Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar: A Psychological Case Study

Sylvia Plath kept records of her life, and the surviving portions of this record have been published as her Journals. The resonance of personal vibrations could be easily noticed in The Bell Jar, her only novel.

The novel The Bell Jar is a confessional novel in which her personality has been fully mirrored through the character of an alter ego. Sylvia Plath uses ‘first Person in The Bell far for the narrator, suggesting her complete identity with Esther, the chief protagonist of the novel. The incidents of Esther’s life have roots in the personal life of Plath. The author’s attitude towards life, sex, marriage, parents, virginity, doctors is all clearly reflected in the behaviour pattern of Esther Greenwood.

The Bell Jar is a psychological novel which reveals the authors’ narcissistic, obsessive and compulsive personality. Her novel and prose writing and the Journals constitute a veritable diary from which one can glean the subtle working of Plath’s mind. They are more in the nature of psychological catharsis which she thought would free her mental strain and hence she could not keep the distance between fact and fiction, art and life. Her predominant concern is with herself written in the stream of consciousness style which is the proper vehicle for her disturbed consciousness, for her frustrated soul. Read More