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.

In the following essay, Martin provides both a brief overview of The Bell Jar and examples of Plath's poetry to illustrate the autobiographic and social context of her work. Challenging the "negative and even hostile judgment of Plath's politics" levelled by some critics, Martin extols Plath's talent and influence as "one of the leading American women poets since Emily Dickinson."

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses the psychological alienation of the heroine, Esther Greenwood, to reinforce … aesthetic alienation. Esther's 'madness' offers her an increasingly 'objective', exterior view of the 'eating customs, jurisprudence, and love life' [in Bertolt Brecht's words] of the culture she has inherited. 'Manners', provide an important motif of the book. Using the finger-bowl at a special lunch, Esther, for exampl...

"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 [J. D.] Salinger's Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell…. "The Bell Jar" is about the way this country was in the nineteen-fifties and about the way it is to lose one'...

[The Bell Jar is a] poet's novel, a casebook almost in stanzas, each episode brief, brittle, encapsulated. The past consists of 'Atoms that cripple', minute totalities of pain which spill out separately. They lack the essential sprawl and waste of the novel. The progress from one to another is poetic too, less in time than in image. Whatever scene is settled upon, is drawn up to its sharpest point, until it hurts. And yet, the disparate scenes gather congruity. They lean forward, crowdi...

The Bell Jar is the matrix of Sylvia Plath's work and anticipates her transition into neurotic writing. Indeed, her task of correcting the proofs of this novel may well have determined the direction as well as the energy of the late poems. In particular, the verbal parallels between The Bell Jar and "Daddy" are numerous and striking.     My German-speaking father, dead since I was nine, came from some manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia...

[The Bell Jar] is a clever first novel, and the first feminine novel I've read in the Salinger mood…. [Esther] is very sharp indeed with the world—certainly one can't see the New York and Boston she describes offering her any support or satisfying any possible human need. But her sharpness is expressed in such an inner-directed way that on the rare occasions her thoughts get out and touch the world at all they do so only at a tangent: 'If there's anything I look dow...

[The sarcasm and sharp wit Plath] shows boyfriends in Bell-Jar is a timid complement to the furious tantrums she displays to the men in the poems of Ariel. The feelings of the personae, the women in the poems, are often so complex that it is difficult to glean any evidence of a truly feminist bent. She is feminist in the sense that she perceives inequities and expresses them excruciatingly well; but there is no prescription for positive thinking or acting, as I take it. (p. 18) Whether the poet was concerne...

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 p...

[The Bell Jar] is not really a good novel, although extremely promising as first novels go. It is clever and polka-dotted with sharply effective vignettes. It is also highly autobiographical, and at the same time, since it represents the views of a girl enduring a bout of mental illness, dishonest. Plath never solved the problem of providing the reader with clues to the objective reality of episodes reported through the consciousness of a deranged narrator. Phoebe-Lou Adams, "Life & ...