Table of Contents

Introduction....................................................................................................................... 2

1. Biography...................................................................................................................... 8

2. Freud – Klein – Lacan: The Psychoanalytic Approach .............................................. 28

3. The Bell Jar ................................................................................................................. 43

Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 76

Works cited ..................................................................................................................... 80

1
 Introduction
I shall perish if I can write about no one but

myself.

---Plath, Journals, November 4, 1959

I must lie down where all the ladder start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

---W.B. Yeats, The Circus Animal’s Desertion

Every piece of art, no matter how objective it is, is a form of retranslation. It

transforms the picture of the world through the channel of imagination giving birth to a

new reality. Art can be based on elaborate techniques following a coherent pattern but

what we finally get is always a product of subjective experience. In her book

Psychoanalytical Approach to Aesthetics, Hana Segal points out that “Every creative

artist produces a world of his own. Even when he believes himself to be a complete

realist and sets himself the task of faithfully reproducing the external world, he in fact

only uses elements of the existing external world to create with them a reality of his

own” (Segal 207).

This thesis addresses the subjectivity of the works of Sylvia Plath. Both her

poetry and her novel together with the short stories though different in their form are

based on a deeply instinctive approach. She stares into the abyss of her soul and tries to

transform the revelations into something more tangible. Writing for her was a way of

dealing with the demons of her past, a remedy for her soul, she “used raw risk and

emotional vulnerability for the sake of vision and sensibility” (Tytell 12). It is through

her extreme sensibility she finally reaches the reputation of a great artist. Her work is

undoubtedly an expression of her innermost feelings. As I have already stated, every

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work of art is a retranslation of the original. What one finally gets is just a reflection of

the real essence. Jacqueline Rose in the introduction of her work on Sylvia Plath argues

that “there is no direct access to the writer, that the only thing available for commentary

and analysis is the text. We do not know Plath. What we do know is what she gives us

in writing, and what she give us in writing is there to be read” (Rose 5).

In his essay The Death of the Author Roland Barthes criticizes the reader’s

tendency to distill the meaning of an author’s work from his or her identity: either

political, historical, religious, gendered or psychological. Such an approach, he argues,

proves to be limited and biased (Barthes 145). Every piece of work contains a

multifaceted entity that cannot be put under a tyranny of narrative truth. Barthes sees the

essential meaning of the work deriving from the reader’s impression, which is limitless.

He raises the question of how we can detect what the author intended to say. One of the

major intentions of my thesis is to challenge this concept as I will attempt to analyze the

work of Sylvia Plath particularly from the confessional point of view. I am convinced

that Plath’s work, though a result of artistic retranslation, cannot be separated from her

identity, or for the most part her identity cannot be ignored. If every piece of work is

formed by multifaceted layers of meaning, the reader should not be deprived of one of

the most essential ones, and if the reader is the one who should be free to choose then

let them do it so.

In the first chapter of my thesis I will deal with the autobiographical facts of

Plath’s life in order to give a glimpse of her life, which is much present in the meaning

of her works. I have consulted various biographies – Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame: A

Life of Sylvia Plath, that is generally considered to be the best biography written with

the help of Olwyn Hughes, Plath’s sister-in-law, and one could argue that it maintains a

rather biased point of view. In addition, I have used biographies by Edward Butscher

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Method and Madness, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman and The

Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm. Nevertheless, one of the

most significant sources that helped me in better comprehending the complexity of

Plath’s life were her Journals edited by Karen V. Kukil and Letters Home published by

Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother.

The concept of the ‘death of the author’ is in itself ironically equivocal in

connection with Plath. Her actual death is the basic phenomenon standing behind her

myth. She became obsessed with this demon and it ran throughout her whole writing in

the form of a repetitive use of death images. When she was thirty she deliberately ended

her life. Plath’s sensibility was turned deep inside penetrating to the darkest worlds of

limitless chaos. James Phillips and James Morley in their study called Imagination and

Its Pathologies point out that human existence should be accepted as being ambiguous,

always oscillating between the imaginary and the real. Psychopathology from that point

of view fails to acknowledge this (22). Its perceptive belief fixes upon a quest for

absolute certainties. Searching for something solid, Plath needed a strong image or

symbol for her writing and for her living too – she hungered for an object of highest

admiration, an authority, a strong element that would be real enough to be dealt with –

the demon of death was one of them, because what in life is more definite than death.

This subconscious instinct was first defined by Sigmund Freud in his Beyond the

Pleasure Principle as the “death drive”. He observed that people who had some kind of

traumatic experience tend to repeat and maximize their terrors indirectly in order to

master them. Freud called this tendency “repetition compulsion” (Freud 42). Sylvia

Plath experienced the first encounter with death when she was a child. Her father died

and behind him he left a hollow gap that she kept trying to fill with words of extreme

emotions. All her life she had to struggle with a problematic love-hate relationship to

4
her dead father. She seemed to have never liberated from the Oedipal complex later

redefined by Jacques Lacan as the “Name-of-the-Father”. Lacan re-interprets Freud in

terms of language that originates in de Saussures’s theory of formal system of

differential elements. Lacan’s unconscious is tied to the functions and dynamics of

language where “the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified in a chronic

but generative tension of lack” (Homer 65). This lack is the basis of Plath’s narrative.

She kept searching for an expression of her personal view of the world and when she

thought she had found it, it seemed to be even more incomprehensible for the outside

world and that made her even more desperate. Moreover, she felt always bound with

some expectations imposed by the people around her. In Passionate Lives, Tytell notes

that with her writings, “Plath participated in a process of pushing the limits of the

community approval” (Tytell 8). Finding her voice in the confessional narrative was

Plath’s biggest breakthrough.

In spite of the most expressive presence of Plath’s father in her writings, the

central argument of my thesis is the importance of the driving force of Plath’s mother in

her life and therefore in her work too. I will discuss the notion that the approval of her

own mother was for Plath more important then any other recognition. Plath’s perception

of her emotional problems was quite rational. Realizing her sensitive frame of mind she

became interested in psychoanalysis. The self-reflection helped her to open up the

dimensions of the deeply rooted heaviness, revealing the figure of her lost father whose

death she could not cope with and she recognized the roots of her problematic

relationship with her mother. Plath had pulled all her energies of herself only to let them

out with her reordered artistic expression.

In the theoretical part of this thesis, discussed in the second chapter, I will

address several more general approaches employed in psychoanalytical criticism that is

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first and foremost based on Sigmund Freud’s theories. Freud studies the language of the

repression and “draws the attention to the effects of desire in language and, indeed, in

all forms of symbolic interaction” (Wright 16). In her study called Psychoanalytic

Criticism, Elizabeth Wright deals with the relationship of psychoanalytic theory to the

theories of literature, and the arts, and she argues that, “the study of an artist’s life to

explain his works, or the study of his works to explain his mind, was already established

mode in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when pre-Freudian psychology made

various attempts to relate genius to madness” (38). In the theoretical part Freud’s

dominant patriarchal paradigm of the Oedipus complex will be challenged by some

rather mother figure oriented approaches. I would like to pay particular attention to the

maternal aspect being a source of the problematic fragmentation discussed in Jacques

Lacan and Melanie Klein, both being among the most prominent followers of Freud.

Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, is a semi-autobiographical story where

Plath tries to cope with her past, facing her first suicidal trip. She was twenty when she

decided to die, but she managed to come back. Although, she never forgot the idea and

preserved it in her artistic expression; as if she felt more certain now when she had fully

experienced her demon. “Dying / is an art like everything else. / I do it exceptionally

well” (Ariel 16). Plath’s final act of art was her second successful suicide attempt that

remains obscure and to this day provokes different responses and views. The feminist

movements regard her as a martyr and a victim of her husband’s dominance. By others

she is seen as a mentally sick person defeated by an unbearable suffering. The third and

central part of my thesis is an analysis of Plath’s novel that represents a fictional

retrospection of her first suicidal attempt. I will address the parallels of the fictional

story with the real life details and I will demonstrate the leading dominance of Plath’s

mother as mirrored in the novel with slight references to her short stories and poetry.

6
 Though particularly acknowledged as a poet and author of her last collection of

poetry, Ariel, Plath’s biggest ambition was always to write good fiction – to retranslate

life, to get outside herself and picture the world “with no glazing” (Kukil 485). With

The Bell Jar she only solidified the fact that there was no other way for her than getting

out of what is inside. The Bell Jar might have not been her greatest achievement, but it

did contribute to her success. In my thesis I will discuss the importance of The Bell Jar

as an inseparable part of Sylvia Plath’s works.

My motivation to address Plath’s work with the view to addressing its

subjectivity stems from the ‘confessional’ nature that as I suggest, is the most

substantial characteristic of her writing. I would like to emphasize that it is not my

intention to present any kind of psychoanalytical analysis of the author, in fact I find it

difficult to write about one’s most personal affairs and I fully realize that all my

assumptions are just an attempt to reach some closer comprehending of Plath’s work

within a literary framework.

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1. Biography
Presenting Sylvia Plath as an author of personal confession requires a closer

insight into her life. In the opening chapter I will concentrate on the significant

moments in Sylvia Plath’s personal story that affected both her identity and her literary

work. First, I will focus on the figure of the author’s father and his early death that is

supposed to be the primary element standing behind Plath’s myth. The strong and very

much discussed relationship with her father impacted on the creation of other social

bonds in Plath’s life. It was especially when she met her husband Ted Hughes that the

father figure came back to life. Nevertheless, the essential argument of this thesis is an

assumption that the real substance of Plath’s personal and artistic identity formation

originated particularly in her relationship with her mother. It was the mother-daughter

relationship that mediated that with her father, a relationship which was rather abstract

and developed in Plath’s inner world. In his biography The Death and Life of Sylvia

Plath, Ronald Hayman even suggests that “Otto Plath became more important as a

figure in Sylvia’s fantasy than he’d ever been in her life, though her imaginary

relationship with him had already started in fantasies and dreams about him” (25).

Based on journals records and on a rich correspondence between the two women, the

first chapter will mainly address Plath’s relationship to her mother, Aurelia Plath. I will

also address Plath’s mental problems and the suicidal impulses leading to her final

premature death.

Whatever life role Plath played, her eager spirit strived for perfection. “I want, I

think, to be omniscient…I think I would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be

God.” Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be?...But, oh, I cry out against it. I

am I – I am powerful, but to what extent? I am I” (Letters Home 40). Finding her

identity and its limits was Plath’s whole life struggle. The conflict between the inner

8
self and the outer façade required by conventions and general expectations molded

Sylvia into a split personality. One part of her wanted to be perfect in every respect and

the other one wished just “to lie with [her] hands turned up and be utterly empty” (Ariel

31). The first chapter will concern Plath’s struggle for identity as a reaction to the outer

conditions and as a reflection of her ideal self endeavor.

Let me now start with a brief glimpse into the life of Sylvia Plath’s father, as it is

important for the whole understanding of her artistic imagery. Otto Plath, Sylvia’s

father, born in 1885 was of German origin and came from Poland to the United States

when he was fifteen years old, joining his father who settled in North Dakota (Butcher

3-4). His family planned a career of Lutheran priest for Otto and paid for his education

at Northwestern College in Wisconsin. There he was introduced to Darwinism and

against the will of his relatives, he finally opted for science. In 1925, he obtained his

Master of Science degree and his DSc. in 1928. He became an enthusiastic entomologist

and in 1934, his book called, Bumblebees and Their Ways, was published (Hayman 22-

23). Sylvia loved the book and it later became the source of her poetic bee imagery that

can be found e.g. in The Beekeeper’s Daughter. She titled her father “maestro of the

bees” and she symbolically joined him in the last stanza with the words “The queen bee

marries the winter of your year” (Collected Poems 118). In 1962, Plath created a whole

bee series of five poems containing: The Bee Meeting, The Arrival of the Bee Box,

Stings, the Swarm and Wintering. In 1962, she developed an interest in beekeeping and

got first hand-experience of her father’s passion. This fact was retranslated in the “bee

poems”. The sweetness of the honey can be linked to the very sickness that later killed

Otto Plath. In 1940, he was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus due to which his

gangrenous leg had to be amputated (Hayman 25). The image of the amputated leg can

be seen as a synecdoche standing for another authoritative father picture. “This black

9
boot has no mercy for anybody. / Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot, / The

high, dead, toeless foot of this priest” (Collected Poems 196) as described in Berck-

Plage or “a cleft in your chin instead of your foot” addressed in Daddy (Ariel 54).

On November 5, 1940, Otto Plath died. On having learned this, the eight-year-old

Sylvia who prayed every night for his recovery proclaimed that she would “never speak

to God again” (Letters Home 25). To protect her children from emotional shock, Aurelia

Plath did not take her children to the funeral. For this she was later accused of

indifference and of not having let them fully realize their father’s death and therefore

the adequate relief could not come (Hayman 25). It was when Plath discovered Freud

and his Mourning and Melancholia that she penetrated another layer of her inner life. In

Freud’s account melancholia is a

…profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world,

loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the

self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and

self-revealing, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.

(Freud 204)

It is usually the result of the death of a loved person. In mourning, “it is the world that

has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (Freud 206). It seems

that her father’s death was exactly the point when Plath started with the process of

filling her empty ego with writing. It became her obsession, her need. She was fourteen

when she astounded her English teacher, Mr. Crockett with a poem called, I Thought

That I Could not be Hurt, which for a girl of her age impressively developed a

description of devastating feelings caused by an unpleasant experience. “I thought that I

could not be hurt; / I thought that I must surely be / impervious to suffering - / immune

to mental pain / or agony” (Letters Home 33).

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 A couple of years later she first explained her writing intentions and said: “You

ask me why I spend my life writing? Do I find entertainment? Is it worthwhile? Above

all, does it pay? If not, then, is there a reason?...I write only because there is a voice

within me that will not be still” (Letters Home 34-5).

Her poetic language, though developing very early after her father’s death, did

not at first contain any father allusions. There is a record in her diary from July 1950,

when she complained about lack of inspiration and says: “what do I know about

sorrow? No one I love has ever died or been tortured” (Kukil 33). She sealed her father

in an absent reality set in the past, only to be brought back to life again in an even more

potent presence.

The myth behind Otto Plath was constructed of various bits and pieces of basic

facts that Sylvia remembered. As they were not particularly numerous she had to

develop more of them and compose an image which could make him real, at least for

her. Nevertheless, the imprint in her mind was limited by her childhood experience that

was doomed to persist forever and was closely connected with the relationship to her

mother. Plath’s father “evolved into his godlike/devillike manifestations, stripped of

reality – the frightening ghost of a father she had scarcely known as a healthy man.

Eventually she came to associate her father with a block of time she had sealed into a

never-never land of childhood” (Stevenson 12). This is best described in her short story

called, Ocean 1212-W, where Plath describes her early childhood by the sea. It

concludes: “And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father

died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine years of my life sealed themselves off like

a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth” (Johnny

Panic and the Bible of Dreams 26). A similar statement appears in Plath’s novel, The

Bell Jar, when she says: “I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that

11
I was only purely happy until I was nine years old” (The Bell Jar 78). At the age of

nine, the image of a carefree childhood left Sylvia’s world.

Though she did not speak about it openly, Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother,

admitted in Letters Home that her husband was not an easy man to live with and that he

was a difficult and moody person (Letters Home 13). In her early childhood, Sylvia

struggled for her father’s attention together with her younger brother Warren. She

reached it through being the bright, clever and hard working daughter of her father. That

pattern did not seem to be ever abandoned. Sylvia encoded that success and attention

can be achieved just through perfect performance that needs to be approved by parents.

When her father died it meant an unforgivable betrayal for all her effort. These

contradictory love-hate feelings became the part of Sylvia’s literary and personal

identity she could never escape.

Having been twenty-two years her husband’s senior, Aurelia Plath found herself

widow at the age of thirty-four, left without any money. When she married Otto Plath

she had to give up her academic career and became a full time homemaker. “At the end

of my first year of marriage, I realized that if I wanted a peaceful home – and I did – I

would simply have to become more submissive, although it was not my nature to be so”

(Letters Home 13). After Otto’s death, her self-sacrificial instinct decided to give up her

personal life and devote it to her children. For this she was both admired and

condemned by Sylvia. In May 1953, just before her first mental breakdown, Sylvia

wrote to her brother Warren:

You know, as I do, and it is a frightening thing, that mother would actually

Kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us. She

is an abnormally altruistic person and I have realized lately that we have to

12
 fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease.

(Letters Home 112)

This letter represents Plath’s dangerous ambivalence about her mother. On the

one hand, she felt she owed her boundless self-sacrificing care but, on the other hand,

she needed to fight against it to recognize herself as an independent person. She started

to realize the painful absence of her father and the frightening omnipresence of her

mother:

With your father dead, you leaned abnormally to the “Humanities”

personality of your mother. And you were frightened when you heard

yourself stop talking and felt the echo of her voice, as if she had spoken in

you, as if you weren’t quite you, but were growing and continuing in her

wake, and as if her expressions were growing and emanating from your

face. (Kukil 64-5)

In his book, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, Erich Fromm

discusses the incestuous daughters’ fixation on mothers. He points out that this bond is

based not just on the desire for maternal love and protection but also on fear of her. The

fear derives from the very bond that undermines the feeling of power and independence.

The individual dreams of returning to the maternal womb concurrently transmuting the

mother figure into a dangerous cannibal or vampire (Fromm 81). She is a monster

sucking the sense of autonomy from them.

Plath’s disintegrated personality is reflected in the direct contrast between the

contents of her letters and of her journals. Of course the letters were addressed to her

mother while the journals were self-addressed, but it seems, however, that both the

realities were extreme. The reality presented to her mother was rather idealized and

exaggerated. In the letters Sylvia depicted it the way she would have liked to have it, or

13
rather as her mother would have liked to have heard it. Her journal notes, on the other

hand, usually originated in the innermost places of her soul from where her perception

came no less distorted by extremely emotional reactions.

Letters Home is at the same time an independent piece of Plath’s literary

production. Her mother, who was responsible for their publication, wrote in the

introduction: “It may seem extraordinary that someone who died when she was only

thirty years old left behind 696 letters written to her family between the beginning of

her college years in 1950 and her death early in February 1963. […] I felt she could

make use of them in stories, in a novel, and through them meet herself at the varied

stages in her own development […]” (Letters Home 3). In her biography, The Haunting

of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose comments on the letters and says:

Sylvia’s letters to her mother were not just a simple transformation of events

description. The question of plausibility was not as essential as the

aesthetics and style. She wanted to write good fiction at the same time. […]

it is language and writing itself that the mother and daughter most intimately

share: ‘We were critical of our verbal and written expression, for we shared

a love of words and considered them as a tool used to achieve precise

expression, a necessity for accuracy in describing our emotions, as well as

for mutual understanding. […] This could help to explain the moments in

the Journals when Plath describes her own writing as an always inadequate

gift offered to her mother, as well as the ease with which the same writing

can be turned into a weapon against her (The Bell Jar, to which the

publication of the Letters Home by Aurelia Plath comes as the reply). (82)

14
Plath found herself in a schizophrenic double reality between the world designed for

her mother and the one of her real deep self. On February 6, 1961, in the third month of

her second pregnancy, Sylvia had a miscarriage. That day she wrote to her mother:

I do hope the sad news in my last letter didn’t cast you down to much. I

foresaw how you’d enjoy sharing the good news with all your friends and

relatives and only hope it hasn’t been too hard to contradict our optimistic

plans.[…] All I can say is that you’d better start saving for another trip

another summer, and I’ll make sure I can produce a new baby for you then!

(Letters Home 409)

This sounds like a real “fiction” in the sense of sincerity. Sylvia, the caring daughter,

ignored her great distress caused by the miscarriage and promised her mother to

“produce a new baby” for her. On the other hand the ‘real’ Sylvia was concurrently

writing The Bell Jar where she portrayed her mother as a devastating element in her life

and through the figure of Mrs. Greenwood she was “exorcising” the repressed bitter

feelings towards her (Stevenson 214). She created a divided self consisting of the inner

part let out in a form of artistic expression and of the outer mask presented to the others

in various life roles she wanted to play immaculately. The struggle between the former

and the latter made her literally crazy. The negative instinctual energy boiled inside her

waiting for some relief mediated through the poetic language. She wanted to write her

psyche with its real essence. But the last person to see her reversed side was her mother

as she was the main target of her repressed energy and violence. Sylvia felt that her

mother was responsible for the death of her father, for the feelings of inadequacy and

the constant guilt about the hate that dwelt in her. At the same time, everything she did,

she did for her mother. Even the birth of her baby was a side product for Aurelia.

15
 Her writing was caught in a controversial position. Plath realized the

omnipresent feeling of mother surveillance and resented it: “Last night I knew that

mother didn’t matter---she is all for me, but I have dissipated her image and she

becomes all editors and publishers and critics and the World, and I want acceptance

there, and to feel my work good and well-taken” (Kukil 484). At the same time, if her

artistic expression was one of the most important ways how to release the negative

energy and anger towards Aurelia, she had to be prevented from reading it. When The

Bell Jar was published, Sylvia used a pseudonym Victoria Lucas to save her mother the

painful exposure to her daughter’s repressed emotional attacks. A lot of the crucial

poems that are regarded to be the revelation of her real self are included in Ariel and

Collected Poems that had to posthumous. Alive, Sylvia Plath, could never exhibit the

painful feelings humiliating her mother. Nevertheless, if she did not express herself in

such an extreme way she would probably not have reached what Robert Lowell later in

the foreword to Ariel called an “appalling and triumphant fulfillment”(ix).

The father figure in Plath’s life and work undoubtedly played a crucial role, but

one can also argue that the father figure was mediated and created as an artificial deity

through the maternal omnipresence. Not only did Aurelia mediate the picture of Otto

Plath, she was, in the eyes of Sylvia, also trying to create a mirror image of herself in

her daughter. Plath felt that she was forced to an identity and that she was not finally

able to recognize who she was. On December 27, 1958 Plath wrote: “When she dies,

what will I feel? I wish her death so I could be sure of what I am: so I could know what

feelings I have, even though some resemble hers, are really my own. Now I find it hard

to distinguish between the semblance and the reality” (Kukil 449).

It was during the therapeutic sessions with Dr. Beuscher in the years 1958-59

that Plath openly faced her dark feelings towards her mother. Beusher gave her

16
something better than any doctor before, she permitted her to hate her mother. Suddenly

the feelings of guilt turned to diametrically different views: “She killed him (The

Father) by marrying him too old, by marrying him sick to death and dying, by burying

him every day since in her heart, mind and words” (Kukil 431). Then at another point

she was overwhelmed by her own guilt of killing her father: “If I really think I killed

and castrated my father may all my dreams of deformed and tortured people be my

guilty visions of him or fears of punishment for me” (Kukil 476). The lost identity

absorbed by her mother was the source of extremely ambivalent feelings. At one point

she accused her of not being able to protect her enough, to love her enough and then she

called her a “vampire” and “deadly cobra under that shiny greengold hood” (Kukil 433).

She felt she had to do what her mother as her personalized super-ego told her to do and

she wanted to revolt against it. At the same time she could not, as she so much owed her

mother and so much identified with her: “She said this. She wants to be me: she wants

me to be her: she wants to crawl into my stomach and be my baby and ride along. But I

must go her way. I’ll have my own babies, thank you. I’ll have my own husband, thank

you. You won’t kill him the way you killed my father” (Kukil 433-4). Is it possible that

it is by this extreme identification with her mother she creates such a close love

relationship with her father seeing herself as his bride who would join him in death

again? Concurrently by killing herself she would kill the draining echo of her mother.

Plath suffered from an existential anxiety coming from a “chaos of experience”

(Kukil 448). Writing was “a way of ordering and reordering” things inside that mental

confusion. “I felt I couldn’t write because nobody would accept me as a human being.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love

me for my writing” (Kukil 448). She needed to excel in the art of writing to be accepted

by the others, by her mother and by her own self. From her early childhood she was

17
accustomed to the idea that she was predestined to become a successful writer. Her first

poem was printed in the children’s section of the Boston Herald when she was eight. At

high school, besides publishing for the school newspapers, she happened to co-author a

published response to an article in The Atlantic Monthly called “A Reasonable Life in

the Mad World” (Mondragon). “The original article stated that the modern man must

rely on the ability to reason in order to further society. Plath's response argued that,

beyond reason, one needed to connect with and embrace inner divinity and spirituality

to fully live” (Mondragon).

In 1950, Plath entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and she

continued in her writing career publishing for various magazines like Seventeen,

Harper’s and The Christian’s Science Monitor. In 1952, she won a Mademoiselle’s

college fiction contest and spent almost a month in New York’s Mademoiselle

magazine office as a guest editor (Stevenson 35). In spite of all the success Plath started

to suffer with bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts. In November 1952, she wrote

to her diary: “I am afraid. I am not solid but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb,

paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote,

I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back

abjectly into the womb” (Kukil 149). When she came back home from New York,

Sylvia learnt that she was not accepted to a desired course at Harvard Summer School.

Her previously developed fear in her own inadequacy grew into disastrous dimension.

Even if she tried to fight with her fears there seemed to be no improvement. Finally she

was taken to a psychiatrist who diagnosed severe depression and prescribed what was at

that time considered to be the best therapy for severe depression and schizophrenia –

electroconvulsive therapy (Behrman). The experience with the ECT is depicted

particularly in Plath’s fiction. It is described quite in detail in The Bell Jar through the

18
experience of Esther Greenwood and in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams that

deals with it in a symbolic and rather poetic way.

On August 24, 1953, Plath left a note to her mother that she went for a walk. She

crawled into a small space in the cellar where she swallowed forty sleeping pills. After

two days of desperate search, her brother Warren heard a moaning that finally led him

to Sylvia’s suicidal hiding place. She had taken too many of the pills, vomited them and

then she was banging her head repeatedly on the rocks of the cellar in an attempt to sit

up (Letters Home 131). They immediately called the ambulance. Aurelia Plath

remembered her first words after she recovered consciousness. She moaned: “Oh, no!”

and then she added “It was my last act of love” (Letters Home 125-6). In the days

before the suicidal attempt her diary confessions were full of despair from the growing

inability to believe in anything, to feel, to love. Her fear of not succeeding

“intellectually and academically”, of embarrassing her family by being put to the

“straight jacket” started to be unbearable. That is probably why she called her death the

“last act of love” (Kukil 187). It seemed to be the only possible way how to express it.

Sylvia always struggled with the ambivalent feelings of being omnipotent and with the

need to be cared of at the same time. Her suicidal attempt could be therefore seen as an

act of both feelings. Having her sacred life in her own hands she wanted to rejoin with

her lost beloved father and to return to the maternal womb. This is symbolized by the

hollow in the basement, as if she tried to go through a kind of resurrection and rebirth,

later addressed in her poems.

The symbol of Lazarus as an object of identification and admiration reappears in

her journals and then both in the poetry and in the fiction: “I feel like Lazarus: that story

has such a fascination, being dead I rose up again, and even resort to the mere sensation

value of being suicidal, of getting so close, of coming out of the grave with the scars

19
and the marring mark on my cheek […]” (Kukil 199). In Plath’s short story, Tongues of

Stone, she relives her suicide attempt and she writes:

Creeping back to her own bed then, she had lifted up the mattress, wedging

herself in the crevice between mattress and bedsprings, longing to be

crushed beneath the heavy slab. She had fought back to darkness and lost.

They had jolted her back into the hell of her dead body. They had raised her

like Lazarus from the mindless dead […].

(Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams 265)

Like the biblical Lazarus she experiences her rebirth.

When Plath recovered from her physical injuries she was transported to the

Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatric clinic. At that time, Olive Higgins Prouty, a

writer and Sylvia’s sponsor at Smith, who herself suffered a mental breakdown twenty-

five years before, offered both financial and emotional help. Sylvia was admitted to

McLean Hospital’s mental institution in Belmont where she got another round of ECT

treatment. Besides, she received an insulin therapy that showed a rapid improvement

(Letters Home 128). She was released in January and soon pursued her studies at Smith.

Plath started to write poetry again and to earn excellent grades. (Mondragon).

In February 1955, she learnt of her acceptance to both Oxford and Cambridge

Universities in England. Having received a Fulbright scholarship, Plath finally decided

for Cambridge. It later became another important breakthrough in Plath’s life as, among

other things, she met an English poet Ted Hughes, her future husband and a man in her

life who had the potential to replace her father. With Hughes, Sylvia found the lost male

authority, a man “huge enough” for her, someone she could depend on and admire

(Kukil 211). Plath realized her need to identify Hughes with her father and she admitted

20
that “Ted, insofar as he is a male presence is a substitute for my father: but in no other

way” (Kukil 447).

However, at another point in her journal she warns her mother: “You won’t kill

him the way you killed my father. He has a soul, he has sex strong as it comes. He isn’t

going to die so soon. So keep out” (Kukil 434). Aurelia was Sylvia’s ally in the letters

but her mortal enemy in the diaries. Her first months with Ted were like a total

resurrection: “I know this with a sure strong knowing to the tips of my toes, and having

been on the other side of life like Lazarus, I know that my whole being shall be one

song of affirmation and love all my life long” (Letters Home 243). She again used her

favorite Lazarus identification and full of optimism she exposed the cheerful Sylvia to

her mother despite the fact that her beloved grandmother was at that time dying of

cancer.

On June 16, 1956, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes got married in London. It was a

secret ceremony with her mother as a sole family attendant (Letters Home 247). It

seemed that the two poets were truly born for each other and Sylvia believed that she

had finally filled the male absence in her life. “He [Ted] is better than any teacher, even

fills somehow that huge, sad hole I felt in having no father” (Letters Home 289). What

she did not realize at that time was that her absent father revived in Hughes was never to

leave him anymore and that she would have to go through the experience of loss and

betrayal once again. Hughes was an object of Sylvia’s highest admiration and love but

also of jealousy, both personal and professional. She felt strong and fulfilled but also

inadequate next to him. While in February 1957, Hughes won a prestigious first-book

award for his collection of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, Sylvia started her teaching at

Smith College (Mondragon). After some time she got into another emotional stress from

feeling not good enough for the job and she even lost her desire to write. During the

21
following autumn she worked part-time as a secretary in the same psychiatric ward

where she had spent some time after her first suicidal attempt (Mondragon). Her

depressions came back but she started to communicate with her fears coping with them

through the writing.

Her journal entry from October 1, 1957 was called Letter to a Demon. She

wrote: “I cannot ignore this murderous self: it is there. I smell it and feel it, but I will

not give it my name. I shall shame it. […] Talking about my fears to others feeds it”

(Kukil 618-9). Her experience in the psychiatric clinic and the contact with neurosis

from the other side of the fence altered the perceptions of her demons.

The story, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, is a result of that experience.

Fear in this story is deified and exalted as the highest potency: “The only thing to Love

is Fear itself. Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom. The only thing to Love is Fear

itself. May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere” (Johnny Panic and the Bible of

Dreams 166). She seemed to mock Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear

itself” (Safire 481) and at the same time with a kind of worshiping triple repetition of

the word fear as if she tried to exorcize and master her demon. Plath openly started to

use her most subjective feelings as the basic material for her writing. Also her

experience of the McLean mental hospital was for the first time pronounced in Johnny

Panic and the Bible of Dreams.

The crucial element in her poetic development at this time was the example of

Robert Lowell’s Life Studies.1 Sylvia attended his classes at Boston University and this

encouraged a more personal creative experiment in her (Alvarez 20). She felt she had

finally found the right source of her writing, a source that would never be exhausted.

Her most suppressed fears and horrors were now to be revived and fully used. In her

1
Robert Lowell represented a breakthrough in the 20th century American poetry especially during the
fifties “the era of doctrine New Criticism, of the Intentional Fallacy, and the whole elaborate, iron dogma
by which poetry was separated utterly from the man who made it (Alvarez 20).

22
journal entry from July 17, 1957, she expressed her new poetic maturity and wrote: “My

health is making stories, poems, novels of experience: that is why, or, rather, that is why

it is good, that I have suffered & been to hell, although not to all the hells. […] Writing

breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angles

hide” (Kukil 286). In his study, The Savage God, A. Alvarez distinguishes between

‘Totalitarian Art’ and ‘Extremist Art’. The former represents a dehumanized perspective

that refuses any kind of unique personal insight and is oriented outwardly and “tackles

the historical situation frontally, more or less, brutally” (Alvarez 205). The latter is an

opposing perspective where “the destruction is all turned inwards and the artist

deliberately explores in himself that narrow, violent area between the viable and the

impossible, the tolerable and the intolerable” (Alvarez 205). Plath with her inner

perspective belongs to the ‘Extremists’. She liked to compare herself with Virginia

Woolf, her voice having been Woolfish though stronger and tougher. What Woolf

embraced through her developed sense of observation Plath wanted primarily to

experience. Not to observe and write but to live through and write. In her eyes, Woolf

was “too ephemeral, needing the earth. I [Plath] will be stronger: I will write until I

begin to speak my deep self, and then have children, and speak still deeper. The life of

the creative mind first, then the creative body” (Kukil 286).

Plath managed to fulfill her visions quite soon and in the right order. In February

1960, she signed a contract for the publication of her first collection of poems The

Colossus and Other Poems. In April, she gave birth to Frieda, her first child

(Mondragon). That event, nevertheless, meant another total breakthrough and brought

another emotional crisis. The motherhood turned Plath from the deep inside to a

desperate need to break free from her narcissistic view of herself. What first seemed to

be the only genuine reality was now just “Ash. Ash and more ash” (Kukil 500). She

23
suddenly felt that if she wanted to write about life she should escape her “snake pit”

(Kukil 495). Her earlier self-conscious voice determined to describe her guts was

suddenly numb.

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast

on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I

look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby

cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart,

enclosed in a wall of glass. […] My inability to lose myself in a character, a

situation. Always myself, myself. (Kukil 517)

Despite all this, in 1961, she started work on The Bell Jar, her semi-autobiographical

novel, the only novel she ever published. It is centered around her first suicidal

attempt (Hayman x). She wrote poems like The Moon and the Yew Tree, Insomniac,

Widow and The Rival, that definitely did not abandon her confessional style. They

were again mainly directed against her mother, full of repressed violent energy.

On January 17, 1962, Palth gave birth to her second baby, Nicolas. At that

time, her relationship with Hughes was already in a crisis. She learned of his affair

with Assia Wevill, a woman they had both met when they let their flat in London to

her and her husband David. Just a few weeks before, Plath had had a car accident.

She drove her car off the road and she later described that incident as an aborted

suicide attempt. Ted and Sylvia separated in September. During the month after

separation she wrote at least twenty-six poems (Hayman x).

In 1958, when she first accused Ted of adultery, she wrote in her diary: “I

identify him with my father at certain times, and this time take on great importance.

[…] It was an incident only that drew forth echoes, not the complete withdrawal of

my father who deserted me forever. […] Images of his faithlessness with women

24
echo my fear of my father’s relation with my mother and Lady Death” (Kukil 447).

On the other hand, it seemed that Plath was finally approaching her independence and

even though she suffered existentially she produced poems that made her immortal.

She prepared Ariel, a collection of forty one poems and these were the poems that

would bring her fame, though she would never know it.

In the early morning of February 11, 1963, Plath set some bread and milk in

the children’s room, sealed their door off with a tape, and then sealed herself in the

kitchen where she knelt in front of an open oven and turned on the gas (Mondragon).

One could argue if she really wanted to kill herself. In the entry hall she left a note

saying “Please call Dr. Horder” with his telephone number.

Her death became a mystery that laid the foundations of her myth. Dr. Horder,

who had been her personal physician for two years, believed her suicide could not be

interpreted as unintentional due to the deliberation with which she set it up. Her

swings of mood were so excessive that brain chemistry had to be taken into

consideration and though the importance of marriage breakdown and exhaustion after

artistic activity and frequent illness could not be ignored he nevertheless concluded

that in her case “the body was governing the mind” (Stevenson 297-8). A. Alvarez,

who was Sylvia’s close friend during her last years, speculates about her suicide in

his study and says: “I am convinced by what I know of the facts that this time she did

not intend to die” (Alvarez 28). She just wanted to play Lazarus again and go through

another rebirth since she thought it was the right time. When Ted Hughes abandoned

her she went through the same grief and feelings of betrayal as when her father died.

Her old demons of death were back and she wanted to exorcise them first with her art

and second with another death experiment. She wrote her famous poem, Daddy,

where she without self pity, cried out the courage and determination to face her

25
horrors and then to prove her poetic credo that “dying is an art like everything else”

she committed suicide – “the act which validates her poems, gives them their interest

and proves her seriousness” (Alvarez 33).

Ted Hughes in his introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

argues that “her final and successful suicide attempt [that] came at age thirty does

suggest that to some extent she became caught up in her own systematizing” (7)

mentioning the first stanza of Lady Lazarus “I have done it again. / One year in every

ten” (Ariel 16).

Plath’s death can be also seen as the victory of the true self that finally gave

birth to her myth. In her Chapters in Mythology; The Poetry of Sylvia Plath Judith Kroll

presents a notion based on archetypal patterns of death and rebirth. She argues that

every heroine has a true self and a false self where the latter must die so that the former

can live. “Life lived by the false self is death-in-life, while the rebirth of the true self

promises life-in-death, expressed in the poetry in images of purgation, purification, and

transcendence” (qtd. in Blessing 69). Hughes comments on this in the forward to The

Journals and says that it was in the last three months of her life when Plath revealed her

real self:

Her real self had showed itself in her writing, just for a moment, three years

earlier, and when I heard it—the self I had married, after all, and lived with

and knew well—in that brief moment, three lines recited as she went out

through a doorway, I knew that what I had always felt must happen had now

begun to happen, that her real self, being the real poet, would now speak for

itself, and would throw off all those lesser and artificial selves that had

monopolized the words up to that point. It was as if a dumb person suddenly

spoke. (qtd. in Malcolm, Knopf 3)

26
Two years before his death, Hughes said in an interview that all creative work of Sylvia

Plath told just one story: “her Oedipal love for her father, her complex relationship

with her mother, the attempt at suicide, the shock therapy. The novel and the poems all

tell one story, and she never wrote about anything else. Whatever she wrote before,

were metaphors on parts of this story” (qtd. in Wagner 37). Perhaps that is why she

finally reached her genuine independent self that was spontaneously spitting from her

like blood. She obsessively clung to the same feelings and kept repeating and

retranslating them till she finally freed from the tyrannizing constraints of other

people’s expectations and her constant struggle of inadequacy and perfection. At the

same time she left her body and all the earthly life, which seemed to be the fatal price

for her distinctive voice surviving in her myth.

27
Chapter 2. Freud – Klein – Lacan: The Psychoanalytic Approach
When addressing a text from an autobiographical point of view the

psychoanalytic critical approach suggests itself as one of the first concepts. It is a

method based on a relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the theories of

literature and arts (Wright 1). Both art and psychoanalysis might be said to interconnect

the external and the internal world of human existence. They bridge the outer and the

inner using their own means of expression. Nevertheless, the literary arts more than

others, are closer to the psychoanalytic approach in that they use language as a major

means of communication.

In her study, Psychoanalytical Criticism, Elizabeth Wright points out that

“Psychoanalysis addresses itself to the problems of language, starting from Freud’s

original insight concerning the determining force within utterance: he draws attention to

the effects of desire in language and, indeed, in all forms of symbolic interaction”

(Wright 1). In this chapter, I would like to briefly address some of the theories that

approach literary and artistic retranslation from the psychoanalytic point of view. I will

start with a basic account of creative writing by Sigmund Freud. Secondly, I will deal

with an approach of one of his most prominent followers - Melanie Klein and will then

focus on Jacques Lacan’s theories of language and the unconscious.

Psychoanalysis as a method has spread, during its already lengthy existence, into

many other spheres of human knowledge. It has influenced discussions and practices

not just in art but also in sociology, anthropology, religion and mythology, gaining an

uncertain status overstepping its former limits. It has offered other disciplines a different

approach to their subjects.

Similarly, psychoanalysis itself started from other theorizing. Adam Phillips in

his collection of essays Promises, Promises argues that one should not only ask what

psychoanalysis has done in relation to poetry but also “what the poetic has represented

28
for the psychoanalytic” (Phillips 3). He quotes Freud who in Civilisation and its

Discontents admits that it was from Schiller that he first got the clue for his ideas about

sex and self-preservation instincts: “In what was at first my utter perplexity, I took as

my starting-point a saying of a poet-philosopher, Schiller, that ‘hunger and love are

what moves the world’” (Freud 64). After quoting some lines from Goethe Freud also

comments on the ability of an artist and says: “And we may well heave a sigh of relief

at the thought that it is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from

the whirlpool of their own feelings the deepest truths, towards which the rest of us have

to find our way through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping” (Freud 80).

Paraphrasing Freud, Phillips points out that poetry describes what the mind does and in

a way we are all poetic because what we want to say is sometimes unacceptable to

ourselves and others. He then argues that “We are all poets, but some are more poetic

than others; and it is the difference that makes all the difference” (Phillips 13). Artists

have the ability to find their way through the inexpressible spheres of inner images that

most people are hardly aware of.

In the context of his dream studies, Freud relates art as a process of imagination

to the process of dreaming. He compares the artist with a neurotic and says: “An artist is

once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed by

extensively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power, love, wealth,

fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means of achieving these satisfactions”

(qtd. in Wright 27). This might relate to Plath’s own words used in her diary where she

complained that “Again, I feel the gulf between my desire & ambition and my naked

abilities” (Kukil 273). From the journal entries and also from her writing it can be

observed that Plath’s artistic and dreaming activities were undoubtedly interwoven:

“Dreamed last night I was beginning my novel – “What is there to look to?” […] a girl’s

29
search for her dead father – for an outside authority which must be developed, instead,

from the inside” (Kukil 416). The image of her father so much present in her writing,

was part of her dream world and formed a parallel between the two worlds. In the short

story, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Plath as a narrator calls herself a

“collector of dreams” (135). Officially she works in a City Hospital as a secretary but

actually she servers Johnny Panic himself, the master of Fear who resides in the realm

of dreams. Sylvia is his secretary and she claims: “Dream by dream I am educating

myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the

Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur” (153). In another story, The Wishing

Box, she tells the story of Agnes and Harold. Agnes envies her husband his extremely

vivid and exotic dreams while Agnes’s, if she has any, are frightening and ugly. She is

infuriated because “Harold’s dreams were nothing if not meticulous works of art”

(Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams 205). It seems that Plath realized the close

connection of the world of dreams and the world of art Freud suggests in his papers. In

Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning Freud argues that

art:

…brings about a reconciliation of the two principles [pleasure and reality] in

a peculiar way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality

because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual

satisfaction and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the

life of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world

of phantasy by making use of his special gifts to mould his phantasies into

truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of

reality. (qtd. in Glover)

30
In her study, Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: The British School, Nicola Glover points out

that according to Freud the basic difference between the mere daydreamer and the artist

is that the former ignores reality in his or her dream while the latter though fulfilling

unconscious wishes in the world of phantasy is able to find the way back to reality

(Glover). Both of them, argues Wright, “transform their primitive desires into culturally

acceptable meanings” (Wright 28). Besides, the artist is valuable also in perspective of

the audience. The work of art has a kind of narcotic effect offering a substitute for

reality and an escape from it (Glover).

Generally speaking, Sigmund Freud’s cultural texts are built on the basic notion

that intra-personal and intra-psychic dynamics are embodied in various “achievements

of our civilization” (qtd. in Jonte-Pace 3). In the centre of his theories the Oedipus

complex stands as a dominant paradigm. The feelings of hostility and death wishes are

directed towards the father figure while mother is an object of sexual desire. This

concept gives centrality to the father figure. Diane Jonte-Pace in her study The Uncanny

Mother in Freud’s Cultural Texts argues that below this plot lies another thesis Freud

neglects and she calls it a “counterthesis” (Jonte-Pace 1). She says: “On rare occasions,

and with hesitation, Freud discusses death fantasies in relation to the mother, rather than

the father, exploring matriphobic and misogynist fears and fantasies: fears of the

mother, desires for her death, and fantasies of immortality” (Jonte-Pace 2). Pace points

out that many feminist scholars rejected Freud for being androcentric portraying woman

as morally and intellectually inferior and identified Freud as their major enemy. Juliet

Mitchell, well-known for her social feminist study, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, tries

to reconcile these two polarities and argues that “a rejection of psychoanalysis and of

Freud’s works is fatal for feminism” (xiii). Mitchell reconceptualizes Freud’s notions to

describe social and cultural conditions based on phallocentric ideals and relates e.g. “the

31
penis envy with the feminist concern for equality in the social, political and economic

arenas” (Jonte-Pace 9). Jonte-Pace is in her counter-thesis also interested in

reconstructing Freud and she says that “Although Freud is famous for asking the

question, “What does a woman want?”, a better formulation of this question is: “What

do men think that woman want?” This question sometimes takes a related form: “What

do men think that mothers want?”” (Jonte-Pace 12). Pace finally expands that question

and puts it into: “What do we men and women fear that women (and mothers) want?”

(Jonte-Pace 12). As she re-formulates the question it follows that even women within

the patriarchal context share unconscious matriphobic fantasies (Jonte-Pace 12). The

mother regains her ambivalent position between maternity and mortality being both

womb and tomb of life.

Melanie Klein, one of the main post-Freudian scholars, follows his theories and

affirms Freud’s dual concept of death and life instincts though she develops another

object-relations theory that has an impact on art criticism. She emphasizes the role of

fantasy in the mechanism of perception. While Freud believes that fantasy is a

secondary phenomenon and is primarily manifested in dreams and artistic creation,

Klein argues that fantasy is a central activity and is constantly working in perception,

being “an original expression of both impulses and defense mechanisms” (Glover). She

concerns herself with the early phases of infancy and says that the unconscious is the

place where the body and the external world, at first by no means distinguished, come

into interaction. In Klein’s view: “It is this interaction that establishes ‘object-relations’,

the structurings ‘projected’ outwards and ‘introjected’ inwards which form the pattern

of a self’s dealings with the world, including other people” (Wright 80). Glover

comments on the basic difference in Kleinian theory and observes that:

32
 In 1940, Klein writes that when Freud formulated the notion of the super-

ego as an internalisation of the child's identification with the parents during

the Oedipal phase, he was describing the notion of an inner world, under the

sway of inner figures that represent both parts of the self and objects in the

world. […] Klein believed that the super-ego was formed much earlier than

Freud supposed, and that the mechanisms of projection and introjection

exist from birth, leading to the 'institution inside ourselves of loved and

hated objects, who are felt to be 'good' and 'bad', and who are interrelated

with each other and with the self: That is to say, they constitute an inner

world'. (Glover)

Klein introduces the so-called “depressive position” where “the rudimentary ego

becomes exposed to the destructiveness of instinctual aggressive urges” (Wright 81) and

realizes that his or her feelings of love and hate are directed to the same object of the

mother and her body (Glover). The small child first experiences the potency to affect

another object but also the first impulse to repair what has been damaged by the

destructiveness of hate. This depressive feeling originates in ambivalence and is

regarded to be inherent. Klein believes that anxiety originates in aggression and it is one

of the determining consequences for the formulation of fantasy and the nature of

creativity:

The prototype for the aesthetic interaction […] is the (unconsciously) felt

encounter between infant and mother. The medium of the artist becomes the

mother’s body; the separating out of the bodily self from the primal object is

the central mode of experience. The creative act repeats the experience of

separating from the mother. (Wright 84)

33
The child tries to deal with the depressive anxiety through a process of reparation and

through restorative fantasies:

If depressive anxiety is strong enough it may lead the child to employ

defences characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position, such as splitting

the mother once again into good and bad. By making mother bad, the child

avoids his own guilt and depressive anxiety - these arising from the feeling

that he has destroyed what he loves and needs. (Glover)

Klein also emphasizes that the mechanisms of introjection and projection though rooted

in infancy are not just a matter of infantile processes. The interjection between the

internal and external object-relations continues throughout the succeeding life stages

never losing their influence in the individual’s relation to the inside world and the world

around him (Glover). It is the loss of a loved person that can reactivate the depressive

anxiety later in life. The mourner fears that with the person he or she lost the good

internal objects will be destroyed as well, which represents a double loss. Klein argues

that the pain of mourning and the reparation experience during the depressive position is

the basis of creative activity (Kimura).

In her paper Mourning and its Relation to the Manic-Depressive States, Klein says that

We know that painful experiences of all kinds sometimes stimulate

sublimations, or even bring out quite new gifts in some people, who may

take to painting, writing or other productive activities under the stress of

frustrations and hardships. [. . .] Such enrichment is in my view gained

through processes similar to those steps in mourning. [. . .] That is to say,

any pain caused by unhappy experiences, whatever their nature, has

something in common with mourning. It reactivates the infantile depressive

34
 position; the encountering and overcoming of adversity of any kind entails

mental work similar to mourning. (Klein 328)

Through mourning the individual reinstates the external loss of the loved person as well

as the good internal objects inside.

In an essay, Sylvia Plath’s Mourning and Creativity, Keiko Kimura applies

Klein’s theory to the creative process of Sylvia Plath and concludes that it was her

father’s death that triggered the process of compensation and “Plath must have felt that

what had been lost in her father’s death was not only the person but some parts of her

own self. […] She attempted to restore the lost love object by poetry. For Plath, it was a

means of reinstating the lost love objects as well as the lost internal good objects”

(Kimura). The attempts to escape the sufferings connected with the depressive position

can, according to Klein, lead to a severe psychosis. People who fail to experience

mourning are one of the examples:

Feeling incapable of saving and securely reinstating their loved objects

inside themselves, they must turn away from them more than hitherto and

therefore deny their love for them. This may mean that their emotions in

general become more inhibited; in other cases it is mainly feelings of love

which become stifled and hatred is increased. At the same time, the ego uses

various ways of dealing with paranoid fears (which will be the stronger the

more hatred is reinforced). (Klein 336)

In Letters Home, Aurelia Plath remembered that she had been accused by Sylvia for not

taking her and Warren to the funeral of their father and that she therefore did not have

the opportunity to feel a proper grief (23). It is not just her personal writing in the form

of letters and diaries that reflect the constant struggle with the ambivalent feelings of

love and hate towards both her parents. Her literary writing is also full of contradictory

35
symbols features representing the attempt to restore both her love and hate objects but

evidently not reaching the ideal internal integration of the good and the bad.

The relationship between inner psychic mechanisms and their outer expressions

constitute a fundamental concept in Lacanian theory. In her literary study,

Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi argues that “Lacan seems to follow Melanie Klein’s

views of child development in so far as he postulates that the child’s earliest experience

of itself is one of fragmentation” (Moi 100). Lacan redefines the Freudian concepts

focusing on identification and language subjectivity and introduces a theory of the

Symbolic Order based on de Saussure’s conceptualization of language. Literature and

other textual material is for Lacan the basic model material for understanding the

relationship between psyche and language. In his study of Lacan, Madan Sarup points

out that “For a Lacanian reading of literature it is important to understand the ‘mirror

phase’, the mother’s desire and the desire for the mother; the intervention of the

Father’s law, and how the ‘name-of-the-father’ replaces the ‘desire of the mother’, the

interaction between the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real” (Jacques Lacan 162). Not only

does Lacan relate the unconscious with language but he even suggests that the

unconscious is a product of language (Jacques Lacan 162).

In Breaking Free of Symbolic Bondage: From Feminine Submission to a Vision

of Equality, Meg McGavran Murray introduces her study with a myth of the creation of

the world. She begins her paper and remarks that in the beginning there was the Word

and from that time on the “language has the power to speak us into being” (Murray 21).

Murray relates the idea to one of Lacan’s main beliefs that “language is the precondition

for the act of becoming aware of oneself as a distinct entity” (Introductory Guide to

Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism 8). He asserts that the “law of language is the

law of man” (qtd. in Murray 21) and within this Symbolic Order the law of the Father is

36
the law of the Word. According to Lacan the symbols design one’s being and “the

Symbolic to him thus designates the unconscious system, those rules of kinship residing

deep in the self that appear not only in our words, but also in our personal and social

myths, the complex of accepted patterns of behavior, and other components of common

culture that make society possible” (Murray 21).

In his study of Lacan Malcolm Bowie notices that following Freud and his triple

differentiation of the mind into id, ego and super-ego Lacan introduces his own triad of

the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real that, however, do not symbolize mental forces but

rather “orders each of which serves to position the individual within a force-field that

traverses him” (Bowie 91). The first Imaginary order is the “pre-linguistic, pre-oedipal

stage” also called a “mirror stage, in which the infant makes an imaginary identification

with its reflection in a mirror” (Wright 108) and since the mother is the first person the

infant experiences, it models itself upon the mother image. Lacan uses the term ‘Desire

of the Mother’ which represents both the “mother’s desire and the desire for the

mother” (Wright 108). The desire for the mother constitutes the process of

“identification and an illusory sense of unity” (Homer 31). There is still no concept of

the others, there is just the illusory self without a need of confrontation. Since

“repression is neither experienced nor acknowledged, there is, according to Lacan, no

unconscious at this stage” and no language that should be acquired (Wright 108-9).

The notion of otherness occurs in the next stage that Lacan calls the Symbolic

order within which the seeming unity is destroyed and the permanent gap based on the

logic of differences is created. By acquiring language the individual is “reduced into an

empty signifier (“I”) within the field of the Other, which is to say, within a field of

language and culture (which is always determined by those others that came before

you” (Felluga). Emptiness is the essential keyword of this stage. Lacan suggests that

37
“nothing exists except on an assumed foundation of absence. Nothing exists except in

so far as it does not exist” (qtd. in Bowie 93). Bowie makes Lacan’s contrast clear and

continues by saying that

Gaps have as much signifying power as plentitudes, and neither has such

power without the other. Whereas the inhabitant of the Imaginary ventures

into the world of others only to freeze, foreshorten and incorporate it, the

Symbolic is inveterately intersubjective and social. It is a res publica that

does not allow anyone of its members to be himself, keep himself to himself

or recreate in his own image the things that lie beyond him. (Bowie 93)

The Symbolic order is the phase within where the Saussurian pattern signifier-signified

is applied. The link between a signifier, a word sound and a signified, a concept is

entirely arbitrary and any sound can represent any concept. But “once bonded in use”

argues Saussure “the combination is secure, as firmly bonded together as the two sides

of a single sheet of paper” (qtd. in Wright 109). Lacan responds by pointing out that in

his theory Saussure ignores the problem of reference and that the security of the

combination is, on the contrary, extremely insecure. “Illusion can enter the sign-system

because the identification of the signified depends upon the human judgments, which

can, notoriously and justifiably, differ. The Saussurian security is removed here: a

hidden gap opens up between signifier and signified, the bar no longer a bond, but a

division” (Wright 109). This gap is the representation of the loss experienced during the

separation from the mother and it initiates the lifelong need for the lost unity of the self.

As was already mentioned, the Imaginary unity is, nevertheless, just an illusion. The

pure essence of existence is in the realm of the Real where in the centre there is the

Other that is the real self. The Other is what one is not and never will be. It is the never-

ending lack that all individuals experience in a form of desire. Not only one can never

38
merge with this Real existence, one cannot even express it with words. Lacan argues

that “every word indicates the absence of what it stands for” (Wright 111) and

intensifies the child’s frustration of the separation. Bowie points out that while Freud

sees the reality in the world external to the world of the human mind, for Lacan “the

Real is that which lies outside the symbolic process, and it is to be found in the mental

as well as in the material world” (Bowie 94). The inaccessibility is the fact that these

two worlds can never meet in unity and no word can ever match its concept. The world

of reality and the world of language are separated with a chasm. Reality does not give

any meaning to the system of language – it is the language through which we reach the

meaning of the world’s reality (Morris 116). As Lacan says “the real does not wait, and

specifically not for the subject, since it expects nothing from the word. But it is there,

identical to its existence, a noise in which everything can be heard, and ready to

submerge in its outbursts what the ‘reality principle’ constructs within it under the name

of external world” (qtd. in Bowie 95). Wright adds that “language imposes a chain of

words along which the ego must move while the unconscious remains in search of the

object it has lost” (111). Language as a system developed for communication

concurrently proves its own insufficiency and the fact that words sometimes fail.

Sylvia Plath’s language is full of symbols that reoccur in different writings. As if

she was caught in the vicious circle of never-ending absence. Freud and consequently

also Lacan are interested in the notion of repetitive compulsion. Lacan linked to

repetition the word ‘insistence’ when the “meaning of the unconscious subject is

pressing or insisting on being expressed” but without success (Jacques Lacan 171).

Plath’s symbolic repetition seems to represent the quest of the mental object to be

linked to the right expression. She was constantly exploring her mental reservoir

desperately searching for something real: “I believe that there is a realm (abstractly,

39
hypothetically, of course) of absolute fact. Something IS. And that in our poor human

lingo, would be the “truth”. (But as far as I am concerned, that truth is matter not

spirit.)” (Kukil 120). Plath at the same time realized the hopelessness of the quest and

she says: “No man can ever grasp the whole impersonal neutrality of the universe. That

is hidden under the mists of subjectivity. We are merely variously constructed sounding

boards for the noise of the pine tree falling (proverbially) in the forest. The sound is

potential, even if no one is there to hear it” (Kukil 121). Plath probably perceived the

ambivalence of the actual expression and the closeness of its real essence never to be

merged into one, and that is why she was an artist of an almost schizoid nature.

The centre, that Lacan defines as the core of the Real, has a lot of names. Apart

from the Other it is also called the Phallus or the Law-of-the-Father deriving from the

Freudian Oedipus theory. When the self is constructed during the mirror stage, the most

important other, that gives existence to the self, is the mother. “The child decides that it

can merge with the mother if it becomes what the mother wants it to be—in Lacan’s

terms, the child tries to fulfill the mother’s desire” (Klages). Still for Lacan it is not the

mother that represents the lack, “because the idea of lack, or Lack, is essential to the

concept of language, because the concept of Lack is part of the basic structuration of

language, the father becomes a function of the linguistic structure. The Father, rather

than being a person, becomes a structuring principle of the Symbolic order” (Klages).

Such as Freud, Lacan develops theoretical rules that are specifically paternal.

“The "Symbolic" to him thus designates the unconscious system, those rules of

kinship residing deep in the self that appear not only in our words, but also in our

personal and social myths, the complex of accepted patterns of behavior, and other

components of common culture that make society possible” (Murray 21). In her study,

Murray addresses the patriarchal concept and diverts the attention to maternal principle

40
that still stands in the social background subordinated to a slightly exaggerated

omnipotent Father figure.

Similarly, Murray quotes Dorothy Dinnerstein, an American feminist academic,

and argues that “because of the mother's life-and-death control over helpless infancy,

we all, men and women alike, fear the will of woman. We fear the female will because

it is embedded in female power, which is under present conditions the earliest and

profoundest prototype of absolute power” (qtd. in Murray 22-3). Though fathers

represent the law that “damns and saves” (Murray 23), mothers the mighty earth figures

veiled in the nurturing potency are both loved and resented as they personify the

ironical terror of being abandoned and stripped of the self-reliance – “of being

swallowed into the female blackness from which, […] there can be no self recovery”

(Murray 24). What Lacan does apart from other things with his psycho-linguistic

concepts is that he reveals how we all are bounded by this false symbolic logic of

father’s authority and how we serve received narrative myths.

Following Lacan, Murray studies the projection of myth in the works of three

artists and one of them is Sylvia Plath. She argues that she “represents the archetypal

victim” of the symbolic order (Murray 28). Her father’s death becomes a ready-made

symbol of lack and desire and the fragmented father figure the reason of her own

fragmentation. He represents the “gap, a béance, at the centre of her being” (Murray

28), he is the object of the desire that cannot be reached while her mother is in the

position of the omnipresent other or the Other that cannot be avoided. As she writes in

her journals, Plath is finally incapable of distinguishing between her own existence and

the existence of her mother. She cannot resist expressing her hatred towards her,

therefore in hating her mother she hates her own self. Murray points out that the

problem is rooted in the inequality of the basic principles:

41
 The public recognition of women's positive strength depends, then, upon

women's ability to overcome their own fear of women. There is a need to

demythologize not only those fathers whose professional guidance and

expertise we have allowed surreptitiously to guide our lives, but the dreaded

mother as well. We must accept the word that womankind has to teach' us

about not just the Law but compassion and affirm both with our words and

in our actions woman's humane values. (Murray 27)

Plath symbolizes the “victim of the symbolic system” always suffering from the

feelings of inadequate capacity to speak the truth (Murray 48). In one of her final poems

as if she resigns from her verbal inability and accepts the human impossibility of

expressing the Real: “Words dry and riderless, / The indefatigable hoof-taps. / While /

From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars / govern a life” (Ariel 86). In a poetic way Plath

expresses the basic Lacanian concept of the fact that we are all imprisoned in the

insufficiency of language.

Lacan argues that “From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured

and tortured by language” (qtd. in Phillips 14). Following this notion, Lacan together

with Klein agree that some words are still more revealing than others “and the paradigm

for this […] is the literary arts” and that artists can “‘capture’ certain kinds of

experience” psychoanalysts and scientists cannot (Phillips 16). Though both Lacan and

Klein emphasize the concept of fragmentation and the impossibility of filling the gap it

seems that art symbolizes a kind of relief and “belief in the meaningfulness of language

[and] restore the confidence in words” (Phillips 15). The language of art remains to be

the way of speaking that is better than others and though so much insecure it is worth

speaking.

42
Chapter 3. The Bell Jar
Plath’s greatest literary ambition was always to write fiction rather than poetry.

Hughes in the introduction to her short stories points out that it was also her “most

visible burden” (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams 2). She wanted to excel in this

art not just for the professional standing but also because she desired “a practical motive

for investigating the real world” (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams 3). In her

journals she stressed: “I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of

translation and expression of life” (Kukil 184), to “write about things of the world with

no glazing” (Kukil 485). Plath was fascinated with the “thingness of things” (qtd. in

Stevenson 295) and actually as Stevenson observes it was one of the sources of her

extraordinary power – that every image she used was grounded in some thing, “depicted

as verbal paint” (Stevenson 272). Though she was acknowledged primarily as a poet,

her main aspiration was to write conventional stories: “For me poetry is an evasion from

the real job of writing prose” (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams 3). Writing prose

for her was a way to present the world objectively without glazing. Her strong

subjective voice was, nevertheless, unable to reach realistic and sober viewing and it

took her a lot of effort to acknowledge her subjectivity as the only theme. In The Bell

Jar, she found a real life topic, but as it was her own story she did not have to avoid the

subjective perspective.

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath‘s only novel. It is written in the first person and it is

characterized by strong autobiographical features. Esther Greenwood tells a story of the

events that happened before and after her suicide attempt that corresponds to the one

Sylvia Plath made in 1953. Behind a façade of fiction Plath copes with the early identity

problems that took her to the mental hospital where she experienced electroconvulsive

therapy. The quite short period of time depicted in the novel meant not just an important

43
personal shift but it was also significant from the inspirational point of view, as a lot of

images and poetic symbolism originate at this time. Therefore, one of the reasons for

writing the story could again be a kind of rebirth through a written form and a deeper

realization of Plath’s complicated self. In 1959, two years before she started to work on

the novel, she wrote in her diary: “Read COSMOPOLITAN from cover to cover. Two

mental-health articles. I must write one about a college girl suicide. THE DAY I DIED.

And a story, a novel even. Must get out SNAKE PIT. There is an increasing market for

mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, recreate it” (Kukil 495). An important

encouragement for this act was the already mentioned Robert Lowell’s seminar at

Boston University. She felt heartened on learning that he had had the same experience

from a mental institution. In a later interview Plath says: “I’ve been very excited by

what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies.

This intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal emotional experience, which

I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell’s poems about his experience in mental

hospital, for example, interest me very much” (qtd. in Alvarez 20). Lowell represented

an important impulse that triggered Plath’s deep urge to relive and truly experience her

life through writing and through writing to discover the genuine essence of one’s self. In

another entry of her diary she claimed that:

…everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it,

and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-

doubt. And you are so obsessed by your coming necessity to be

independent, to face the great huge man-eating world, that you are

paralyzed: your whole body and spirit revolves against having to commit

yourself to a particular roll, to a particular life which Might Not bring out

the Best you have in you. (Kukil 545)

44
My argument concerning The Bell Jar is that the concept of “self-doubt” and the

“necessity to be independent” is what is crucial and again that the mother-daughter

relationship is at the root of it all. Though the story is based on real events and images

of real people, the fictitiousness of the novel is implicit and in this respect it should be

approached from the author’s reflected self point of view. Plath continues in her diary

entry saying: “and you have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before

you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you. You big baby” (Kukil

546). Trying to find her own self she used the other people’s identities as in a scientific

experiment. Stevenson argues that “The portrayal of others in her work would only

reflect what they truly represented artistically to her: projections and reflections of her

own powerful subjectivity” (Stevenson 167).

As already mentioned in the previous chapters, Plath’s subjectivity is closely

linked with her mother’s and also in the novel, one can see the imprint of the ambiguous

mother-daughter relationship in almost every character. In this analysis, the mother’s

omnipresence will be addressed together with a kind of condensed depiction of each

character created or re-created by Plath.

Every character in The Bell Jar seems to reflect a piece of identity that Sylvia

separated from her own and out of which she consequently creates a new individuality –

a concentrate filtered out from the original mixture of Plath’s chaotic identity that

haunted her. The problematic contradictory feelings to her mother could be reflected in

almost every other relationship described in the story. Moreover, the notion of

ambiguity is not only present in the characters depiction but it characterizes the novel as

a whole. The more or less apparent emotional attack on Plath’s mother was one of the

reasons why the novel was published under the pseudonym, Victoria Lucas. In this

chapter, I will focus on how the ambiguous and very problematic mother-daughter

45
relationship is mirrored in other characters in the novel and how the maternal principle

is distilled in images seemingly unrelated to the issue.

The story can be divided into three distinct parts. The first one, set in New York,

is rather superficial, and directed outward. The second part describes Esther’s stay in the

mental hospital and at first seems to be rather fantasy like and ironic when finally it

turns its voice into a pragmatic and balanced tone, closing the whole novel with an

impression of reconciliation – it is when the imaginary bell jar is lifted up though the

author clearly suggests that it will never really cease to exist.

The novel begins when Esther together with other eleven girls wins a month’s

internship in a women’s magazine editorial office2 and experiences what should be the

time of her life. She goes to parties, eats delicate food, gets presents and meets young

men but still some kind of creeping negativity keeps intruding. The opening sentence of

the novel says: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the

Rosenberg’s, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York” (The Bell Jar 1). The

Rosenberg’s case and their electrocution is at one hand commented in an almost

childish way when Esther points out “I thought it must be the worst thing in the world”

(The Bell Jar 1) but at the same time the previous sentence introduces an ironical

comment referring to her own electroshock therapy that is yet to come in the near

future. The statement sounds as a foreboding: “It had nothing to do with me, but I

couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your

nerves” (The Bell Jar 1). Though expressing her deeply rooted horrors, Plath continues

linking the Rosenbergs with the memory of her first encounter with a cadaver in an

ironic association with mundane objects:

2
This fact corresponds to Plath’s experience as a guest editor in Madmoiselle New York magazine in
1953

46
 For weeks afterwards, the cadaver’s head – or what there was left of it –

floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and behind the face of

Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and

pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver’s head around with

me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar”.

(The Bell Jar 1-2)

The artificial superficiality is vibrating with a deeper and darker emptiness that

cannot be patched by the glitter and serves just as a contrastive element. Esther’s

feelings also precisely correspond to the entries that can be found in Plath’s journal

shortly before her suicidal attempt in 1953. Esther concludes the first subchapter saying

that she is “very still and very empty” (The Bell Jar 3) while Sylvia suffers from an

“incapability of loving or feeling” (Kukil 187). This is probably the moment where the

metaphoric “bell jar” starts to descend.

Esther feels estranged among the other girls and though she gives quite a

detailed description of all the fashion business, she is too sensitive to be part of it. Still,

as Edward Butscher in Method and Madness points out, Plath’s actual experience was

as contradictory as Esther’s and “Oddly enough, Sylvia seemed just as fascinated by all

this as were the others. […] but it is likely that her behavior here, as with almost

everything she had ever done, was conscious and rather brave attempt to fight despair

and mental paralysis – to construct an alternative self, a more sophisticated Sylvia who

could laugh at her inadequacies” (Butscher 103). For that purpose and as a substitute in

The Bell Jar Plath creates Doreen, a beautiful southern girl with a sharp tongue, an

embodiment of boisterousness. Esther partly identifies with her and feels a strong

interconnection: “Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of

my own bones” (The Bell Jar 7). Doreen symbolizes everything Esther/Sylvia thinks

47
she ever desired to be. “She made me feel I was that much sharper than the others, and

she really was wonderfully funny” (The Bell Jar 5). Butscher quotes Cyrilly Abels, the

Madmoiselle editor-in-chief portrayed in the novel as Jay Cee, who describes Plath as

an extremely stiff person and she says that she “never found anyone so unspontaneous

so consistently, especially in one so young. She was simply all façade, too polite, too

well-brought-up and well-disciplined” (Butscher 104).

Doreen is what Esther/Sylvia never will be and after all actually not even desires

to be, but the fact that she is what Esther is not fits the pattern of doubleness that is what

seems to be much more appealing. The position of a mere observer who does not want

to be really involved is illustrated in an incident when Esther and Doreen meet a couple

of young men. They go to a bar with them and it quickly becomes clear that Doreen is

the more desirable but still Esther agrees to join Doreen and her new lover Lenny in his

apartment. Esther reveals her fascination with negativity and intensive experience

admitting: “I wanted to see as much as I could. I liked looking on the other people in

crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or baby pickled in a

laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it” (The Bell Jar

13).

One can note the proximity between this passage and another journal entry from

March 1958: “One night, late, we walked out and saw the lurid orange glow of a fire

down below the high school. I dragged Ted to it, hoping for houses in holocaust. […]

The fire was oddly satisfying. I longed for an incident, an accident. What unleashed

desire there must be in one for general carnage. […] Nothing happens: I walk the razor

of jeopardy” (Kukil 356-57). The extremity of this situation is appealing for Plath as it

juxtaposes the weakness of reality and because the rational part of her mind is still

aware of the illusion. In the same matter Doreen represents the possible tempting

48
alternative Esther wants to identify with or at least to be close to even if it means the

repression of her own self. “I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those

red and white rugs and that pine-panelling. I felt like a hole in the ground” (The Bell Jar

17).

However, the closer the individual is to the supposed real identity, the more

probable is the situation that the artificial supplement starts to haunt them. Similarly,

Doreen’s glittering picture changes into an ugly image showing the reversed side that

forms an inseparable part of Plath’s perception. Doreen comes back from her lover

completely drunk and she is sick. She calls for Esther’s help. Esther finally leaves her at

the front of her door suddenly feeling disgust at her friend: “I decided I would watch her

and listen to what she said, but deep down I would have nothing to do with her. […]

Doreen’s body [was] lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to

my own dirty nature” (The Bell Jar 24). Doreen is a double-headed representation of the

outer and the inner dimension, the symbol of the lack that in neither way can be fulfilled

and of violence that originates in the dissatisfaction. At the same time, Doreen’s

imposed identity resembles one of the Others imposed by the mother figure that is

outwardly respected and followed but deeply resented inwardly.

Another predominant element of Plath’s writing is a strong impact of physicality

that goes beyond the space of sexuality and “exposes the preconditions of sexuality and

writing as such” (Rose 30). Rose argues that Plath’s “writing rejoins the orality out of

which language was itself first produced – here words are tongued and mouthed, or else

they vanish and thin” (Rose 31). In her journals, Plath points out: “I feel stifled, weak,

pallid, mealy-mouthed. […] It is sad only to be able to mouth other poets. I want

someone to mouth me” (Kukil 63). Rose suggests that Plath’s obsession first with food

and secondly with orality is associated with her writing, which is apparent both from her

49
work and from her personal journal and letter narrative (Rose 31). “Language and

orality [in Plath’s work] run back into each other, their connection made literal – writing

as biting, sucking” (Rose 31). In another one of her journal entries Plath asks: “Let me

come in and suck your life and sorrow from you as a leech sucks blood; let me gorge

myself on your sensations and ideas and dreams; let me crawl inside your guts and your

cranium and like a tapeworm for a while, draining your life substance into myself”

(Kukil 55). The abstract penetration to the essence of human interiority is

interconnected with the physical dimension.

Bodily instincts for Plath are as much important for self perception as the

investigation of the inner world. Esther with the rest of the girls is invited for a big

banquet where she experiences a gastronomical adventure. She acknowledges her food

affection remarking: “I’m not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about

anything else” (The Bell Jar 25). On that occasion she remembers a poet she once had

the opportunity to have lunch with: “This poet ate his salad with fingers, leaf by leaf,

while talking to me about antithesis of nature and art. I couldn’t take my eyes off the

pale, stubby white fingers traveling back and forth from the poet’s salad bowl to the

poet’s mouth with one dripping lettuce leaf after another” (The Bell Jar 28). The theme

of orality a language is demonstrated also in a short story Tongues of Stone inspired by

Plath’s mental hospital stay in McLean. The girl in the story experiences the same

numbness and lost sense of communication substituted by food satiation and says:

[…] it was only the sun that talked to her still, for all the people had tongues

of stone. Only the sun consoled her a little, and the apples which she picked

in the orchard. She hid the apples under her pillow so that when the nurses

came to lock up her closet and drawers during the insulin treatment she

50
 could still go into the bathroom with an apple in her pocket and shut the

door to eat in large, ravenous bites.

(Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams 263)

Jacqueline Rose argues that “In Plath’s writing, that connection between the body and

language knows no limit – not in the sense that it captures some aesthetic process of

physicality without bounds, but because it touches on the limit, crossing over the

boundary between inside and outside, where what is incorporated is ejected […]” (Rose

35). Reading Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia Plath is aroused by the “vampire”

metaphor Freud uses, and by the process of “draining the ego”: that is exactly the

feelings I have getting in the way of my writing: mother’s clutch” (Kukil 447). She

believes her mother was the source of her suicidal feelings that originate in murderous

impulses transferred from her mother on herself. The impulses derive from the resented

control imposed upon Sylvia’s individuality: “How can I get rid of this depression: by

refusing to believe she has any power over me, like the old witches for whom one sets

out plates of milk and honey” (Kukil 447). Writing as an idea of vampire like biting and

sucking leads back to the mother and the fear of absorbing and of being absorbed by

her. In the Poem for a Birthday Plath exclaims: “Mother, you are the one mouth / I

would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness / Eat me” (Collected Poems 132). As a

personal denial another diary entry says: “What do I expect or want from mother?

Hugging, mother’s milk? But that is impossible to all of us now. Why should I want it

still. What can I do with this want. How can I transfer it to something I can have?”

(Kukil 456). Plath expresses the idea of the notorious gap refilled with words and

writing that do not seem to work either. “ASK ABOUT MOTHER-LOVE: Why these

feelings. Why guilt: […] Magical fear mother will become a child, my child: an old hag

child” (Kukil 456).

51
 In a critical extract to Sylvia Plath, Lynda K. Bundtzen mentions Freud and

argues that Esther’s circular reasoning leading to a feeling of guilt is:

[…] similar to Freud’s description of patients in Analysis Terminal and

Interminable, who out of unconscious sense of guilt, punish themselves by

never getting well. […] Likewise, we begin to suspect that Esther’s sudden

halt after years of accomplishment is motivated by guilt, rather than the

opposite cause-effect sequence. It is guilt that leads to failure, rather than, as

we normally expect, failure that leads to guilt. (Bundtzen 8)

The guilt here is directed towards the mother figure. In The Absence at the Centre:

Sylvia Plath and Suicide, Murray M. Schwartz and Christopher Bollas discuss the

significance of mother figure and argue that “Returning to the maternal matrix […]

resolves Plath’s murderousness, her cannibalistic wish to take in others, by reversing

process, just as suicide reverses the wish to kill the other” (Schwartz, Bollas 194). They

also point out that “Plath experiences separation from a nurturant matrix as a rejection

of her being that makes her close to nothing” (195), which forms an ambiguous

confrontation with the statement that separation from the maternal principal is the only

way of reaching independence for one’s own individuality.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva discusses the relationship of language and

anxiety and she uses term abjection. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Rose describes it

as follows:

Abjection is a primordial fear situated at the point where the subject first

splits from the body of the mother, finding at once in that body and in the

terrifying gap that opens up between them the only space for the

constitution of its own identity, the only distance which will allow it to

become a user of words. (Rose 33)

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The use of language is often an attempt to control the fear fulfilling the gap with words.

Kristeva views written language and its artistic transformation as the language of fear

and “the writer is a phobic who succeeds in metaphorizing in order to keep from being

frightened to death; instead he comes to life in signs” (Kristeva 38). She also believes

that orality is represented in food as “the oral object (the abject) that sets up archaic

relationships between the human being and the other, its mother, who wields a power

that is as vital as it is fierce” (Kristeva 75-76). The mother incorporates orality, food,

language and fear.

The fear that the mother might devour her is represented in The Bell Jar when

Esther, with a kind of disgust, says: “My mother turned from a foggy log into a

slumbering, middle-aged woman, her mouth slightly open and a snore raveling from her

throat. The piggish noise irritated me, and for a while it seemed to me that the only way

to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it

to silence between my hands” (The Bell Jar 129-30). The same feelings are expressed in

a Tongues of Stone, which is a short story also following Sylvia’s first suicidal attempt.

The similarity of description is significant: “During those last nights before her blackout

the girl had lain awake listening to the thin thread of her mother’s breathing, wanting to

get up and twist the life out of the fragile throat, to end at once the process of slow

disintegration which grinned at her like a death’s head everywhere she turned” (Johnny

Panic and the Bible of Dreams 256). A parallel to this can be also found in Plath’s diary

entry from December 1959: “I lay in my bed when I thought my mind was going blank

forever and I thought what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined

throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world” (Kukil 433). The

horror is turned into aggression and violence but at the same time Esther admits that she

in her twenties is still sleeping with her mother in one bed and what follows is a

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description of her urge to crawl into a safe womb/tomb like space between the

mattresses: “It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough”

(The Bell Jar 130). One cannot deny the interconnection between the innermost feelings

expressed in Plath’s diary and their fictitious echo. It is questionable how much the

diary serves just as a later inspiration and in what extent it is a clear confirmation of its

content.

The desired unity experienced in the maternal dark, safe space is in the

immediate juxtaposition with the process of disintegration. Esther is unable to read or

write. “Words, dimly familiar, but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled

past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain” (The Bell Jar 131). The

paralyzed language capacity together with Esther’s insomnia may be seen as her

resentment to a passive dependence on the maternal figure depriving the individual of

his or her autonomy. She asks her friend for some stronger medicaments and says: “‘I

can’t sleep. I can’t read.’ I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in

my throat and choked me off. I turned my hands palm up” (The Bell Jar 133).

Following the previous theories one could assume that the image of “zombie” once

again substitutes for the mother figure that is surrendered with the “hands palm up”.

A similar image can be found in Plath’s poem, Tulips: “I only wanted / to lie

with my hands turned up and be utterly empty” (Ariel 21). The emptiness here is

associated not just with surrender but also with Plath’s favorite death in piece or death

in life – the rebirth. A similar image of a monster hidden behind a mouth reappears in a

minor character of Hilda. The girls discuss the Rosebergs’ case and suddenly Hilda

turns into a demonic figure: “She yawned then, and her pale orange mouth opened on a

large darkness. Fascinated, I stared at the blind cave behind her face until the two lips

met and moved and the dybbuk spoke out of its hiding place […]” (The Bell Jar 105).

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“She doesn’t know she’s a walking vampire” (The Bell Jar 429), writes Plath in her

diary referring to her mother’s nature.

Insomnia in Plath’s writings is a panic of emptiness, a hollow inner life veiled

with fear. In The Wishing Box Agnes suffers first from the lack of dreams that finally

develops into a panic that does not let her sleep: “She saw an intolerable prospect of

wakeful, visionless days and nights stretching unbroken ahead of her, her mind

condemned to perfect vacancy, without a single image of its own to ward off the

crushing assault of smug, autonomous tables and chairs” (Johnny Panic and the Bible of

Dreams 210). To kill the emptiness and to kill the sleeplessness she poises herself with

the sleeping pills – just like Sylvia in 1953 and like Esther later on in the story.

As I have already mentioned, almost every character in the novel bears an

imprint of Plath’s relationship with her mother. The way she approaches them is either

based on the rather general aspect of the ambiguity of her feelings or she creates mother

substitutes. They are usually strong woman figures in some way completely distinct

from Aurelia Plath. Jay Cee, the boss at the magazine publishing house, is one of the

authorities Esther admires. She is not physically attractive but she is an ambitious, self-

confident career woman and she inspires Esther, who thinks that Jay Cee is the right

person to show her how to fulfill her dreams and how to become what she desires to be,

whatever it is. She wishes she “had a mother like Jay Cee. Then [she]’d known what to

do” (The Bell Jar 40) because her own mother is useless having taught her just

shorthand and typing.

In her critique, Plath returns to her father’s death and to her mother’s sacrificial

tendencies that gives rise to the critical ambivalence in Sylvia’s feelings. Sylvia knows

she should be obliged for all the material support that her mother offered both the

children after their father’s death. However, at the same time she starts to hate her for it,

55
knowing that her mother negates all the pleasure in her own life and blaming her

husband for dying and for not leaving any money for his family just “because he didn’t

trust life insurance salesmen” (The Bell Jar 40). The feelings of sympathy and guilt

mingle with accusing hate that corresponds with Plath’s journal entries: “How could the

fates punish her so if she was so very noble and good. […] My mother had sacrificed

her life for me. A sacrifice I didn’t want” (Kukil 432-33). The notion of obligation in

her sacrifice is what challenges the purity of her mother’s feelings. “Now this is what I

feel my mother felt. I feel her apprehension, her anger, her jealousy, her hatred. I feel no

love, only the Idea of Love, and that she thinks she loves me like she should” (Kukil

432). In the identification with her mother Plath seems to project her own feelings of

hate on her – feeling the uncertainty of her own feelings she cannot believe in her

mother’s. Jay Cee in The Bell Jar represents the direct opposite of Sylvia’s mother who

is accused, among other things, of a weak and nondirective upbringing. Esther

complains that her “mother wasn’t much of a help” (The Bell Jar 40), she never took

care to tell her to do anything and “She would only reason with me sweetly, like one

intelligent, mature person with another” (The Bell Jar 127). This way of behavior

probably deprives Esther/Sylvia of a feeling of security and an intensity of her mother’s

affection.

Plath uses various images that represent the two-faced character of her mother.

One of them that reoccurs both in her poetry and also in The Bell Jar is the image of the

moon. “The moon is my mother” (Ariel 47) says Plath in her poem The Moon and the

Yew Tree. Plath is influenced by Robert Graves’s study of mythological and

psychological sources of poetry, The White Goddess, where he links the moon deity

with the female element:

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 Moreover, twenty-eight is a true lunar month not only in the astrological

sense of the moon’s revolution in relation to the sun, but in the mystic sense

that the Moon, being a woman, has a woman’s normal menstrual period

(‘menstruation’ is connected with the word ‘moon’) of twenty-eight days.

(Graves 166)

Female power is associated with the lunar cycle, menstruation and fertility. Graves

concurrently points out the dual understanding of female deity that is both life-giving

and deadly. He mentions the Talmud where it is said that if a menstruating woman

passes between two men, one of them will die (Graves 166). In the novel, Plath refers to

her mother’s image and remarks: “My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful

moon […]” (The Bell Jar 250). Then she goes on: “A daughter in asylum! I had done

that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me” (The Bell Jar 250). The

moon is the nobility, the dominance, the threat. In The Bell Jar after the big banquet

organized by the magazine the girls get poisoned by crab meat and end up in hospital.

Just before the first symptoms of the poisoning appear, Esther is sitting in the cinema

watching a bad film and observing the people around and she says: “[…] I began to feel

peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow

on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked

like nothing more or less than a lot if stupid moon-brains” (The Bell Jar 44).

The negative air of the situation associated with the moon image again refers to

Plath’s condemnation of her mother. In her study called Out of the Cradle Endlessly

Rocking: Motherhood in Sylvia Plath’s Work, Nephie Christodoulides points out that

“In Plath’s work the moon is generally identified with the mother, a controlling figure

who can influence subjectivity” (86) and the “moon which [she] often presents [is] a

sinister, indifferent mother” (130). The moon image is frequently used also in Plath’s

57
later poetry. Edge is one of her last poems she wrote before her death – the moon is still

there: “The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone. / She is

used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks crackle and drag” (Ariel 85). The moon as a

symbol of motherhood is authoritative and distant. In Tales of Love Kristeva argues that

“mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a

division of language” (Kristeva 254). She believes that the maternal and language are

“homologous in existing at the threshold of culture and nature” (Kristeva 259). In

Plath’s symbol of maternal moon both of these principles are present.

In the first chapter of my thesis, I discussed the strong contrast between the

depiction of reality presented to Plath’s mother in The Letters Home and the way she

puts it in her journal entries. There is the outward display of the events structured

according to the general expectation of Aurelia Plath, which is the veiled version almost

completely free from the inner view and then there is the open confession of her diaries,

where on the contrary, the emotional part is intensified as a reaction to the repressed

feelings. The relationship between Esther and Buddy Willard in The Bell Jar follows

almost the same pattern. Buddy is Esther’s college boyfriend, a prototype of 1950s ideal

young American man – a good-looking, athletic student of medicine who goes to church

and loves his parents – he represents everything that, according to the social manners, a

young woman should want. At first Esther admires him for all he does seems to be so

right: “I took everything Buddy Willard told me as the honest-to-God truth” (The Bell

Jar 59). When Buddy comes with his own definition of a poem for he wants to show

Esther that doctors can very easily be writers as well she dares not present her own

opinion and reacts saying “I guess so” (The Bell Jar 58). It is just in her mind that she

imagines what she would reply and she does not care that it would embarrass him.

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 The conflict between the outer respect of the conventional and the inner

resentment forms a parallel to the mother-daughter issue. Buddy represents the

conventionality that would destroy Esther’s ability to write and that would suppress her

individual needs and desires – he is the implicit controlling figure who wants her to

become an obedient housewife sacrificing her own life to her family, just as Aurelia

Plath did when she married Sylvia’s father. Esther finally sees through the veil she so

resents and realizes that Buddy is just a hypocrite. She remembers the exact moment she

found it out. It was when he kissed her with “a dry, uninspiring little kiss” and then she

adds: “I found out on the day we saw the baby born” (The Bell Jar 64). The veil of

hypocrisy is here again, connected with birth and motherhood - Plath in her diaries often

accuses her mother of not being honest about the feelings towards her and towards her

dead father.

The next chapter returns to the incident with the jarred dead babies Buddy shows

Esther in hospital. She is fascinated by the death in life image eternally preserved in the

glass bottle so much resembling her own state of mind. Butcher comments on the jarred

fetuses and says that:

[…] to Sylvia their moon heads swimming and glowing in the false glass

wombs became touchstones of horror, empirical symbols of stillborn

humanity. They developed in her imagination as objects d’art of the central

obsession with Kierkegaard’s “fear of nothingness” that would govern her

later poetry, real symbols springing from the rich soil of her own nature.

(Butscher 62-63)

The nothingness derives from the desperate search of her own identity lost in the

mother’s womb that is now descending upon her like the jars the dead babies are in.

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Plath’s fascination with death reoccurring in many places in the novel may be seen as a

way how to touch the only certainty in the human life.

In his study, Fromm speaks about necrophilia as opposed to biophilia which is in

its substance deprived of sexual perversion. The necrophilic people live in the past.

They are in a state of living but are appealed by death, not growth but decay (Fromm

34). One could argue that Plath is captured by the necrophilic tendencies that she tries to

neutralize with the creative act of writing. Still, she cannot help putting the symbols of

decay to it.

The dead fetuses’ imagery is juxtaposed with a scene of giving birth that Esther

also has the chance to witness. Nevertheless, the air of the situation stays the same –

horrific and repulsive. Esther watches the woman’s body and says: “She seemed to have

nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in

the high stirrups, and all the time the baby was being born she never stopped making

this unhuman whooing noise” (The Bell Jar 68). On the other hand, like everything in

Plath’s perspective, it was not exactly that she would resent motherhood as such, she

was just afraid of being limited by this status. She always just wanted to become all she

imagined. Plath uses the metaphor of a fig-tree for her life in The Bell Jar when each fig

would represent a wonderful possible future fulfilled either with husband and happy

family or with a career of a famous poet or a brilliant professor or whatever she could

make up. Then she realizes the absurdity of such a vision and says: “I saw myself sitting

in a crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind

which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing

one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to

wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet” (The Bell

Jar 80).

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 In a later conversation with Buddy, Esther openly confesses her unstable state of

mind and reacts on Buddy’s comment that she must be a neurotic when she cannot

decide whether to live in the city or in the country. “‘Neurotic, ha!’ I let out scornful

laugh. ‘If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time,

then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive

thing and another for the rest of my days’” (The Bell Jar 98). The quote serves as

Esther’s conscious personal diagnosis foreshadowing the upcoming events. For Esther it

is the last night in New York and the airy atmosphere of the situation set on the roof of

the hotel between the “dark and dawn” (The Bell Jar 116) is like a final breath before

the imaginary bell jar closes down. She throws all of her clothing off the roof “like a

loved one’s ashes” (The Bell Jar 117).

The last section of chapter nine in the book seems to be a symbolic crossing

point between the first rather outwardly oriented part of the novel that is now moving

inwards to the to the isolated spaces of Esther’s world.

Her arrival home is like an entry into negativity: “I stepped from the air-

conditioned compartment on to the station platform, and the motherly breath of the

suburbs enfolded me. […] A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like

death” (The Bell Jar 119). Esther’s mother is waiting for her and the first news she has

is that Esther was not admitted to a writing course she so much desired and with the

realization of the whole summer spent at home “the grey, padded car roof closed over

my head like the roof of a prison van, and the white, shining, identical clapboard houses

with their interstices of well-groomed green proceeded past, one bar after another in a

large but escape-proof cage” (The Bell Jar 120).

The feelings of loss and inadequacy paralyze Esther into a state of complete

mental and later also physical collapse. She tries to struggle rationally with her panic

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and decides to write a novel. The recaptured command of language represents a possible

therapy for the panic: “A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be

myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my

fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too” (The Bell Jar 126-27). And so there are in

Sylvia. This could be seen as a hint to a story within a story created by Plath in The Bell

Jar and her attempt to exorcise the painful events through writing. It is questionable

how far Plath succeeded in this respect but as for Esther it does not work and not that

she cannot just write anything but the words start to twist into “an alphabet soup of

letters” (The Bell Jar 130). Ten, twenty, thirty nights without a sleep, Esther believes

she is going mad and she agrees to see a psychiatrist. She is sent to Dr. Gordon who

recommends electroconvulsive therapy and Esther, who wants to be an obedient

daughter, agrees. The description of the painful procedure concludes with: “I wondered

what terrible thing it was that I had done” (The Bell Jar 150). She thinks of the shock

therapy in terms of punishment but what does she feel guilty of? In a letter to her friend

Eddie Cohen, Plath recalls the feelings she went through after the ECT and writes:

“Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing

suicide. […] I was going to make use of my last ounce of free choice and choose a

quick clean ending. I figured that in a long run it would be more merciful and

inexpensive to my family; instead of an indefinite and expensive incarnation of a

favorite daughter in the cell of a State San […]” (qtd. in Stevenson 45). Probably all her

life Plath suffered from a feeling of guilt towards her mother. In the journals she

remembers: “My brother and I made her sign a promise she’d never marry. When we

were seven and nine. Too bad she didn’t break it. She’d be off my neck” (Kukil 433).

Plath feels responsible for the sacrifice her mother had to make to provide for

her children and that is why she now feels terrible ending up in a mental hospital. It is

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the guilt that would be off her neck if she did not owe her mother so much. She feels

bound and the last expression of her free will seems to be the suicide that would ease

both her and her mother.

In the novel Esther experiments with various ways of ending her life. She tries to

slash her wrists first, imagining that “lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from

the wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till [she] sank[s] to sleep under a

surface gaudy as poppies” would be a perfect way to die (The Bell Jar 156). But then

she realizes she cannot do it that way because as Esther says “it was as if what I wanted

to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but

somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at” (The Bell Jar

156). Esther gets to know the death demon nourishing inside her but she is still too

much paralyzed to do a thing. She then just wants to try for a practice and cuts herself

on a calf. In Letters Home, Aurelia Plath mentions that one morning she noticed purple

gashes on her legs and when she asked Sylvia she replied: “‘I just wanted to see if I had

the guts!’ Then she grasped my hand – hers was burning hot to the touch – and cried

passionately, ‘Oh, Mother, the world is rotten! I want to die! Let’s die together!’”

(Letters Home 124).

Struggling with a terrible panic Sylvia still tries to maintain sanity and in a

journal entry she writes just a month before the suicide: “Stop thinking selfishly of

razors & going out and ending it all” (Kukil 186). The second time Esther tries to drown

herself, she describes the tempting and welcoming nature of the water: “I thought

drowning must be the kindest way to die […] Some of the babies in the jars that Buddy

Willard showed me had gills, he said” (The Bell Jar 166). The manifest maternal

undertow develops in the depiction of the third suicide attempt when she tries to hang

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herself on her mother’s bathrobe silk cord “in the amber shade of the bedroom” (The

Bell Jar 167).

What all these acts have in common is a poetic, almost pleasurable impression. It

was as if they all somehow lead to the secure space of the mother’s belly. Esther’s very

first suicidal attempt goes back to an incident that happened when she went skiing with

Buddy Willard. Standing at the top of the slope she rushes downhill ready to die in the

moment of seeming happiness: “People and trees receded on either hand like dark sides

of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the

bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly” (The Bell Jar

102). Schwartz and Bollas argue that “the body is also a space of death, where objects

are mutilated or the dead return to existence. It is where daddy is, and her return is a

union with the father” (Schwartz, Bollas 194).

Both in her journals and also in The Bell Jar Plath cannot help accusing her

mother of not letting them go to their father’s funeral: “[…] he had died in hospital, so

the graveyard and even his death, had always seemed unreal to me. […] I should have

taken on a mourning my mother had never bothered with” (The Bell Jar 175). When

Esther finally visits her father’s grave she remarks: “I couldn’t understand why I was

crying so hard. Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father’s death. My

mother hadn’t cried either” (The Bell Jar 177). For Esther/Sylvia the graveyard was the

mother’s womb and as her mother seemed to be unable to mourn for her husband her

daughter must do it for both of them.

The last almost successful suicidal attempt is again in The Bell Jar described in

such an appealing way that the reader as Stevenson points out is “all but persuaded of

the sweetness of the act” (Stevenson 45). Knowing that her mother is not at home, with

the pills and glass of water, Esther goes down to a basement where she knows about a

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narrow space. She removes the firewood blocking “the whole mouth” of the hiding

place and then she “crouched at the mouth of the darkness” and entered the womblike

space (The Bell Jar 179). As if she really entered a peaceful world of primal unity with

her mother’s body:

Cobwebs touched my face with the softness of moths. Wrapping my black

coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills

and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.

At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red

and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my

fingers and I lay down. (The Bell Jar 179)

The actual experience preceding Plath’s suicidal attempt is recorded in her journals. The

intensity of the horror juxtaposed to the comfort of the final suicidal act is another

significant contrast of Plath’s individuality:

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb,

paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness, I never thought, I

never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from

responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I

am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to

these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom.

(Kukil 149)

This is one of the most expressive utterances given by Plath and it seems to picture the

core of all her writing.

In Powers of Horror Kristeva speaks about the mother figure split in two – the

abject and the sublime (Kristeva 157). The child can either make the mother abject and

become autonomous or it can see her as the sublime and forever lose its individuality

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(Christodoulides 61). In the person of Plath, Kristeva sees the collapse of the fragile,

“foundering” and “sinking” ego (Christodoulides 1). As she puts it: “Once the moorings

of the word, the ego, the superego, begin to slip, life itself can’t hang on: death quietly

moves in” (Kristeva 157). Plath identifies her mother with the sublime symbol of the

earth but at the same time she is the representation of the abject and needs to be cut

from. Fromm points out that the maternal figure is both life giving and destroying. The

father represents quite a different principle. He is the man-made law and order, he is the

one who punishes and rewards. His love is transient and one is loved when one does

what he requires. Stevenson mentions how Sylvia was in her early childhood the centre

of her father’s attention, performing always perfectly what she was asked to do

(Stevenson 8). The fixation on the father cannot, nevertheless, be as deeply rooted as it

is in the relationship to the mother – family, blood and earth (Fromm 83). Fromm talks

about an incestuous fixation or symbiosis with the mother figure that is based on a

strong regression desire. It is a conflict between independence and integrity that

damages or completely destroys the ability to love. He argues that the fixation does not

have to be fully recognized and it can even seem quite rational. An individual strongly

fixed on his or her mother interprets the bond as an obligation for the mother who

sacrificed her life and suffered so much for her child. Nevertheless, the incestuous

desires are not primarily a result of a sexual drive but they form one of the basic human

tendencies to keep a bond with the person he or she originates from while feeling a

constant fear from freedom of the self that can be destroyed by the maternal authority

(Fromm 86-87). The realization of the deep desire to return to the mother’s womb

concurrently weakens the feeling of individuality and transforms the image of the

mother into a dangerous vampire, cannibalistic and necrophilic figure. If the child is not

able to sever the ties with the mother later in life it cannot get rid of the terror of being

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eaten up or destroyed by her and never reaches its individuality (Fromm 81). Though

escaping from her and through her, the first word Esther moans when she recovers

consciousness is “‘Mother!’” (The Bell Jar 181). When she comes to see her in the

hospital, Esther is disappointed by the turn of the events and reacts very negatively on

her visit and wants her to go away: “My mother came smiling round the foot of the bed.

She was wearing a dress with the purple cartwheels on it and she looked awful” (The

Bell Jar 182).

In another scene she mocks her mother through a figure of Mrs. Tomolillo who

is sitting in a park next to them and is imitating Esther’s mother as she moves. Mrs.

Greenwood does not believe it but Esther notices: “the minute my mother turned round

to me again, Mrs. Tomolillo matched the tips of her fingers together the way my mother

had just done and cast a black, mocking look at me” (The Bell Jar 189). Mrs. Tomolillo

seems to represent another reflection of Esther’s mother, this time a bit tragicomic. All

the characters appearing in the hospital scenes seem a bit unreal and anonymous having

usually no names limited to “the nurse”, “the second nurse”, “the woman” or “the

negro”. Esther refuses to co-operate and accuses her mother of getting her in the

hospital: “‘You got me in here,’ I said, ‘You get me out’” (The Bell Jar 190). To

Esther’s surprise she does.

With the help of Philomena Guinea, a wealthy novelist who financially supports

Esther in her studies, Mrs. Greenwood gets her to a private hospital where Esther meets

Dr. Nolan: “This woman was a cross between Myrna Loy and my mother” (The Bell Jar

197). Just before the first description of Dr. Nolan the image of the bell jar is mentioned

at least three times: “wherever I sat – on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or

Bangkok – I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air”

[…] “The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir” (The Bell Jar 196-97).

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Entering the building of the hospital she observes that “The inner surface of the tall wall

seemed smooth as glass” (The Bell Jar 197). The persistent presence of the bell jar is

confirmed only to stress the importance of Dr. Nolan’s appearance. Dr. Nolan is

modeled on Dr. Beuscher, Plath’s long life psychiatrist from McLean Hospital, to whom

she established a close and trustful relationship (Stevenson 47). Dr. Beuscher ordered a

second course of electroshock therapy plus insulin doses but treated Sylvia with a

maternal care. She first realized “that it was Plath’s inhibited expression of her strong

feelings against her mother that caused her writer’s blocks and consequently her

depression” and who gave her the relieving permission to hate her mother

(Christodoulides 164).

During their sessions in 1958, Plath experienced a breakthrough in the

perception of the relationship with her mother. She took notes of the conversations in

her diary: “RB says: […] If you are angry at someone else, and repress it, you get

depressed. Who am I angry at? Myself. No, not yourself. Who is it? It is my mother and

all the mothers I have known who have wanted me to be what I have not felt like really

being from my heart […]” (Kukil 437). In The Bell Jar it is Esther’s birthday when her

mother comes to see her and brings roses. Esther throws them to a wastebasket. She

cannot stand her mother’s “sorrowful face” (The Bell Jar 215) who keeps asking her

what she has done wrong. Dr. Nolan seems to understand: “‘I hate her,’ I said, and

waited for the blow to fall. But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had

pleased her very, very much, and said, ‘I suppose you do.’” (The Bell Jar 215). Esther’s

need for a maternal care is now projected on Dr. Nolan whom she trusts just like a child.

During the insulin treatment she has a reaction and is served hot milk: “I fanned the hot

milk out on my tongue as it went down, tasting it luxuriously, the way a baby tastes its

mother” (213).

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 Everything that is associated with the character of Dr. Nolan is given a

protective air and symbolizes a positive change in the course of events. A significant

change is happening also inside Esther, as if the bell jar slowly rises and she starts to

regain her self-confidence: “I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a

few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air” (The Bell Jar 227). Dr. Nolan

represents the maternal understanding that Sylvia found in Dr. Beuscher and that she

never got from her mother, because no matter how big and sincere was Aurelia’s

sacrifice it seems that she never really knew her daughter.

In The Bell Jar after Esther’s first electroshock treatment she announces to her

mother that she is not going through it any more and her mother smiles and replies: “‘I

knew my baby wasn’t like that.’ […] ‘Like those awful people. Those awful dead

people at that hospital.’” (The Bell Jar 154). Mrs. Greenwood does not admit that her

daughter could have a problem and pretends not to see it. Hayman mentions that when

Aurelia Plath “first heard the news of Sylvia’s death […] her first impression was that

her daughter had died of pneumonia” (Hayman 16). Though she was aware of her

daughter’s interior contradictions she seemed to refuse to face the negative side. When

Esther leaves the hospital Mrs. Greenwood remarks: “‘We’ll take up where we left off,

Esther,’ […] ‘We’ll act as if this were a bad dream.’” (The Bell Jar 250). One of

Aurelia Plath’s impulses for publishing the correspondence between her and her

daughter was to expose Sylvia’s loving daughter side. Actually, as Rose argues, she

achieved the opposite effect: “If Aurelia Plath had sought to remove any traces of what

is most negative, especially in relation to herself, the editing of the Journals can be seen

here going back in the opposite direction, preserving, underscoring, what is negative”

(Rose 91).

69
 As a controversial response to the Letters Home in 1982, Ted Hughes published

Plath’s Journals (Rose 76). He provoked another theme for discussion and completed

the picture of her public myth.

Plath’s murderous impulses in real life transferred from her mother onto herself

are in her writing diverted in the reverse direction back to their source (Christodoulides

85). In The Bell Jar the very last character to be introduced is Joan. Joan is a girl Esther

knows from school and who is a former girlfriend of Buddy Willard. It looks as if she

just feigned suicide to get close to Esther. After Doreen she symbolizes another

associate in the novel. The opening sentence in the chapter introducing Joan starts with:

“Joan’s room […] was a mirror image of my own” (The Bell Jar 207). Though Esther

does not really like Joan and she definitely does not admire her like she did Doreen, Jay

Cee or Dr. Nolan, she feels a strange interconnectedness and while Doreen represents

all the bright and dominant that Esther would like to find in herself, Joan is the

submissive and fragile mirror image component of Esther: “Sometimes I wondered if I

had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in every crisis

of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on

her own separate but similar crisis under my nose” (The Bell Jar 231). She is the

resented part of Esther that is still inseparable from her and is always present: “I looked

at Joan. In spite of the feeling, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated

me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not

my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her

thoughts and feelings seemed wry, black image of my own” (The Bell Jar 231). Joan is

the last figure in the novel following the mother image – she is despised and liked, she

is resented but at the same time Joan is the person Esther goes to after her first sexual

experience. Through her Esther is reborn therefore she has to die.

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 One day Joan does not return to the sanatorium and is later found in the woods

hanged. In Joan’s death one could see the symbolic burying of all that is resented in the

perception of Esther’s self - the panic from the empty individuality and inadequacy,

which is the imaginary bell jar that deprived Esther from her freedom. The bell jar is the

maternal womb constituted of all the expectations and unfulfilled wishes projected at

the daughter. By killing Joan, Plath symbolically kills her mother within her in order to

be finally herself. In the journal entry from February 1959, she writes:

What inner decision, what inner murder or prison-break must I commit if I

want to speak from my true deep voice in writing and not feel this jam up of

feeling behind a glass-dam fancy-façade of numb dumb wordage. […] I

think success would be heartening now. But, the most heartening, the

feeling I were breaking out of my glass caul. What am I afraid of? Growing

old and dying without being Somebody?

(Kukil 469-70)

Esther goes to Joan’s funeral and is wondering what she thinks she is actually

burying and just a few lines later she proclaims: “I am, I am, I am” (The Bell Jar 256).

The bell jar is broken but the fear upon which it was constructed does not seem to be

entirely defeated and Esther thinks: “How did I know that someday – at college, in

Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t

descend again?” (The Bell Jar 254). The essence of the bell jar corresponds to the

characteristics of Johnny Panic, the master of fear in Plath’s short story: “He’s sly, he’s

subtle, he’s sudden as thunder, but he gives himself away only too often” (Johnny Panic

and the Bible of Dreams 157). Esther leaves the psychiatric clinic healed, “patched,

retreated and approved for the road” (The Bell Jar 257), nevertheless, with a definite

feeling of uncertainty and doubt.

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 Though The Bell Jar concludes in a reconciliatory tone it does not suggest

finality - it would not correspond to Plath’s characteristic duality. In one of her essays,

she compares the style of her poems with the prose writing: “The door of the novel like

the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable

finality” (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams 63). By producing The Bell Jar Plath

managed to put life into her writing, it seems that she did not accomplish another of her

intentions not to write just about herself. She was so much devoured by the quest of her

real self that she could not get outside of it. In November 1959, she wrote: “A horror

that I am really at bottom uninterested in people: the reason I don’t write stories. Only a

few psychological fantasias” (Kukil 522). In 1961, she started to work on The Bell Jar

and as Ted Hughes pointed out “It was only when she gave up her effort to “get outside

herself”, and finally accepted the fact that her painful subjectivity was her real theme,

and that the plunge into herself was her only real direction […]” (Johnny Panic and the

Bible of Dreams 5). She realized that her most dreaded demons could become her major

source of material as they more than anything else define her life: “Names, words, are

power. I am afraid. Of what? Life without having lived, chiefly. […] If I could funnel

this into a novel, this fear, this horror – a frog sits on my belly” (Kukil 421). In The Bell

Jar Plath managed to “relive” and “recreate” (Kukil 495) the story of her rebirth after

the fatal collapse and she finally got out of the “snake pit” (Kukil 495). In the Letters

Home she wrote: “If anyone asked me what time of my life was the most invaluable, I

would say those six terrible months at McLean” (Letters Home 241) – in making use of

the McLean time and in turning it into a literary piece of art she managed to fill the

empty value of that vain life period. Before The Bell Jar Plath wrote approximately

seventy stories out of which only twenty were finally published within Johnny Panic

72
and the Bible of Dreams. What is interesting about the large number of stories is the

consistency of themes and materials Plath worked up (Zajdel 8).

This is particularly obvious in Tongues of Stone, The Wishing Box and in Johnny

Panic and the Bible of Dreams. She vehemently stuck to one story that was rewritten

and reworked till it found its final version in The Bell Jar. The Bell Jar preceded by her

early short stories of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams form a period of

apprenticeship leading to the recognition of her own voice later honored in Ariel. The

relatedness of ideas interconnects Plath’s fiction with her poetry. One of the reasons

why Plath published the novel under a pseudonym was that she did not want it to be

judged as a work of a poet (Becker 32). She wanted to discover a novelist in herself but

it seems that the novelist could not be separated from the poet.

In The Bell Jar, Plath also fully acknowledges the basic threat of her artistic

expression: “My one want: to do work I enjoy – must keep clear of any confiding in

mother: she is the source of great depression – a beacon of terrible warning” (Kukil

422). She recognized the source of the fear in her mother and redistributed it into the

characters of the novel. In her critical essay, Diane S. Bonds observes that “Esther

embraces relations with most of the women in the novel only to cast them off, as if they

constituted a foreign presence within the purity of her own identity, some threat to her

integrity” (Bonds 15). The mother figure stands in the centre of Plath’s critical relief

taking many different forms of symbols and characters. The mother is a moon – the

distant authority unifying the culture-nature dichotomy. The mother is a womb – the

origin and the terminal of life symbolizing the ambivalent face of maternity, comforting

and binding. And the mother is language – the separation from the flesh never to be

overcome.

73
 In his critical study, Tim Kendal points out that “The Bell Jar is a novel about

searching for and shedding of identity” (Kendal 53). One could see a double effect in

the story. First there is a story of Esther which serves as a reconstruction of Sylvia’s

own experience, but then there is the act of writing itself that represents the second part

of the search. “Writing is my health” she says in her journal (Kukil 523). Plath

demonstrates the close relationship of art and psychoanalysis in terms of controlling and

expressing the repressed in order to give some order to her chaotic perception of the

self. In the introduction to her short stories Hughes concludes: “It seems probable that

her real creation was her own image, so that all her writings appear like notes and

jottings directing attention towards that central problem – herself” (Johnny Panic and

the Bible of Dreams 8). The Bell Jar is Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel and as

such it openly presents some truth about her life. It is a kind of public talking cure, a

therapy through an artistic act of writing. In the journals she notes: “The dialogue

between my Writing and my Life is always in danger of becoming a slithering shifting

of responsibility, of evasive rationalizing: in other words: I justified the mess I made of

life by saying I’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it” (Kukil 208-9). But the

dialogue may fail such as words and language sometimes fails.

In his article A Fiction of the Truth, J. M. Coetzee mentions Freud and his paper

called Therapy Terminable and Interminable where Freud “wonders whether talking

cure can be a cure in all cases, whether there might not be cases in which therapy is

interminable, in which the therapeutic goal of getting the subject to speak the truth of

himself is unattainable, since the time needed to get past all the screens of lies and self-

deception would be longer than a lifetime” (http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/). Coetzee

applies Freud’s approach on the personal narrative of autobiography and argues that

looking for some truth in the autobiography is an unfeasible task, “that perhaps the best

74
you can hope for will not be the history of yourself but a story about yourself, a story

that will not be the truth but may have some truth-value, probably of mixed kind – some

historical truth, some poetic truth. A fiction of the truth, in other words”

(http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/). He concludes that autobiography does not have any

certain end and therefore seems to be inherently unsatisfactory. Instead it is about

beginnings and origins of the individual, “a way of explaining the present in terms of its

origins” (http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/). “My “fiction” is only a naked recreation of what

I felt, as a child and later, must be true,” said Plath in her journals. In this respect, Plath

fits the pattern – she leaves no definite end in the story, it is just a way of exploring the

origins in a personal retrospective and with the help of fictional images she looks for

some truth-value of her life.

75
Conclusion
One of the main focuses of my thesis is to provide an analysis based on a general

relationship between an author’s life and his or her work of art. It deals with the

confessional character of literature and argues that the personal testimony imprinted in a

work should not be ignored in a critical evaluation. Virginia Woolf commented on this

topic and claimed that “Every secret of the writer’s soul, every experience of his life,

every quality of his mind is written large in his works” (Woolf 103). In The Savage

God, Alvarez even suggested that the life itself is a work of art: “In its authenticity [life]

is our own interpretation and re-organization of experience, structured metaphorically.

It is the result of successive imaginative acts – it is a work of art! By conversion, a work

of art is life, provided it be true to the experiential core” (Alvarez 212). Following this

statement Sylvia Plath’s life and work form an inseparable unity. Reading Plath and

ignoring the perspective of her personal experience would deprive the reader of a

significant meaning and value of the work. Through her writing, she was searching for

the genuine self whose imprint is strongly present and therefore cannot be overlooked.

Though her biggest ambition was to write objectively about the world around

she could not keep the necessary distance, her own world was always too much

involved. She started to write at the age of nine after her father’s death – it was most

likely this highly personal event that came too early and triggered her inner need to

express herself through writing. Plath’s language could be called a ‘language of

mourning’ – it expresses the feeling of lack, of a gap that needs to be filled but never

will be. With her writing she kept breaking the ‘psychic numbness’ (Alvarez 204).

Alvarez mentions Kafka whose statement aptly defines Plath’s language: “The books

we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that makes us suffer like the

death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on

76
the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should

serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us” (qtd. in Alvarez 204). It is a language of

purification and rebirth substituting for the lost and dead inside – it is what Kristeva

calls the abject – “the death infecting life” (Felluga).

Throughout all her writing, either in the poetry or in the fiction, Plath sticks to a

certain group of symbols that reoccurs again and again. In connection with the process

of mourning, Freud uses a term ‘repetitive compulsion’ – an insistence on certain

subject to be exorcised in a full and extreme experience of the loss. Plath concurrently

realizes the hopeless meaninglessness of the repetition and she desperately tries to be

finally done with it.

From another perspective Plath poetically represents the general substance of

language as described in Lacan’s theories. Entering the ‘symbolic order’, one is reduced

to empty signifiers never to be filled with real meanings. The individual remembers the

illusory feeling of unity of language and body, broken at the stage of separation from

the mother. The mother figure then usually splits into a two-faced entity – the one that is

loved and to whom one desires to return to and secondly, the one that is for the same

reason resented as it represses one’s autonomy. This ambivalent attitude is the ground

nature of Plath’s writing and the schizoid relationship with her mother is significant

element that influenced her work and life. It seems that Plath did not ever manage to

sever the ties with her mother and her first suicidal attempt is said to be a message to

her mother, a way how to freed from the bonds and simultaneously to return to the

primal place of security.

The year 1953, when Plath tried to commit suicide for the first time, is the main

topic of her novel The Bell Jar. The central analysis of my thesis has attempted to

pursue the omnipresence of the ambiguous mother figure reflected either in various

77
characters or symbols. In the chaos of experience, she realizes her unconscious

symbiosis with her mother and retranslates it in the novel. The Bell Jar pictures Plath’s

death in life concept, suicide as a return to the womb that is the crucial symbol in the

novel. First, it is the physicality linked to other images - it is not just the cozy space of

the maternal body, it is also the bell jar descended upon Esther and it is full of fear and

panic of one’s own nothingness. As a parallel Plath uses the image of jarred fetuses -

another expression of the trapped death in life. Secondly, the womb is the relationship

of maternal and oral symbolized by the mouth. The mouth is language and nourishment.

It is the hollow space that is hungry if not fed and it is numb if it is not able to express

itself. In The Bell Jar there is the poet, associated with plentitude – oral and verbal, and

then there is Hilda and her empty devouring mouth fearful and demonic. Esther faces

her hateful feelings towards her caring mother and cannot help the morbid urge to

strangle her throat.

The Bell Jar is first and foremost, a novel about the search of identity. Plath’s

split personality is mirrored in the ambivalent depiction of the characters in the novel.

The basic pattern is, nevertheless, her symbiotic existence inseparable from her

mother’s. The ambiguity with which she struggles is present in almost every figure in

the story. The panic from the uncertain autonomy of oneself is linked with her creative

writing and with the struggle of sustaining a life of imagination. Plath, judging from the

diametrically different character of her rich correspondence with her mother and the

tone of her voice in the journals, is trapped between her innermost needs and feelings

and her mother’s expectations. The disunion results in her mental collapse relived in her

novel. Hughes notes that “Throughout the years between college and The Bell Jar the

great tension of her character was inseparable from her inability to write these stories to

78
her satisfaction” (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams 3). In her journals she

describes her panic and says:

[…] I couldn’t simply sit down at the typewriter and by sheer genius and

willpower begin a novel dense and fascinating today and finish it next

month. Where, how, with and for what, to begin? […] I sat paralyzed,

feeling no person in the world to speak to, cut off totally from humanity, in

a self-induced vacuum: I felt sicker and sicker. I couldn’t happily be

anything but a writer and I couldn’t be a writer. (Kukil 199)

The last sentence could be read as - I couldn’t happily be anything but myself and I

couldn’t be myself. Then she realizes that the only way how to deal with the panic is to

use it to her account and turn in into the desired artistic material for her prose writing.

“It is the hate, the paralyzing fear that gets in my way and stops me. Once that is

worked clear of I will flow” (Kukil 199). Writing the Johnny Panic and the Bible of

Dreams triggered off the breakthrough in her artistic expression.

The Bell Jar is not considered to be Plath’s major literary success. It was the

final collection of poetry in Ariel with which she entered the history of literature.

Nevertheless, one could argue that if it were not for the writing of the novel, Plath

would not have found her voice in Ariel. The Bell Jar represents an important phase in

her personal and professional development. As Esther she goes through her problematic

period of life and finds a way how to deal with her schizoid voice split in her

problematic mother-daughter relationship. At the same time the novel writing serves as

an apprenticeship during which her repetitive imagery is shaped into the form presented

in her final poetic triumph.

79
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