Word: plath
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Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar stands on the sun roof of the Amazon Hotel for single girls and lets fly with her forty dollar city dresses into the New York City night. She and cloven other college girls had won a month with a well-known women's fashion magazine, and now they were all going back home. For Esther it was home to her mother and a New England suburb for the summer. She was quitting the city and she hadn't even found a drink she liked, "My dream was ordering a drink...
...they were Catholic and she was ever pregnant behind her ratty baby carriage. Esther tried writing a novel about herself and that didn't work. And then she tried different ways of killing herself and one way worked better than the other so they put her away. As Sylvia Plath says in her poem "Daddy," "They pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue." The Bell Jar is a description of their jar of glue and the way their fusty inept hands fumbled Esther's embarrassed and bruised parts. Her hilarity is as black...
...BELL JAR. Sylvia Plath's only novel, was published in Great Britain under the name of Victoria Lucas one month before her death in 1963. Her first book of poetry, The Colussus, was published in 1960; Ariel was published in 1965. and Uncollected Poems in 1965. Although her novel goes far towards explaining her poems, it is not an appendage; it stands on its own. Sylvia Plath's legend is as ruthless and as individualistic as Joan Didion's, But where Joan Didion's Play It As It Lavs describes nothing leading to no suicide, The Bell Jar describes every...
...Bell Jar is a novel of mourning. Sylvia Plath's inability to leave death alone is her inability to find the kind of joy she had known when she was "nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father before he died." In her novel she remembers "that I had never cried for my father's death." At nineteen Esther can cry and unharbor the funeral she never attended. Like a magnet to its opposite, the daughter need not follow from her life into her father's death. In her own life, though, the mourning was too persistent...
...Berryman Dream Songs I got for Christmas, ingenious and moving as they were, seemed somehow too contrived, too removed from brutality and the raw news to speak with any authority. My aunt, who gave me the book (and is no fool), didn't understand it. And she likes Sylvia Plath, I couldn't fault her for not hearing Berryman-he wasn't talking to her. He was busy talking to Henry. It was often superb if you could figure it out, but why should...