Sylvia Plath ( )Sylvia Plath ( )  Plath was born in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. A precocious child – knew insect names in Latin.  Her mother introduced her to poetry and her first poem was published when she was 8.  Idolized her father – a bee keeper and professor. He developed diabetes and died in  She attended Smith College on scholarship. At the age of 20, she won a Mademoiselle short story contest and worked as a guest editor during her junior year of college, but suffered mental and emotional exhaustion.  In August, 1953, she attempted suicide and was institutionalized, though, eventually, she returned to college and graduated with honors.  In 1953, Plath received bipolar electro-convulsive shock treatments, leaving her traumatized.

Plath and HughesPlath and Hughes  Once again receiving a scholarship, she continued her studies at Cambridge University, where she met poet laureate of England, Ted Hughes in Within a year, they married and returned to the States.  By 1962, Plath and Hughes have 2 children and live in England.  July1962, Sylvia discovers Ted is having an affair and they separate.  October, 1962, she writes 26 poems in one month.  February 1963, during one of the coldest winters in English history, she succeeded in taking her own life.

The BookThe Book  The Bell Jar is considered to be a deep work of slightly fictionalized autobiography.  It became most influential in its style: straight-forward, earnest, and almost-painfully honest.  Many critics focus on the parallel between Plath’s fight to become a well-known writer (a predominantly male profession) and women’s fight for equality on the larger scale.

The BookThe Book  In 1963, The Bell Jar was published under a pseudonym : Victoria Lucas. A month later, Plath committed suicide by putting her head in a gas oven.  In 1966, The Bell Jar was reprinted with Plath’s name on the cover.  Plath’s mother claimed that Plath intended to follow this novel with another version of the same events – a version that would more closely resemble how a “sane” person would interpret the same events  Plath’s mother also claimed Sylvia once described the process of writing this books as:  What I’ve done is throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color – …I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown…I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.

A Bell Jar?A Bell Jar?  a bell-shaped glass cover used for covering delicate objects or used in a laboratory, typically for enclosing samples. Can keep contents under great pressure  an environment in which someone is protected or cut off from the outside world  symbolically represents being trapped in depression and isolated  The view from the outside in is distorted – just as mental illness distorts its victim’s perception of the world

Themes  Society and class  Women and femininity  Madness  Identity  Conformity (1950s in the US)  Death and transformation through rebirth  Family  Sex

Motifs  Whiteness/snow  Silence/death  Submersion  Suicide/graves/coffin  Sea/seashore  Moon  Babies/birth/children  Clear/transparent

Existentialism  Existentialism is a philosophical theory/approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of will.  Existentialism involves the attempt to make meaning in a chaotic world.  Sartre argued, "Man makes himself."  As a form of literary criticism, Existentialism seeks to analyze literary works, with special emphasis on the struggle to define meaning and identity in the face of alienation and isolation.  Asks the questions:  Who am I?  What is my place in the world?  How do I make meaning?

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