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The Poetry and Prose of Sylvia Plath 159
Ted. During this time, she began writing her novel, had a miscarriage,
an appendectomy, and became pregnant again; her second child
was born in January 1962 shortly after their move to Devon. The
following year, Sylvia decided to move to London with the children;
Ted remained in Devon. When The Bell Jar was published in January
1963 under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, she was hard at work
on her Ariel poems. One month later on 11 February 1963 during the
coldest winter in London since 1813–14, Sylvia Plath killed herself;
she was thirty-one years old. 3
What is striking about Sylvia Plath’s biography is that she was an
accomplished writer, wife, and mother; she even described herself as a
“triple-threat woman.” Friends describe her as energetic, efficient, and
cheerful and often express surprise or are shocked by the isolation,
confusion, searing pain and anger in The Colossus (1960), Ariel (1965),
Crossing the Water (1971), and Winter Trees (1972), her four volumes
of poetry. 4
Apparently, Sylvia Plath played her social role so convincingly
that few guessed at the intensity of her despair, but her novel, which
is largely autobiographical, illuminates the sense of isolation conveyed
by her poetry. In spite of the fact that The Bell Jar has been on the
national best-seller list for over a year, it has received very little serious
critical attention; this critical lapse is especially surprising in view
of the fact that it is an extraordinary first novel paralleling F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise or Hemingway’s In Our Time.
Not since Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Mary McCarthy’s
The Company She Keeps has there been an American novel which so
effectively depicts the life of an intelligent and sensitive woman eager
to participate in the larger world, who approaches experience with
what amounts to a deep hunger, only to discover that there is no place
for her as a fully functioning being. Like Chopin’s Edna Pontellier
and McCarthy’s Margaret Sargent, Esther Greenwood struggles to
develop the strength to survive in a world where women are alienated
from themselves as well as each other (it is this alienation that
Doris Lessing explores in The Golden Notebook which was published
in 1962).
The Bell Jar chronicles Esther Greenwood’s rite de passage from
girlhood to womanhood, and explores such subjects as sexual initiation
and childbirth which are, for the most part, taboo in women’s
fiction. Superficially, Esther Greenwood appears to be the 1950’s