The Bell Jar and the Sexual Politics in the American 1950s S. F.

Sylvia Plath's novel, The Bell Jar (1963), is conspicuously autobiographical. The story follows the fictional character, Esther Greenwood, during her summer spent in New York City working for a prestigious fashion magazine and back in Massachusetts struggling with her severe depression at home, and the months spent in a mental institution. It is obvious that the materials of the book are derived from the life of young Plath herself. Upon return from a strenuous stay in New York City where she had been a guest editor at the Mademoiselle Magazine, Plath almost succeeded in killing herself with sleeping pills, which led her to a difficult period of recovery involving electroconvulsive shock treatment and psychotherapy. However, apart from being a record of the writer's traumatic experiences in her own life, the book also gives a vivid account of the heroine's dilemma as woman living in the American 1950s, when heterosexuality was highly predominant as the social norm. In other words, Plath's novel is not only a female writer's autobiography but also a text which offers one part of the American sexual politics' genealogy. My aim in what follows, then, is to read The Bell Jar in its social-historical context....