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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), poet and novelist, explored her obsessions with death, self, and nature in works that expressed her ambivalent attitudes toward the universe. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston's Memorial Hospital on October 27, 1932, to Aurelia an...

Now famous for her ritual flirtations with death, Sylvia Plath has emerged as a significant fig- ure in contemporary American literature in the two and a half decades since her suicide on 11 February 1963. Her reputation as an accomplished and versatile...

In his introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-62 (1982), her husband, poet Ted Hughes, wrote that she wore "many masks" but that he believes he knew her "real self" -- "the self I had married, after all, and lived with and knew well." Yet thi...

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath In her novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath describes the torment that she suffered during a mental breakdown and suicide attempt. Although she tells the first-person tale through her character Esther Greenwood, the girl's...

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Paris master jeweler Joel Rosenthal turns his discriminating talent to a fleeting pleasure: perfume. Joel Rosenthal, the ornery genius behind the Paris jewelry house JAR, casts an eye over the inventory in his velvet-lined sanctuary just off the Place Vendome. It goes...

Glass, the most magical of manmade materials, has been around for centuries. The Egyptians made it and then the Bohemians rediscovered it in the 15th century. Every country--England, France, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States--created its own unique version of art glass,...

There were hints that I might be Sylvia Plath reincarnated as early as high school, but confirmation didn't arrive until the summer of 1996, shortly before my 21st birthday. As a 16-year-old, I'd won Seventeen magazine's annual fiction contest, as Plath had done in 1950,...

Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement, by Sylvia Plath, with an introduction by Frieda Hughes. HarperCollins, 211 pages, $24.95. On the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, in the alleyway behind 23 Fitzroy Road in snowbound London,...

In the following essay, Bonds reconsiders feminist critical analysis of The Bell Jar, drawing attention to Esther Greenwood's recovery in the novel. According to Bonds, Esther fails to establish an autonomous, or separative, self, and ultimately resorts to "culturally-ingrained stereotypes of women."

In the following essay, Wagner examines The Bell Jar as the chronicle of a young woman's psychological development and search for identity. As Wagner notes, Plath's depiction of the heroine's madness and thinly veiled anger at patriarchal society differs from the traditional bildungsroman in which the author strives to provide moral education.

In the following essay, Hughes comments on Plath's struggle to transcribe her private anguish into the fiction of The Bell Jar. According to Hughes, Plath's difficulty stemmed from her effort to produce a novel with both mythic aspirations and cathartic ritual based in reality.

Compares and contrasts the narrators' use of "I" in "Naked" by David Sedaris and "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath. Keywords: literary devices, point of view, mental disorder

Plath's lack of gender in The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" explores a young woman in the 1950's deciding on a future, and her downward spiral into madness, attempted suicide, and recovery.