Study Guide to The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath

By Intelligent Education

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645424116

Intelligent Education

Intelligent Education is a learning company with a mission to publish accessible resources and digital tools to educate the world. Their mission drives every project, from publishing books to designing software and online courses, film projects, mobile apps, VR/AR learning tools and more. IE builds tools to empower people who love to learn. Intelligent Education offers courses in science, mathematics, the arts, humanities, history and language arts taught by leading university professors from Wake Forest University, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, and other great schools. The learning platform features 3D models and 360 media paired with instructional videos for on-screen and Mixed Reality interaction that increases student engagement and improves retention. The IE team is geographically located across the United States and is a division of Academic Influence. Learn more at http://intelligent.education.

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INTRODUCTION TO SYLVIA PLATH

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, had emigrated to the United States from Poland and was an internationally known authority on bees; a distinguished professor of biology at Boston University, he also taught German and was recognized for his work in ornithology, entomology, and ichthyology. Aurelia Schober, the poet’s mother, was of Austrian descent and met her husband while working toward her master’s degree in German.

CHILDHOOD

The Plaths lived in Winthrop, a seaside town near Boston, and Sylvia’s early years were influenced by the ocean’s proximity. She later wrote, from the perspective of adulthood, My childhood landscape was not land but the end of land-the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. (Ocean 1212-W, the Listener no. 70, Aug. 29, 1963). Her maternal grandparents lived nearby, and for two and a half years Sylvia was the center of a tender universe bordered by the ocean on one side, the Massachusetts Bay on the other. Then, in 1935, her brother Warren was born, and consciousness of her separateness was thrust upon her. My beautiful fusion with things of this world was over. . . . On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else. Still, for five and a half years she continued with her family to live happily by the sea believing not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids.

When in 1940 Otto Plath died, after a long illness, the family moved inland to Wellesley, an upper middle-class suburb of Boston. Mrs. Plath went to work, teaching in a medical-secretarial program at Boston University; Mr. Schober took a job as maitre d’ hotel at the Brookline Country Club; Mrs. Schober ran the household.

EDUCATION

Sylvia and her brother Warren attended the local public schools which, she later wrote, were genuinely public. Everyone went. From the start she was an A student and began, early on, to win prizes for her poems and pen-and-ink drawings. Right through high school, she achieved top recognition, in both scholastic and social activities.

FIRST PUBLICATIONS

As Sylvia reached adolescence, she took her writing more and more seriously. By 1950 she had developed enough discipline and control to earn publication in Seventeen. After forty-five previous submissions, the magazine finally accepted And Summer Will Not Come Again. Shortly after, the Christian Science Monitor printed her poem Bitter Strawberries.

COLLEGE

She entered Smith College in 1950 on a scholarship endowed by Olive Higgins Prouty, the author of Stella Dallas and later a friend and patron. As usual Sylvia was a successful student and participated in a variety of extra curricular activities, from weekends at men’s colleges to a position on the disciplinary Honor Board. Continuing to publish stories and poems in Seventeen, she wrote poetry on a rigid schedule and kept a detailed journal and scrapbook. Prizes and awards also began coming in. In 1951 she won Mademoiselle’s fiction contest with her story Sunday at the Mintons. The next year, her junior year, she won two Smith poetry prizes, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to Alpha (Smith’s honorary society for the arts), and was selected as a guest editor in Mademoiselle’s College Board Contest. (The issue on which she participated published her favorite Villanelle, Mad Girl’s Lovesong.) Also at this time came her first professional earnings, one hundred dollars from Harper’s for three poems.

BREAKDOWN

This period of glittering recognition and achievement, however, could not forestall the blanket of desperation that had been gradually creeping upon her. Her attempted suicide and subsequent hospitalization for electric shock treatment and psychotherapy were widely publicized at the time and provide the basis of her novel, The Bell Jar (1963). She later described this six-month period during the summer and fall of 1953 as a time of darkness, despair, disillusionment-so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.

HONORS

When she returned to Smith, she resumed her norm of academic accomplishment. During the summer of 1954 she attended Harvard, taking courses in German, creative writing with Alfred Kazin, and special studies in writing with Alfred Fisher. After a year of more prizes and published poems and the completion of an honors thesis on the double personality in Dostoyevski, she was graduated from Smith in 1955, summa cum laude.

MARRIAGE

Then came a Fulbright to Newnham College at Cambridge. There she met the young English poet Ted Hughes, the only man I’ve ever met whom I could never boss. They were married in 1956 on Blooms-day, June 16 (the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place). The following year the Hugheses moved to the United States, where Plath taught for a time at Smith. Her colleagues there appraised her as one of the two or three finest instructors ever to appear in the English department at Smith College. But because the rigorous teaching schedule interfered with her writing, she decided to abandon her academic plans. She and Hughes moved to Boston, where they lived for a year on a shoe-string. She audited Robert Lowell’s poetry course at Boston University, where she became acquainted with Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, two other young poets.

LIFE IN ENGLAND

With repeated rejections of Plath’s book of poems by American publishers, they decided to return to England. There, in 1960, their first child, Frieda, was born, and The Colossus was accepted for publication by William Heinemann, Ltd. Then, always suffering now with sinus disorders, Plath’s health endured additional setback with a miscarriage and an appendectomy within a short time of each other. Fortunately, in 1961 she was awarded a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, which she had been refused in 1958. She was thus freed to work on her novel, which she wrote according to a precise timetable.

The Hugheses moved to Devon to live in a thatched country house and had a son, Nicholas, in 1962. The Bell Jar was punctually finished and the Ariel poems begun. After a vacation in Ireland, Plath and Hughes decided to separate for a time because her health, in a poor state again, couldn’t withstand a second country winter. So she moved with her children to a flat in a London house, which by a small miracle, W.B. Yeats had lived in.

SUICIDE

In 1963 The Bell Jar appeared under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas because she was in doubt of the book’s seriousness. It was, she said, an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past. Then, as the winter set in, it proved to be the coldest in fifty years. Fighting against household inconveniences and continuing poor health, she began to turn out poems at an extraordinary rate, writing in the pre-dawn hours before the children awoke. In a depression serious enough to send her to a doctor but self-controlled enough to be overlooked by friends, Sylvia Plath, in the midst of her most poetically productive period, ended her own life on February 11, 1963.

POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS

Ted Hughes had Ariel published in 1965. In 1966, The Bell Jar was reissued by Faber and Faber, this time under Plath’s own name; and in 1967 The Colossus reappeared. The New York editions of these books were: The Colossus (1962); Ariel (1966); The Bell Jar (1971). Then, the previously uncollected poems were published in Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1972).

THE POET REMEMBERED

Sylvia Plath has been remembered as vigorous, efficient, professional, and ambitious. Her social manner was poised and warm (Lois Ames, Notes Toward a Biography, The Art of Sylvia Plath. Charles Newman, ed. 1970). She