The Bell Jar Literary Criticism

Sylvia Plath’s writing is a haunting memory of her ineluctably tormented and thoughtful mind. The Bell Jar is a perniciously brutal story of a young woman struggling to handle the pressures of academia, sexism, career uncertainty, insomnia, depression. These factors had a synergetic effect on her ability to get through life. Essentially, the events in the book are autobiographical. Truly, one would be incapable of creating such a gruesomely emotional novel without experiencing the same internal despair as its protagonist. The Bell Jar is a strange mix of mundanity, grotesqueness, barbarity, nature, and glamour. Something dark and insidious perturbs the author’s stand in protagonist, Esther Greenwood, in the most prosaic of circumstances. The novel remains …show more content…
The protagonist discusses the hypocrisy of Buddy Willard, her fiance, for not remaining celibate, yet expecting it of her. This is part of the larger issue which Plath dealt with: the fear of surrendering her autonomy and individuality because of sex. She writes in her book, “I hated the idea of serving men in any way.” She loathed the idea of being good at something, such as writing in shorthand, to win the attention and affection of men. Not only would this render such accomplishments hollow aside from garnering male interest, but it implied that accomplishments were only valid for the sake of appealing to men. This likely had ties to Plath’s mother, Aurelia, who had married her professor. Another quote from The Bell Jar which supports this idea is, ““So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.” Esther Greenwood discussed the sinister way in which her fiance spoke about marriage; he told her that after she had children, she would not want to write poems