The bell jar

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The glass bell ( english The Bell Jar ) is the only novel by the American writer Sylvia Plath , mainly as a poet was known. He accompanies his protagonist Esther Greenwood through the summer of 1953, which begins with an eventful traineeship at a New York fashion magazine and culminates in a severe depression and a suicide attempt by Esther and subsequent treatment in a psychiatric clinic .

The novel, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, has autobiographical traits. Sylvia Plath herself worked in New York for a month in 1953 and attempted suicide later that year. Ten years after the celebrated novel in processed events and four weeks after its publication on 14 January 1963 Sylvia Plath suicide . After the novel's late publication in the United States, The Bell Jar became a cult book in the 1970s . The turmoil of its protagonist in the field of tension between social demands affected the mood of many women and contributed to the fact that the author posthumously became an icon of the women's movement .

Cover of the German-language first edition by Suhrkamp Verlag

content

The Barbizon Hotel for Women in Manhattan , where Sylvia Plath stayed in 1953 while working for Mademoiselle , and which serves as a model for the Hotel Amazon , where the twelve guest editors in the novel are quartered

When nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood from a suburb of Boston first arrived in New York in the summer of 1953, college students from all over America envied her. She is one of twelve winners of a fashion magazine's writing competition, is allowed to sit in on the magazine's editorial team for a month and is showered with giveaways and invitations to socialize. But how deceptive appearances can be, Esther learns when she poisons herself at a banquet on crab meat that has been decorated for a photo, but has rotten.

In the big city of New York, Esther's hitherto ambitious college fame is fading. The editor Jay Cee reprimands her for her lack of commitment. Esther stands between two companions, the sophisticated Doreen and the good Betsy. And she neither finds her way back to her usual ambition, nor, like Doreen, is able to enjoy her stay in New York and indulge in amusements and affairs. Esther's own male acquaintances are disappointing; either they are too small like Frankie, uninterested in an affair like the simultaneous interpreter Constantin or they are “misogynists” like the Peruvian Marco, who almost rapes them. Even the marriage proposal of her childhood friend Buddy Willard, who has tuberculosis, is no longer an alternative for Esther. Ever since she learned that he was hiding his sexual experiences from her, she has only called him a "hypocrite" in her mind. And his remark that her poems were made of dust hits her so bad that she ponders an adequate reply a year later .

Esther describes her situation with the picture of a branched fig tree, in which every possible future beckons like an appetizing fruit. But she cannot decide for any of them, because it would also be a decision against all the others. At a final photo session, during which the girls are to be portrayed with props from their future careers, Esther is the only one who cannot name their future. When she finally poses as a poet with a paper rose, long pent-up tears break out of her. On her last evening, she says goodbye to New York by throwing her wardrobe out of the window dress by dress and let the night wind spread it over the city.

Back home in her small town, Esther's plans for the summer vacation melt away. It will not be accepted at the planned writers' seminar. Her mother wants to teach her shorthand , but Esther cannot imagine any work that she would like to do and that would require shorthand. Trying to write a novel does not get past the first lines. And in her college thesis on Finnegans Wake she fails because of Joyce's verbal structures. Esther's mind seems receptive only to gunshots and their stories of crime and suicide. Since returning from New York, she has hardly slept and has not washed. She can no longer bear doing something that she has to repeat the next day anyway.

The psychiatrist Doctor Gordon, whom Esther seeks out on the advice of a friend, is more interested in his former amours at her college than in Esther herself. His improper treatment with electric shocks is so painful and traumatizing for Esther that she makes up the resolution rather to kill than to endure such an ordeal again. Her mind constantly revolves around the various ways of committing suicide. But their half-hearted attempts are still missing the last consequence. She visits her father's grave for the first time. Esther realizes that she has never been completely happy since he died when she was nine years old. For the first time she can weep over his death. After that, she definitely knows how to kill herself. She hides in a cave in the basement of her parents' house and takes an overdose of sleeping pills.

Esther survives the suicide attempt and is admitted to the psychiatric department of the city hospital. There you feel as if you are sealed off from your surroundings by a glass bell. She also apathetically accepts the referral to a private clinic financed by her scholarship donor , the writer Philomena Guinea. But it is there that Esther is treated for the first time by a woman and she trusts Doctor Nolan, who, to Esther's delight, forbids her mother to visit. The psychiatrist also helps her patient to achieve personal freedom through contraception . Esther's condition is gradually improving and she has the feeling that for the first time fresh air is coming under her glass bell.

Surprisingly, Joan Gilling, Esther's former classmate at college and friend of Buddy Willard's predecessor, is brought to the clinic. Joan was inspired to make her own by the newspaper reports of Esther's attempted suicide. The relationship between the two women fluctuates between friendship and rivalry as Joan's recovery soon makes good progress and Esther's recovery stagnates. But in the end it is Joan who dies in another attempted suicide. At Joan's funeral, Esther is convinced that she will bury her own shadow with her companion. In the meantime she has slept with a man of her own choosing. It is of the utmost importance for Esther not to have children. The upcoming discharge from the clinic means a second birth for her, and despite her concerns about whether the glass bell will descend over her again one day, she wants a ritual to celebrate her return to life. At the end of the novel, she steps through the door, behind which the doctors will decide on her discharge.

Form and genre

The novel is written in the first person from Esther Greenwood's perspective. However, the proximity of the reader to the protagonist that this creates is constantly undermined. Even the first sentences question the reliability of the narrator when Esther does not know what she wants to report in New York and instead confesses: "I knew something was wrong with me this summer". (P. 7–8) Again and again a counter-reality shimmers through the sober to cynical tone of the college student. The narrator speaks in the voice of a mentally ill person who tries to hide her illness from those around her and the reader. The contrast between the narrative attitude, which maintains a facade of self-protection and happiness fantasies, and the inner alienation of the protagonist often takes on comedic traits. It becomes a narrative strategy of a “cultural performativity ”. Sylvia Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, described this duality as a battle of two opposite books over a story.

Sylvia Plath assembles two time levels in her novel. The narrative present Esther from the summer of 1953 by flashbacks broken in Esther's past. Together with the variation in tone and tempo and the richness of lyrical metaphors, this creates the impression of an impressionistic collage . In the development of the protagonist's identity and her rebellion against older and male authorities, the bell jar offers a draft of a female educational novel that was unusual in literary history up to this point . The roles are swapped for the classic male Bildungsroman: the “heroine” is just as female as her role models, who take the place of the problematic mother.

Motifs

A woman in the 1950s

The 1950s , as Esther Greenwood experienced, are a time in which women are just waiting for “some career man to marry them.” (P. 10) From Esther, too, one does not expect a way out of himself, not the glamorous successes at her college, which only earn her the reputation of "wasting her golden college days with books and drums." (p. 68) What is expected of Esther is "Mrs. Buddy Willard ”(p. 102), and the future husband is certain:“ If I had children, I would think differently, then I would not want to write any more poetry. ”(P. 94) Esther became convinced "that getting married and having children was like brainwashing and that afterwards one only ran around in a daze, like a slave in a totalitarian private state." (P. 94)

Buddy's mother sums up the contemporary role model of a woman in her wisdom: “A man who wants a companion, and a woman who wants unrestricted security […] A man, that is an arrow into the future, and a woman, that is the place from which the arrow flies away ”. (P. 80) But Esther defends herself against this role: “Unrestricted security was the last thing I wanted, and I also didn't want to be the place from which an arrow flies. I wanted variety and excitement and wanted to fly in all possible directions myself, like the colored arrows on a fireworks rocket on July Fourth . "(P. 92) She refuses to learn shorthand, but confesses:" I hated the idea of ​​men somehow to be of service. "(p. 84)

The 1950s is also the time when Reader's Digest published articles with the title “A Lance for Chastity”, listing all the reasons “why a girl should not sleep with anyone but her husband, and that too, after they got married. ”(p. 89) But after Esther realizes that Buddy Willard only expects chastity from her side, while he himself has long had sexual experiences, her own“ virginity hangs on her neck like a millstone. ”(p 245) Only through contraception does she achieve “freedom from fear, from the prospect of marrying a wrong person like Buddy Willard just because of sex” (p. 239) and at least on this point she finally feels like “my own mistress ". (P. 240)

The fig tree

A fig tree in spring

“I saw my life branching out in front of me, like the green fig tree”, (p. 85), Esther introduces one of the central metaphors of the novel. She has reached the end of her successful college days, is in New York, where apparently all options are open to her, and is nevertheless seized by an internal paralysis. "Even thick, purple figs waved and attracted a wonderful future from every branch tip." (P. 85) The figs represent a home with a husband and children, for possible fame as a poet, a career as a professor, the profession of an editor, an Olympic medal, trips to distant countries or lovers with unusual names. And she cannot even see many future possibilities. “I saw myself sitting in the fork of this fig tree and starving, simply because I couldn't decide which fig to take. I wanted them all, but taking one of them meant losing all the others ”. (P. 85) And while Esther hesitates, the figs wither before her eyes.

It's not just an inability to choose. Esther refuses to make the decision. To Buddy Willard she confesses: “I am neurotic. I could never live either in the country or in the city. ”(P. 103) And she adds,“ If it's neurotic to want two mutually exclusive things at the same time, then I'm damned neurotic. For the rest of my days, I'll be flying back and forth between mutually exclusive things. ”(P. 103) Esther's search for identity is that of a woman in the 1950s who wants both family and career, and society only is set to a role. Faced with a choice that she does not want to make, she refuses any further decision. She renounces a world of constraints and impossibilities by withdrawing into her own world, into the isolation under the bell jar.

Under the bell jar

With the metaphor of the novel, Sylvia Plath describes Esther Greenwood's depression as a life under the bell jar. It symbolizes Esther's separation from the world of others. Wherever she is, Esther sits “under the same bell jar in my own sour haze”. (P. 200) The bell jar is not a part of itself, it is a foreign body that turns over it without Esther's control and keeps it trapped in its own world. "For those who are wedged in and crouching like a dead baby in a bell jar, the world itself is a bad dream." (P. 254)

The bell jar not only closes its contents; it is transparent, exposes those who are trapped for observation, displays them. It almost becomes a "scientific object". Esther also becomes a scientific object in psychiatry. Doctor Gordon gives her dubious treatment with electric shocks, which Esther is severely traumatized. The doctors' rounds give Esther the impression, "They were curious about me, and afterwards they would gossip about me." (P. 192) When he said goodbye to Esther, the medical student Buddy Willard was also undisguisedly curious about her future life as a former psychiatric patient : "I want to know who you want to marry now". (P. 258)

With Doctor Nolan's treatment, the bell jar rises for the first time and lets fresh air to Esther. “The bell jar hovered a few feet above my head. A draft of air reached me. ”(P. 231) But when Esther was released, she was threatened by a glass bell hanging constantly over her head:“ How should I know whether one day - in college, in Europe, anywhere, everywhere - would the bell jar with its suffocating, paralyzing distortions lower over me again? ”(p. 258)

Esther's mirror

She doesn't recognize herself in any of the mirrors that Esther looks into during the novel. In the elevator door of her hotel she sees “a tall Chinese woman” (p. 24). On the drive home from New York, the mirror shows her a “sick Indian” (p. 123). Esther's identity crisis shows her inability to reconcile her external appearance with her self. Even in a figurative sense, she cannot recognize or understand herself. When she looks in the mirror for the first time after her suicide attempt in the hospital, she has the impression of seeing a picture of which she cannot even say “whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman”. (P. 189) Esther breaks the mirror, whereupon the nurses prophesy seven years of misfortune. The mercury drop from a thermometer shows her a renewable mirror image : "If I let it fall, it would burst into millions of small replicas of itself, and if I pushed them together again, they would merge seamlessly and form a whole again." 199) Reference is already made to the motif of rebirth: In order to recognize her reflection again, Esther has to destroy her old image.

The people Esther meets in the course of the novel are also like mirrors to her. Doreen as the personified temptation and Betsy as the embodiment of virtue oppose the two incompatible sides of her personality. Joan becomes both a rival and a doppelganger in the clinic. The rivalry between the two women dates back to when they vied for Buddy Willard's favor, and it continues as they compete for recovery in the clinic. Joan's fascination for Esther goes so far that she not only collected the newspaper clippings about Esther's suicide, but even imitated him. For Esther, Joan is “the shining double of my old self at its best, specially created to haunt and torment me.” (P. 220) And she even adds: “Sometimes I wondered if I had made up Joan […] Whether she would continue to show up at every crisis in my life and remind me of what I was and what I had been through, and whether she would continue to experience her own and similar crisis right under my nose in the future. “(P. 235) In the end, Esther manages to distance herself from Joan. She pushes her back: “Because I don't like you. I think you puke if you want to know exactly. ”(P. 236) And Joan's funeral coincides with Esther's discharge from the clinic, her second birth, as if she had to bury her other self in order to be reborn can.

Death and rebirth

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg , who were executed on the electric chair on June 19, 1953 on charges of espionage

"It was a crazy, sultry summer, that summer in which the Rosenbergs got on the electric chair" (p. 7) - the very first sentence of the novel is about death. Esther has a strong sympathy for the Rosenbergs, who are being executed by society for their non-conformist behavior. Esther, too, does not feel that she is complying with the rules of society, and so she meets the ungracious condemnation of the death row inmates by her colleague Hilda personally: “I am so glad that they will soon die [...]. It is terrible that such people live at all. ”(Pp. 109–110) Esther follows the path laid out by the Rosenbergs. Her psychiatric treatment is also condemnation for her deviation from the norm. The treatment with electric shocks answered the initial question, "What would it be like to burn the nerves down while alive?" (P. 7) The experience is so excruciating that she wonders "what terrible things I did." (P. 156)

Esther celebrates her departure from New York by throwing her clothes one by one out of the window and letting them be carried away by the wind, "like the ashes of a loved one". (P. 122) Playing through the different types of death after their return home seems almost parodic. Even when planning her suicide, Esther orients herself to given norms by emulating clichés she has read. But again and again little things speak against the implementation, for example that her mother returns home too early or that Esther cannot stand the sight of blood. When she tries in vain to drown herself, her own body holds out to her in the form of her rushing pulse: "I am I am I am". (P. 171) Only the personal reference to the death of her father breaks through the clichéd suicide fantasies. In a hole in the ground in the basement of her house, Esther follows him into the grave.

Surviving a suicide attempt is a first form of rebirth when Esther wakes up after two days of twilight sleep with the cry “Mother!” (P. 185). Later, Esther found out about Joan's death as a new beginning. The following day, the snow covered the clinic and left “a pure, white sheet”. (P. 253) At the funeral of her doppelganger, Esther's heart is in harmony with her will for the first time when its beating calls to mind: “I am. I am. I am. ”(P. 260) Esther can now accept the scars of her experiences as part of herself:“ They were my landscape. ”(P. 254) She feels“ patched up, renovated and approved for the world ”(p. 254). 261) and would like to celebrate her second birth with a ritual. The positive outlook of the end stands in striking contrast to the unresolved dilemmas that led to Esther's collapse. In fact, the shadow of the bell jar still hangs over her. The “ happy end ” contains its own deconstruction and leaves behind the ambivalence of the superficial integrity and its threat that continues to be hidden beneath the healthy surface.

Autobiographical reference

The College Hall of Smith College in Northampton , Massachusetts

The bell jar shows considerable parallels to Sylvia Plath's own experiences between June 1953 and February 1954. Even the name of the protagonist Esther Greenwood refers to Sylvia Plath herself. Greenwood was her grandmother's last name, Esther , like the first names of most of Plath's protagonists and like Sylvia herself, consists of six letters, which is satirized in the novel as Esther for her own novel a main character named Elaine remembers and states: “I would be my heroine myself, but under a mask. Her name should be Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. Esther also had six letters. I thought that was a good sign. ”(P. 131)

The real events of the summer of 1953 began when Sylvia Plath, then studying at Smith College , was chosen as one of twenty students from the United States to work on the August issue of Mademoiselle magazine, called the college issue . She stayed with the other students at the Barbizon Hotel for Women on the Upper East Side of Manhattan from June 1 to June 26 , wrote an article for Mademoiselle Poets in Campus and interviewed Elizabeth Bowen . In the August issue, the photo of her described in the novel was printed with a paper rose. An undated letter to her brother Warren reveals that many details from her social life in New York later found their way into the novel, from the crab poisoning to the rendezvous with a simultaneous interpreter to the dispute with a Peruvian UN delegate. But the letter also reveals that "the move to NYC has been so rapid that I am still unable to ponder who I am or where I am going." And the poet found a drastic metaphor for the shock under which it said: "The world has burst open in front of my gawking eyes and has splattered its entrails like a burst watermelon."

Upon returning to her hometown of Wellesley , Sylvia Plath learned that she had been turned down from Frank O'Connor's writing class . And although, in the perception of her boyfriend at the time, Gordon Lameyer, she maintained a social normality, she suffered from increasingly severe depression in the weeks that followed. In an angry diary entry of July 6, 1953, she took herself to court: “The time has come, my pretty girl, to stop running from yourself […]. Stop selfishly thinking about razor blades and self-harm, about going out and about to break up with everything. Your room is not your prison. It's you yourself. ”On July 14th, her last entry in the diary ended with the words:“ You mustn't look for a way out like this. You have to think. ”She found no other way out and on August 24th, as described in the novel, tried to take her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills.

McLean Hospital administration building in Belmont , Massachusetts

Two days later and after a police search, her brother Warren found her half unconscious in the basement of the family home. Sylvia Plath survived because she vomited most of the pills. With the financial support of her college scholarship founder, novelist Olive Higgins Prouty , she was treated at McLean Hospital in Belmont by psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher, the role model for Doctor Nolan in The Bell Jar . After being treated with electric shocks and insulin as well as meeting a former classmate named Jane in the clinic, who did not commit suicide like her fictional likeness Joan, Sylvia Plath was released as cured in early February 1954 and returned to Smith College.

The numerous parallels between Die Glasglocke and Sylvia Plath's life suggest an autobiographical reading of the novel and make it difficult to draw a clear line between the life of the author and her literary work. In her book The Other Sylvia Plath, Tracy Brain recognized a real marketing strategy for the American editions of The Bell Jar in the suggested unity of biography and fiction. Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath, who suffered from being regarded by everyone as Mrs. Greenwood, complained in an interview: “[The novel] was read as an autobiography, which it was not. Sylvia manipulated him very skillfully. She invented, fused, made up. She created an artistic whole that read like the pure truth. ”Ted Hughes saw her particular strength in the autobiographical element of Plath's prose:“ […] the subjects that addressed her enough to captivate her concentration all arise as episodes from their own lives; they are all autobiography. They have the vitality of their personal involvement, their subjectivity. ”In contrast, Tracy Brain pointed out the novel's reference to A Room for Himself by Virginia Woolf and Villette by Charlotte Brontë , thereby placing The Bell Jar in a literary context that goes beyond a mere autobiography reaches out.

Position in Sylvia Plath's complete works

Although the bell jar is Sylvia Plath's most popular work in terms of sales success, the literary significance of the novel is mostly overshadowed by its poetry, especially the late poems published in Ariel . Jacqueline Rose, the author of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath , simply called The Bell Jar "entertainment literature". Linda Wagner-Martin countered this: "Nowadays [1992] the bell jar is considered to be an integral part of Sylvia Plath's work, although the quality of the novel suggests that Plath saw herself as a prose writer and narrator as well as a poet."

In fact, Sylvia Plath's own view of the novel cannot be clearly determined. In a letter to her mother dated March 14, 1953, she showed very different ambitions for poetry and prose: "I want to get my poems to the New Yorker and my stories to the Ladies' Home Journal ". In her letters to the family, she described the bell jar as “bread work” and in conversation with her friend and critic and writer Al Alvarez as “autobiographical apprentice work”, which she had to write in order to free herself from her past. On the other hand, she revealed to her friend Ann Davidow that she was more enthusiastic about working on the novel than anything she had written before. And in a letter to her brother Warren in October 1962, she was convinced: "I think I'll be a pretty good novelist."

The influence that Die Glasglocke had on Plath's late poems is generally recognized . As early as 1966, CB Cox found in Critical Quarterly that the novel was “a first attempt to express the states of mind which later found a more appropriate form in poetry.” This assessment was shared by Ted Hughes, who judged the prose and poetry that preceded the novel, that they didn't seem to "live". In his eyes, the novel was the important step forward that led Sylvia Plath to her later works. The abandonment of the original desire to create literature according to objective standards gave her access to her own subjective images. The Ariel -Poems emerged parallel to the revision of the novel, from Elm (German: elm ) in April 1962 to last initially for Ariel provided Sheep in Fog (German: Sheep in the Mist ) on 2 December of the same year. It is no coincidence that you are using the same repertoire of symbols as The Bell Glass . And they have the same layered structure in which an apparently intact surface is threatened by deeper-seated disturbances. However, the surface in Plath's late poems has already become much thinner and more fragile than in the novel.

Already in the spring of 1959, resulting in the short story Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (German: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams ) saw Hughes the new tone of the novel take shape. The motif of the electroshock treatment can already be found here, which occupies a central position in The Bell Jar. Other short stories also anticipate scenes and characters, sometimes even the words of the novel. Among the Bumblebees (German: Unter den Hummeln ) describes the feelings of a girl after the death of her father, Tongues of Stone (German: Tongues of Stone ) describes the healing process of a young woman after a suicide attempt, In the Mountains (German: In the mountains ) shows an earlier version of TBC sick Buddy Willard and Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men (German: Sweetie Pie and the gutters men ) a traumatizing birth as Buddy she presents in the novel Esther.

Aurelia Plath said that Sylvia was planning a sequel to The Bell Jar, the design of which she burned in front of her eyes on July 10, 1962 out of anger over her husband's infidelity. "The accompanying book that was to follow this [ The Bell Glass ] [...] was to become a victory for the healed protagonist of the first volume, and the caricatured characters of the first volume should assume their true identity in it." Indeed, are found in Sylvia Plaths Diaries some drafts of a novel project entitled Falcon Yard , which, however, are to be placed before the work on The Bell Glass . It is not clear whether Sylvia Plath returned to this project again in 1962 and whether a reference to the content of her first novel can be made. Anne Stevenson relied on Ted Hughes when she insisted, "There is absolutely no documented evidence of such a novel". The only surviving fragment of the early drafts is the short story Stoneboy with Dolphin (German: Steinknabe mit Delphin ) from 1958.

History of origin

Although Sylvia Plath had already written numerous short prose texts in addition to her poetry, she struggled for a long time with the goal she had set herself to write a novel. Many draft novels are recorded in her diaries, for example the sketches The Day I Died and Lazarus My Love , which are thematically related to The Bell Glass . But the work all got stuck in the beginning, which repeatedly made Sylvia Plath desperate. She longed for the task that would occupy her for a longer period of time: "A novel, bold and arrogant, could be the solution for my days, for a year of my life."

It was not until the spring of 1961 that Plath's literary maturity and favorable external circumstances allowed determined work on Die Glasglocke . Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, who at this time in the district of Primrose Hill in London lived, could the study of neighboring and were traveling for a few weeks poet WS Merwin use. While Hughes worked there in the afternoon, Plath could devote himself to her novel project undisturbed in the mornings. On April 21, 1961, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother: “I work like a devil seven mornings a week in Merwin's study […]. I have finally found the key to my happiness: I need four to five hours, first thing in the morning, in which I can write completely freely and independently ”. In later letters in March 1962 she continued: “I find it much easier to write prose; the concentration extends over a wide area and does not stand or fall with the work of a single day as with poetry. ”And in contrast to poetry, prose works are“ not so violently demanding or depressing, if not achieved. ”Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Glass in great speed and only required minor revisions until the novel was finished in August 1961 to the point that she noted in the margin of an old diary entry from December 12, 1958 with the question “Why am I not writing a novel?”: “I have! August 22, 1961: The bell jar ”.

On October 21, 1961, Sylvia Plath signed a contract for the publication of the novel with the British publisher Heinemann , who had published her collection of poems The Colossus and Other Poems the year before . Shortly thereafter, on November 9, 1961, she received the approval of the Eugene Saxton Foundation for a scholarship of 2000 dollars to work on a prose text, which meant "the rescue" for the constantly troubled young writers. Plath decided to postpone the publication of Die Glasglocke by a year and to submit quarterly revised parts of the novel to the foundation as work progress. In a letter to her mother dated November 20, 1961, she explained that writing under the pressure of deadlines for a scholarship “will definitely mean the death of my literary work” and stated: “Of course one should write with the help of the scholarship and not already written but I will do what I can and what I feel like, while my conscience is completely unburdened because I know my tasks have already been completed. "

23 Fitzroy Road in London - the house Sylvia Plath lived in for her final weeks

Sylvia Plath did not reveal anything to her family about the content of her novel. She was aware that the apparently autobiographical descriptions of her characters would hurt many friends and relatives, especially her mother. It was not until October 18, 1962 that she confessed to her brother Warren: "In addition, my first novel has been accepted (that's a secret; it's bread and butter and nobody is allowed to read it!)" And a week later she also implored her apparently alarmed mother: “Forget about the novel and don't tell anyone about it. It's bread and butter and just for practice. ”Out of consideration for the family in the United States, she decided to publish The Bell Jar in the UK only and chose the pen name Victoria Lucas , that of Ted Hughes' favorite cousin Victoria Farrar and his friend Lucas Myers was composed. At the end of 1962, Plath's attitude to the novel changed, and she also offered it for publication in America, but received two rejections. Judith Jones, the editor of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. criticized the unbelievable narrator, who portrayed serious events from the point of view of a college girl. Elisabeth Lawrence of Harper & Row dismissed the novel as a "private experience".

On January 14, 1963, The Bell Jar appeared under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas at Heinemann in Great Britain, four weeks before Sylvia Plath committed suicide. It was not until 1967 that the novel was republished under Sylvia Plath's name, and in 1971 it was first published by Harper & Row in Plath's homeland, the United States. Until then, Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath had prevented publication in the USA because the novel denigrated all those who loved and helped Sylvia Plath. In a letter she complained to the publisher: "Since the book is uncommented, it embodies the meanest ingratitude." Her reaction to the publication was the publication of Sylvia Plath's Letters Home 1950–1963 in 1975, which was based on the literary image of Sylvia Plath should contrast the private image of their daughter in public in correspondence with the family.

The German translation by Christian Grote was first published by Suhrkamp in 1968 . In 1997 Reinhard Kaiser made a new translation that emphasized the comic, sometimes exaggerated tone of the novel.

Reception and effect

When the book appeared in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, no one initially associated it with Sylvia Plath's previous poetry publications. This is how the critics supposedly reacted to the work of a debutante. Robert Taubner called the novel in New Statesman a "clever debut novel" and compared it with The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger , a comparison that was often drawn later. Laurence Lerner wrote in New Novels : “a brilliant and touching book”. Although the reviews were generally benevolent, Sylvia Plath herself was disappointed that, in her opinion, they did not get to the heart of the novel.

After the German translation was published, Ingeborg Bachmann wrote in 1968 in a draft of an essay published only posthumously on The Bell Glass : “The striking thing at the beginning is the barely believable humor, the comic, the infantile, the clown-like in this 19-year-old Esther Greenwood, and it crashes in such an imperceptible way that after the third reading one asks oneself where this secret misfortune begins and how […]. Since Malcolm Lowry's estate, I have not known anything from English literature that is capable of this derailment and in which there are passages that are just as shocking as they are shaking. ”Nevertheless, Reinhard Baumgart said in 1979, looking back on the German-language reception:“ Sylvia Plath? If there wasn't a women's movement, this name would probably have long since disappeared in this country. ”And he labeled The Bell Glass as“ glued together from two parts somewhere in the middle. In the front there is an absurd to silly young girl novel, a kind of ' nestling in Manhattan', in which the door to a cellar stair opens slowly, inaudibly […]. It reads as if Sylvia Plath had been caught by life in the middle of writing. And so it was."

It was only with its publication in the USA that the novel's popularity began, which continues to this day. Robert Scholes called the publication overdue in his review in the New York Times in 1971 , as illegal copies had already been smuggled into the country from Europe by student groups. He too drew the comparison with Salinger: “It is a fine novel, as bitter and ruthless as her last poems - the kind of book that Salinger's Franny could have written about herself ten years later if she had spent those ten years in hell would. " the bell jar ranked more than a year on the American bestseller lists, but was initially shunned by literary criticism. Richard Locke found his answer to the question of popular success in the amalgamation of fiction and reality, which is reinforced by the American edition with an attached biography, the photography from Mademoiselle and Sylvia Plath's ink drawings: “Feminine, desperate, misunderstood, the poet and their tragedy be made available - nostalgic, weepy "Compared to one of Plath's poems like. Cut (German: Chopped ) was the novel merely a" swab ".

In a very different way from when it was first created, The Bell Jar met with a public debate about the role of women in society in the 1970s. Sylvia Plath soon became an icon of the women's movement. Marjorie Perloff stated in the spring of 1973: "During the last year Sylvia Plath became a real cult figure." Ellen Moers judged in her book Literary Women 1976: "No other writer has meant more to today's women's movement." The bell jar became this one For the most part read as “a feminist manifesto avant la lettre ”. Paula Bennett called the novel “a brilliant evocation of the oppressive atmosphere of the 1950s and the devastating effects this atmosphere could have on ambitious young women of high disposition like Plath.” Linda Wagner saw in it “a testimony to the repressive cultural mold, the center of the century, excluded many women [...] from their rightful, productive lives. ”And she was personally addressed by the novel:“ For those of us who lived through the 1950s, The Bell Jar is much more than Sylvia Plath's autobiography. ”But not only women from the author's generation were able to establish this personal connection, which contributed to the success story of the novel. Perloff turned to the “new woman”, who had learned to defend herself, and proclaimed: “Esther's landscape is our landscape.” The novel became a “cult book” for a whole generation of female readers. Teresa de Lauretis summarized: " The bell jar is not the story of an individual case, but the synchronous look at femininity, this time seen through the perspective of a woman."

With a greater distance to the social conditions that shaped the novel, other aspects came to the fore of the reception. In 1998 Elisabeth Bronfen highlighted the novel's black humor, called it a “celebration of artificiality” and praised its postmodern view of the connection between the protagonist's identity and the pop culture that surrounds her : “That is why Plath's insistence is that the secretly traumatic knowledge not only constantly haunted its host, but is fought back […] with the same violence […] that was necessary to suppress this truth, incredibly topical. ” Gisela von Wysocki aimed in the same direction when she wrote the artificial poetics of the novel and in 1997 emphasized his "unique mixture of tale of suffering and comic" and called The Bell Jar "still one of the most exciting books on American states of consciousness". The effect of the novel on many readers continues unabated in the 21st century. In April 2008 , the editorial team of the Daily Telegraph voted The Bell Glass one of the 50 best cult books.

Adaptations and motivic use

The Bell Jar was first filmed in 1979 under the direction of Larry Peerce . Marilyn Hassett played the role of Esther Greenwood . Julia Stiles secured the rights for a remake in 2007 , who also wants to take on the lead role.

As Sylvia Plath's most popular work, the bell jar is often used as a motif in literature and film. Esther Greenwood's psychological instability is boldly transferred to the - mostly female - reader. Examples of readers vacillating between depression and rebellion are Kat Stratford in 10 Things I Hate About You and Mallory Knox in Natural Born Killers . In both films, a copy of the novel is used in suggestive scenes to characterize the figure.

literature

Text output

  • Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar . Faber and Faber, London 1966 (first published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas , 1963) (English).
  • Sylvia Plath: The bell jar . Translation by Christian Grote . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1968.
  • Sylvia Plath: The bell jar . New translation by Reinhard Kaiser . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-45676-8 (quotations and page references refer to this edition).
  • Sylvia Plath: The bell jar . Complete reading by Nina Hoss . The Hörverlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-89584-755-0 .

Secondary literature

About The Bell Jar :

  • Linda Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar. A Novel of the Fifties (= Twayne's Masterwork Studies No. 98). Twayne Publishers, New York 1992, ISBN 0-8057-8561-2 (English)
  • Elisabeth Bronfen: Sylvia Plath . Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-627-00016-1 , pp. 190-214
  • Gordon Lameyer: The Double in Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" . In: Edward Butscher (Ed.): Sylvia Plath. The Woman and the Work . Dodd, Mead & Company, New York 1985, ISBN 0-396-08732-9 , pp. 143-165 (English)
  • Tracy Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath . Longman, Edinburgh 2001, ISBN 0-582-32730-X , pp. 141-175 (English)
  • Deborah Forbes: The Bell Jar , SparkNotes, New York 2002, ISBN 1-58663-474-7 (English, online version , accessed September 30, 2008)
  • Jeanne Inness: Plath's The Bell Jar . Cliffs Notes, Lincoln 1984, ISBN 0-8220-0226-4 (English, online version , accessed September 30, 2008)

About Sylvia Plath:

  • Linda Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-38486-4
  • Anne Stevenson: Sylvia Plath. A biography . Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-627-10025-5

Additional writings by Sylvia Plath:

  • Sylvia Plath: Letters Home 1950–1963. Selected and edited by Aurelia Schober Plath . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-596-11358-X
  • Karen V. Kukil (Ed.): The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath . Anchor Books, New York 2000, ISBN 0-385-72025-4 (English)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b cf. Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar. , Pp. 17-27
  2. ^ Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , pp. 194-195
  3. ↑ a b c d Ted Hughes: On Sylvia Plath . In: Raritan , Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 1–10 (accessed September 30, 2008)
  4. ↑ See Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , pp. 28–34
  5. ↑ See Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , pp. 35-46
  6. ↑ Linda W. Wagner: Plath's "The Bell Jar" as a female "Bildungsroman" . In: Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal , Vol. 12, No. 1–6, 1986, pp. 55–68 (accessed September 30, 2008)
  7. ↑ See the section: Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , pp. 35–46
  8. ^ Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , p. 22
  9. ↑ See the section Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , pp. 62–71
  10. ↑ See the section Gordon Lameyer: The Double in Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" , pp. 143-165
  11. ↑ See section Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , pp. 201–210
  12. ↑ See Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , pp. 119–125
  13. ↑ Sylvia Plath: Letters home , p. 123
  14. ↑ See Gordon Lameyer: Sylvia at Smith . In: Butscher: Sylvia Plath , pp. 32–41
  15. ↑ "The time has come, my pretty maiden, to stop running away from yourself [...]. Stop thinking selfishly of razors & self-wounds & going out and ending it all. Your room is not your prison. You are. ”In: Kukil: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , pp. 185–186
  16. ^ "You must not seek escape like this. You must think. "In: Kukil: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , p. 187
  17. ↑ See Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , pp. 130-134
  18. ↑ See Gordon Lameyer: The Double in Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" , pp. 159-165
  19. ^ Stevenson: Sylvia Plath , p. 102
  20. ↑ See Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath , pp. 1–12
  21. ^ "It was accepted as an autobiography, which it wasn't. Sylvia manipulated it very skillfully. She invented, fused, imagined. She made an artistic whole that read as truth itself. ”In: Nan Robertson: To Sylvia Plath's Mother, New Play Contains“ Words of Love ” . In: The New York Times , October 9, 1979
  22. ↑ "[...] the themes she found engaging enough to excite her concentration all turn out to be episodes from her own life; they are all autobiography. They have the vitality of her personal participation, her subjectivity. "Quoted from: Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath , p. 195
  23. ↑ Cf. Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath , pp. 141-175
  24. ↑ Julia Voss : The tricked Cinderella . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , December 21, 2007 (accessed September 30, 2008)
  25. ^ Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , p. 191
  26. ↑ "Currently, The Bell Jar is viewed as an integral part of Plath's oeuvre, its quality insisting, that she thought of herself as much as a prose and fiction writer as a poet." In: Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , p 13
  27. ↑ Plath: Letters home , p. 114
  28. ↑ a b Plath: Letters home , p. 506
  29. ↑ a b Plath: Letters home , p. 512
  30. ↑ "autobiographical apprenticework". Quoted from: Marjorie G. Perloff: "A Ritual for Being Born Twice": Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar . In: Contemporary Literature , Vol. 13, No. 4, Autumn 1972, pp. 507-522 (accessed September 30, 2008)
  31. ^ Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , p. 239
  32. ↑ Plath: Letters home , p. 499
  33. ↑ "The novel seems a first attempt to express mental states which eventually found a more appropriate form in the poetry." Quoted from: Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , p. 11
  34. ↑ Published in: Sylvia Plath: The Bible of Dreams . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-596-29515-7
  35. ↑ a b c d e Published in: Sylvia Plath: Zungen aus Stein . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-596-10783-0
  36. ↑ See Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , pp. 91-98
  37. ↑ "The companion book which was to follow this [...] was to be the triumph of the healed central figure of the first volume and in this the caricatured characters of the first volume were to assume their true identities." Quoted from: Robin Peel : Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics . Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison 2002, ISBN 0-8386-3868-6 , p. 83
  38. ^ Kukil: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , p. 284
  39. ↑ Stevenson: Sylvia Plath , pp. 424-425
  40. ^ Kukil: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , pp. 476 and 495
  41. ^ Kukil: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , p. 497
  42. ^ "A novel, brazen, arrogant, would be a solution to my days, to a year of life." In Kukil: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , pp. 518-519
  43. ^ Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , p. 221
  44. ↑ Plath: Letters home , p. 435
  45. ↑ Plath: Letters home , p. 477
  46. ↑ Plath: Letters home , p. 475
  47. ↑ "Why don't I write a novel?" - "I have! August 22, 1961: The Bell Jar ”. In Kukil: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , p. 696
  48. ↑ a b Stevenson: Sylvia Plath , p. 387
  49. ↑ Plath: Letters Home , p. 459
  50. ↑ Plath: Letters Home , p. 460
  51. ^ Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , p. 296
  52. ↑ a b Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , p. 302
  53. ^ Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , p. 312
  54. ↑ Cf. Nan Robertson: To Sylvia Plath's Mother, New Play Contains "Words of Love" . In: The New York Times , October 9, 1979
  55. ↑ Janet Malcolm : The Silent Woman. The biographies of Sylvia Plath . Kellner, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-927623-43-1 , p. 38
  56. ↑ Cf. Malcolm: The Silent Woman , pp. 37–47
  57. ↑ a b Gisela von Wysocki: Life. A hectic presence . In: Die Zeit , No. 15/1997
  58. ^ "Clever first novel ... the first feminine novel ... in the Salinger mood". Quoted from: Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , p. 10
  59. ↑ "a brilliant and moving book". Quoted from: Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , p. 11
  60. ↑ Ingeborg Bachmann: The Bell Glass / The Tremendum . In: Monika Albrecht, Dirk Göttsche (eds.): “Writing about time” 2 . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1837-0 , pp. 181-183
  61. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart: The girl who God wanted to be . In: Die Zeit , No. 49/1979
  62. ↑ "It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems - the kind of book Salinger's Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell." In: Robert Scholes: Esther came back like a retreaded tire . In: The New York Times , April 11, 1971
  63. ↑ Wendy Martin: "God's Lioness" - Sylvia Plath, Her Prose and Poetry In: Women's Studies , Vol. 1, 1973, pp. 191–198 (English, accessed September 30, 2008)
  64. ^ "Feminine, desperate, misunderstood, the poet and her tragedy are rendered accessible-- nostalgic, lachrymose. […] Beside this excerpt from Cut for example, her novel is but a cotton swab “In: Richard Locke: The Last Word: Beside the Bell Jar . In: The New York Times , June 20, 1971.
  65. ↑ "During the past year or so, Sylvia Plath has become a true cult figure." Quoted from: Janet Badia: The "Priestess" and Her "Cult" . In: Anita Helle (Ed.): The Unraveling Archive. Essays on Sylvia Plath . The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2007, ISBN 0-472-06927-6 , p. 163
  66. ^ "No writer has meant more to the current feminist movement." Quoted from: Wagner-Martin: The Bell Jar , p. 8
  67. ↑ a b Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , p. 210
  68. ↑ Quoted from: Diane S. Bonds: The Separative Self in Sylvia Plath's “The Bell Jar” In: Women's Studies , Vol. 18, No. 1, May 1990, pp. 49–64 (accessed September 30, 2008)
  69. ↑ "For those of us who lived through the 1950s, The Bell Jar moves far beyond being Sylvia Plath's autobiography." In: Wagner: Plath's "The Bell Jar" as Female "Bildungsroman" (English, accessed September 30, 2008)
  70. ↑ "Esther's landscape […] is […] our landscape." In: Perloff: "A Ritual for Being Born Twice": Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (accessed September 30, 2008)
  71. ↑ Frederik Hetmann : Our hearts are so easily vulnerable. The life story of Sylvia Plath . Beltz & Gelberg, Weinheim 1989, ISBN 3-407-80681-7 , p. 81
  72. ^ " The Bell Jar is not a single case history, but rather a synchronic view of womanhood, for once seen from the woman's perspective." In: Teresa de Lauretis: Rebirth in "The Bell Jar" . In: Linda Wagner-Martin (Ed.): Sylvia Plath. The Critical Heritage . Routledge, London 1997, ISBN 0-415-15942-3 , p. 133
  73. ^ Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , p. 211
  74. ↑ 50 best cult books on the website of The Daily Telegraph, April 25, 2008 (accessed September 30, 2008)
  75. ↑ The Bell Jar in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  76. ↑ Sascha Lehnartz: Starlet for the thinking audience . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , September 9, 2007
  77. ↑ See Janet Badia: The "Priestess" and Her "Cult" . In: Helle: The Unraveling Archive , pp. 159–181
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on November 2, 2008 in this version .