"A Ritual for Being Born Twice": Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar"

Now that 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 a recent reconsideration of Sylvia Plath's poetry, asks, 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 general?' These are by no means easy questions to answer, especially in the case of The Bell Jar, which was, after all, originally published under a pseudonym because Sylvia Plath herself regarded it as an autobiographical apprenticework, a confession which, so she told A. Alvarez, she had to write in order to free herself from the past.2 The novel's enormous popularity, it would seem, has less to do with any artistic merits it may have than with its inherently titillating subject matter. As the dust jacket of the Harper edition so melodramatically puts it, this extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: