Review: ‘The Bell Jar,’ by Sylvia Plath (Published 2021)
- ️Thu Oct 21 2021
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from the book review archives
To our reviewer, the poet’s novel was “the kind of book Salinger’s Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell.”
Credit...Victoria Maxfield
THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath | Review first published April 11, 1971
“The Bell Jar” is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath’s 20th year: about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue. It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems — the kind of book Salinger’s Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell. It is very much a story of the ’50s, but written in the early ’60s, and now, after being effectively suppressed in this country for eight years, published in the ’70s.
“Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia Plath called herself in a poem. And she added,
DyingIs an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell,I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I’ve a call.
And in another poem, “Daddy,” she wrote,
At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.
F. Scott Fitzgerald used to claim that he wrote with “the authority of failure,” and he did. It was a source of power in his later work. But the authority of failure is but a pale shadow of the authority of suicide, as we feel it in “Ariel” and in “The Bell Jar.” This is not so much because Sylvia Plath, in taking her own life, gave her readers a certain ghoulish interest they could not bring to most poems and novels, though this is no doubt partly true. It is because she knew that she was “Lady Lazarus.” Her works do not only come to us posthumously. They were written posthumously. Between suicides. She wrote her novel and her “Ariel” poems feverishly, like a person “stuck together with glue” and aware that the glue was melting. Should we be grateful for such things? Can we accept the price she paid for what she has given us? Is dying really an art?
There are no easy answers for such questions, maybe no answers at all. We are all dying, of course, banker and bum alike, spending our limited allotment of days, hours and minutes at the same rate. But we don’t like to think about it. And those men and women who take the matter into their own hands, and spend all at once with prodigal disdain, seem frighteningly different from you and me. Sylvia Plath is one of those others, and to them our gratitude and our dismay are equally impertinent. When an oracle speaks it is not for us to say thanks but to attend to the message.