poetry, asks, "what illumination—moral, psychological, social—can be provided of ... the general human condition by a writer so deeply rooted in the extremity of her plight? Suicide is an eternal possibility of our life and therefore always interesting; but what is the relation between a sensibility so deeply captive to the idea of suicide and the claims and possibilities of human existence in ...
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jacket of the Harper edition so melodramatically puts it, "this extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful—but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time." (pp. 507-08)
I do not think, in short, that subject matter alone can account for The Bell Jar's popular appeal. The novel's most enthusiastic admirers, after all, have been the young, who tend to take health, whether physical or mental, enormously for granted, and whose preoccupations, a decade after The Bell Jar was written and two decades after the period with which it deals, are far removed from the fashion world of the Mademoiselle College Board, the Barbizon Hotel for Women, the Yale Junior Prom, or even the particular conditions under which shock therapy is likely to benefit the schizophrenic. Yet, although it deals with the now hopelessly anachronistic college world of proms and petting, The Bell Jar has become for the young of the early ...
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The Bell Jar. (2011, March 28). Retrieved December 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Bell-Jar/96960
"The Bell Jar." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 28 Mar. 2011. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Bell-Jar/96960>
"The Bell Jar." Essayworld.com. March 28, 2011. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Bell-Jar/96960.
"The Bell Jar." Essayworld.com. March 28, 2011. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Bell-Jar/96960.
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