In Plath's schoolgirlish novel [The Bell Jar] nothing is imagined; the events come straight out of the life, untransfigured; madness and suicide are facts like any other. No insight, no illumination, no irony, no following wisdom. The events are chronological, monochromatic, sequential; the reader, appalled by the flatness of narration, may even find himself thinking that had the madness and self-burial occurred before the reported antecedent events, the latter, by that device, might have assured a power and awesomeness they do not otherwise possess, though only for those acolytes most disposed to invest them with magical properties. The book yields nothing of the kind; in it, madness and suicide are random events, forms of tantrum, self-indulgent, excessive—so to speak, unearned. Causeless—uncaused—in the literary sense; unmotivated, motiveless. Gratuitous. (p. 371)
[The] novel is full of venomous little sketches. Self-pity excepted, spitefulness is the only powerful running feeling. Everything carefully excluded from the letters went into the work—as if having been nice too long she could now be horrid a while. Art as revenge. (p. 372)
Saul Maloff, "The Poet as Cult Goddess," in Commonweal (copyright © 1976 Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.), Vol. CIII, No. 12, June 4, 1976, pp. 371-74.
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