Study Guide to The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath

Intelligent Education

• Editorial: Influence Publishers
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645424116
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Guías de estudio
• Categoría: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Sylvia Plath, who at an early age won prizes for her poetry. Titles in this study guide include The Bell Jar, Two Views of a Cadaver Room, Night Shift, Disquieting Muses, Spinster, Crossing the Water, and The Bee Poems.
As a collection of fiction, short stories, and poetry of the late- twentieth-century, Plath's work was largely biographical and confessional as she wrote through her depression and other tragic circumstances. Moreover, critics praised her use of literary devices such as imagery, meter, and voice. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Plath's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:
- Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As
The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO SYLVIA PLATH

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, had emigrated to the United States from Poland and was an internationally known authority on bees; a distinguished professor of biology at Boston University, he also taught German and was recognized for his work in ornithology, entomology, and ichthyology. Aurelia Schober, the poet’s mother, was of Austrian descent and met her husband while working toward her master’s degree in German.

CHILDHOOD

The Plaths lived in Winthrop, a seaside town near Boston, and Sylvia’s early years were influenced by the ocean’s proximity. She later wrote, from the perspective of adulthood, “My childhood landscape was not land but the end of land-the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.” (“Ocean 1212-W,” the Listener no. 70, Aug. 29, 1963). Her maternal grandparents lived nearby, and for two and a half years Sylvia was the center of a “tender universe” bordered by the ocean on one side, the Massachusetts Bay on the other. Then, in 1935, her brother Warren was born, and consciousness of her separateness was thrust upon her. “My beautiful fusion with things of this world was over. . . . On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else.” Still, for five and a half years she continued with her family to live happily by the sea believing “not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids.”

When in 1940 Otto Plath died, after a long illness, the family moved inland to Wellesley, an upper middle-class suburb of Boston. Mrs. Plath went to work, teaching in a medical-secretarial program at Boston University; Mr. Schober took a job as maitre d’ hotel at the Brookline Country Club; Mrs. Schober ran the household.

EDUCATION

Sylvia and her brother Warren attended the local public schools which, she later wrote, were “genuinely public. Everyone went.” From the start she was an “A” student and began, early on, to win prizes for her poems and pen-and-ink drawings. Right through high school, she achieved top recognition, in both scholastic and social activities.

FIRST PUBLICATIONS

As Sylvia reached adolescence, she took her writing more and more seriously. By 1950 she had developed enough discipline and control to earn publication in Seventeen. After forty-five previous submissions, the magazine finally accepted “And Summer Will Not Come Again.” Shortly after, the Christian Science Monitor printed her poem “Bitter Strawberries.”

COLLEGE

She entered Smith College in 1950 on a scholarship endowed by Olive Higgins Prouty, the author of Stella Dallas and later a friend and patron. As usual Sylvia was a successful student and participated in a variety of extra curricular activities, from weekends at men’s colleges to a position on the disciplinary Honor Board. Continuing to publish stories and poems in Seventeen, she wrote poetry on a rigid schedule and kept a detailed journal and scrapbook. Prizes and awards also began coming in. In 1951 she won Mademoiselle’s fiction contest with her story “Sunday at the Mintons.” The next year, her junior year, she won two Smith poetry prizes, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to Alpha (Smith’s honorary society for the arts), and was selected as a guest editor in Mademoiselle’s College Board Contest. (The issue on which she participated published her “favorite Villanelle,” “Mad Girl’s Lovesong.”) Also at this time came her “first professional earnings,” one hundred dollars from Harper’s for three poems.

BREAKDOWN

This period of glittering recognition and achievement, however, could not forestall the blanket of desperation that had been gradually creeping upon her. Her attempted suicide and subsequent hospitalization for electric shock treatment and psychotherapy were widely publicized at the time and provide the basis of her novel, The Bell Jar (1963). She later described this six-month period during the summer and fall of 1953 as “a time of darkness, despair, disillusionment-so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.”

HONORS

When she returned to Smith, she resumed her norm of academic accomplishment. During the summer of 1954 she attended Harvard, taking courses in German, creative writing with Alfred Kazin, and special studies in writing with Alfred Fisher. After a year of more prizes and published poems and the completion of an honors thesis on the double personality in Dostoyevski, she was graduated from Smith in 1955, summa cum laude.

MARRIAGE

Then came a Fulbright to Newnham College at Cambridge. There she met the young English poet Ted Hughes, “the only man I’ve ever met whom I could never boss.” They were married in 1956 on “Blooms-day,” June 16 (the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place). The following year the Hugheses moved to the United States, where Plath taught for a time at Smith. Her colleagues there appraised her as “one of the two or three finest instructors ever to appear in the English department at Smith College.” But because the rigorous teaching schedule interfered with her writing, she decided to abandon her academic plans. She and Hughes moved to Boston, where they lived for a year “on a shoe-string.” She audited Robert Lowell’s poetry course at Boston University, where she became acquainted with Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, two other young poets.

LIFE IN ENGLAND

With repeated rejections of Plath’s book of poems by American publishers, they decided to return to England. There, in 1960, their first child, Frieda, was born, and The Colossus was accepted for publication by William Heinemann, Ltd. Then, always suffering now with sinus disorders, Plath’s health endured additional setback with a miscarriage and an appendectomy within a short time of each other. Fortunately, in 1961 she was awarded a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, which she had been refused in 1958. She was thus freed to work on her novel, which she wrote according to a precise timetable.

The Hugheses moved to Devon to live in a thatched country house and had a son, Nicholas, in 1962. The Bell Jar was punctually finished and the Ariel poems begun. After a vacation in Ireland, Plath and Hughes decided to separate for a time because her health, in a poor state again, couldn’t withstand a second country winter. So she moved with her children to a flat in a London house, which “by a small miracle,” W.B. Yeats had lived in.

SUICIDE

In 1963 The Bell Jar appeared under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas because she was in doubt of the book’s seriousness. It was, she said, “an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.” Then, as the winter set in, it proved to be the coldest in fifty years. Fighting against household inconveniences and continuing poor health, she began to turn out poems at an extraordinary rate, writing in the pre-dawn hours before the children awoke. In a depression serious enough to send her to a doctor but self-controlled enough to be overlooked by friends, Sylvia Plath, in the midst of her most poetically productive period, ended her own life on February 11, 1963.

POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS

Ted Hughes had Ariel published in 1965. In 1966, The Bell Jar was reissued by Faber and Faber, this time under Plath’s own name; and in 1967 The Colossus reappeared. The New York editions of these books were: The Colossus (1962); Ariel (1966); The Bell Jar (1971). Then, the previously uncollected poems were published in Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1972).

THE POET REMEMBERED

Sylvia Plath has been remembered “as vigorous, efficient, professional, and ambitious. Her social manner was poised and warm” (Lois Ames, “Notes Toward a Biography,” The Art of Sylvia Plath. Charles Newman, ed. 1970). She had “a long, rather flat body, a longish face, not pretty but alert and full of feeling, with a lively mouth and fine brown eyes” (A. Alvarez, The Savage God, 1972). Some thought her “a remarkably attractive young woman. She was impressively tall, almost statuesque.... Her eyes were very dark, deeply set under heavy lids that give them a brooding quality in many of her photographs” (Nancy Hunter Steiner, A Closer Look at Ariel, 1973). And Ted Hughes has said, “In spite of the prevailing doom evident in her poems, it is impossible that anybody could have been more in love with life, or more capable of happiness, than she was” (Encounter 21, no. 4).

A REVIEW OF PLATH CRITICISM

For several years criticism of Sylvia Plath’s poetry was almost exclusively biographical. Because the sources of her poems appear blatantly autobiographical and her images and symbols undeniably derived from the facts of her life, she has been labeled a confessional poet. Her work has been viewed as an expression of very real, personal feelings and circumstances, as the moving record of a deeply troubled mind. The occasion of her suicide reinforced this view, while calling additional attention to the correspondence between her poetry and life. As a result a division emerged among critics, reviewers and, consequently, readers who either praised her books enthusiastically, and rather uncritically, as “the genuine article,” a true confession; or dismissed it as the indulgence of wholly private emotions. Only very recently have critics begun to view her poetry as craft, as subject for close analysis and explication. Finally her autobiographical side, including her death, is being taken for granted, and other poetic elements studied. In the past few years, in fact, essays have appeared refuting Plath’s classification as a confessional poet; once looked at critically, in terms of image, meter, voice, etc., her poetry can be seen for what it is in itself: skillful creations that happen to employ, and transform, biographical materials in the process of becoming works of art.

REMINISCENCES

Reminiscences and biographical notes began appearing in periodicals not long after Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963. For example, the November 1966 Glamour Magazine published an article by Elinor Klein entitled “A Friend Recalls Sylvia Plath.” Lois Ames, a high school and college acquaintance of Plath’s, has written two thorough biographical notes, one published in Tri-Quarterly no. 7 (Fall 1966), the other in the Harper and Row edition of The Bell Jar (New York, 1971). Articles such as these, while substantiating the “Sylvia Plath legend” and fixing attention on the poet rather than the poetry, do not attempt to critically evaluate the poems either in their own right or in terms of biographical criticism.

As late as 1973 interest in piecing together her art and her life was renewed by the publication of Nancy Hunter Steiner’s A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press). This book takes up, in a sense, where The Bell Jar left off and discusses the period in the poet’s life immediately following her first suicide attempt in 1953, from the time she returned to Smith College after her hospitalization to the time she was graduated. As Plath’s roommate and close friend, Mrs. Steiner was present during many of the events that were later incorporated into The Bell Jar, and her very different perspective helps to distinguish between fact and fiction, to establish just where in Plath’s novel art and autobiography merge. But Mrs. Steiner also contributes to the legend, for she discloses those intimacies, eccentricities, and obsessions that only a roommate could be aware of and only a biographical critic could make use of in a reading of the poetry.

GEORGE STADE

George Stade, who wrote the introduction to Mrs. Steiner’s book, is such a biographical critic. His major concern is “the image of the poet that rises out of the poetry as we read it” and the reconciliation of this image with the quite different one in the memoirs of her friends. He neither looks at her life in order to understand her poetry nor studies the poetry in order to learn about her life, but rather considers the poetry itself as a biographical fact - with autobiographical sources - that can in turn shed light on the poet’s psychological condition. Thus he will point out some aspect of the poetry - for example, the recurring image of “Opposed Selves,” a deep-set violent disturbance vs. a formal superficial containment (an idea discussed more closely by other critics) - only to use such insights to suggest the poet’s apparent schizophrenia. He acknowledges her use of personae (poetic voices, or first-person narrators, that are imagined or fictitious speakers distinct from and not to be confused with the poet’s own voice or personality) and remarks how they shift, not only from poem to poem, but within individual poems as well; but he ultimately opts for the “personal reference and source” in her work and devotes nineteen pages to recounting her biography, illustrated with fragments of poems to underline the relationship.

A. ALVAREZ

A. Alvarez met Sylvia Plath in 1960, shortly before The Colossus appeared but after he’d already read some of her poems in his capacity as poetry critic for The Observer in London. Thus, perhaps inevitably, he approaches her art in the light of her personality as he knew it. His two major pieces on her work are “Sylvia Plath” in Tri-Quarterly No. 7 (Fall, 1966; later reprinted, along with much of this issue, in The Art of Sylvia Plath, 1970) and the prologue to The Savage God (New York: Random House, 1972). In these essays he wrestles with the difficulty of responding to her poems for what they are, independent artistic creations, because of the role they played in her own life, i.e., a means of keeping “the disturbance, out of which she made her art, at a distance.”

Alvarez is careful to distinguish where he is concerned with her poetry from where he is concerned with Plath as a case history. As a “poet in extremis” or an extremist poet, as he calls her, she strives “to make poetry and death inseparable.” This does not mean that suicide is inevitable for such a poet, not that it is a necessary validation of her work. Rather, extremist poets, Sylvia Plath among them, run a great risk in confronting the depths of their emotions, pain, awareness of mortality, etc. In articulating her vision, or consciousness, of life/death, she brought herself closer to the object of that vision, to a release into death. But by transforming private suffering into poetry it takes on a general meaning, an objectivity even, that removes the poem from the private pain out of which it sprung. Thus Alvarez insists that her images are not obscure personal references; the reasons for them “are always there, though sometimes you have to work hard to find them.”

In The Savage God he explores more particu...