Investigation Into The Theme of Entrapment in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

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Investigation Into The Theme of Entrapment in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932 to Austrian parents. She studied at the prestigious Smith College with a scholarship and in 1955 she went to Cambridge University where she met and later married Ted Hughes. Plaths life was one of success, and intense ambition and perfectionism. In an early journal entry, aged 16, she described herself as 'The girl who would be God'. Her desire to be a perfect writer and a perfect woman is set however in her understanding of the constraints placed on women in the 50's. The early death of her father when she was just 8, and the combination of fear and adoration she felt towards him had an immense and lasting effect on her life, and subsequently he appears as a major theme in both her poetry and prose works.

The Bell Jar was first released in England in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It received lukewarm reviews with most critics highlighting the personal yet detached voice of novel. An anonymous review stated 'it read so much like the truth that it is hard to disassociate her from Esther Greenwood, the 'I' of the story, but she had the gift of being able to feel and yet to watch herself: she can feel the desolation and yet relate this to the landscape of everyday life'. This shows how the novel was seen to be autobiographical even before it was known who the author was, and before comparisons of plot construct and the life of the author could be made. This shows how the tone, which some may say is confessional, leads readers to analyse the work from a psycho-biographical standpoint. Laurence Lerner equates the detachment, which the anonymous reviewer highlights, with Esthers neurosis deriving from her role as satirist of the world around her, and he sees her 'Bell Jar' as one of a detached observer. Critics also compared it to JD Salingers 'The Catcher In The Rye', because of the interpretation of it as a critique of college life and establishing identity, and also the existential undertones of the dominant voice are similar in both texts. Robert Taubman wrote in The Statesman that The Bell Jar was a 'clever first novel... the first feminist novel... in the Salinger mood.'

Linda Wagner saw The Bell Jar as 'in structure and intent a highly conventional bildungsroman ', or a rites of passage novel, with the construct focusing entirely on the: 'education and maturation of Esther Greenwood, Plath's novel uses a chronological and necessarily episodic structure to keep Esther at the centre of all action. Other characters are fragmentary, subordinate to Esther and her developing consciousness, and are shown only through their effects on her as central character. No incident is included which does not influence her maturation'.

Modern criticism also focuses on political and feminist criticisms of the novel. Alan Sinfield explores ideological intersections between society and the arts, and recognises Plath as critiquing the construction of gender role arguments, taken up by many contemporary feminist critics. Plath is seen as articulating many of the thoughts and feelings many women have about the constraints, opportunities and contradictions of women's role in society.

Many have interpreted The Bell Jar as semi-autobiographical. It is impossible to ignore the similarities between the life of Plath and that of Esther, the main protagonist of the novel. The novel parallels her twentieth year almost perfectly. Plath was awarded a spot as a "guest editor" at Mademoiselle magazine during her junior year at Smith, as Esther won a fashion magazine competition to work on it in New York for a month. Both had been, on the surface, a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A's and winning the best prizes. She even went to Smith on scholarship; endowed by Olive Higgins Prouty, perhaps the model for Esther's patron, Philomena Guinea. That summer, however, she nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping pills, paralleling the suicide attempt in the novel. After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy Plath seemed to become "herself" again, graduating from Smith with honours and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England. However, her troubles returned to haunt her throughout her life, and she committed suicide in 1963. Plath recognised her own inability to write about anything other than her own experiences. In her journals she referred to this as the 'curse of my vanity'. She talked of, 'my inability to lose myself in a character, a situation. Always myself, myself, myself.' This makes any reading into The Bell Jar all the more poignant, because Plath's few prose works are more directly related to real life than most fiction.

The theme of entrapment forms the central image of The Bell Jar. Plath constructs the analogy in Chapter 15 where Esther, the central character, concludes that 'I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air'. Plath's use of the sibilant words 'stewing' and 'sour' evoke strong sensual reactions in the reader as if they were hit by a pungent sickly smell. The Bell Jar represents the entrapment Esther feels at the hands of society and its expectations of women, and also entrapment by men and the possibility of entrapment by children.
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The first of these could be understood as representing Esther's suffocation at the hands of societal pressure and the general oppressive atmosphere of the 50's, especially for women. It must be noted that at the end of the fifties the average age of marriage had actually fallen to 20, and was still dropping. It was not uncommon for girls to drop out of college or high school to marry, in fact education was sometimes seen as a bar to marriage. During all of the forties and fifties housewifery tasks were glorified as 'proof' of a 'complete' woman in ...

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