The Radical Imaginary ofthe Bell Jar

Abstract

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase Bell JarV Haunting American classic? Girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Flawed first novel? Not her again! For many people the answer lies somewhere between these phrases. And to be sure the book invites such sentiment, a feeling of empathy or even pathos for the failings of its protagonist (and perhaps its author) to find solace. The lure or enticement of the reaction, or affect, that the book triggers is one that accounts at least in part for the book's stunning popularity even forty years after its initial publication. has indeed become a cottage industry. In 2003 alone, a major motion picture called Sylvia, an off-Broadway production based on The Bell Jar, the publication of the screenplay, a biography of Plath's estranged husband Ted Hughes called, simply, Her Husband, and the megabookstore displays which purposefully confuse The Bell Jar with Gwyneth Paltrow's movie role as together have created a media frenzy. Focus Features' tagline for the movie, life was too small to contain her, serves as a mandate to consumers: Life may have been too small, but is large enough that everyone can and should have a piece of her.1 What we learn from this is not only savvy marketing strategies and the cultivation of a kind of mass literary taste for the classics, but also that the terms of female containment continue to plague Plath. Containment was of course the term coined by George Kennan in 1947 in Sources of Soviet Conduct to describe both American domestic and foreign policy during the Cold War. It is perhaps because of its uncanny sense of perpetual female entrapment that Plath's story moves people such that The Bell Jar and its protagonist, Esther Greenwood, are compounded with their author and millions of readers in a circuit of feeling: we are encouraged to feel with or through The Bell Jar. This circuit of emotion situates The Bell Jar alongside a genre of fictions of sentiment. The 1 perpetually appears in contemporary popular media. The female protagonist in the movie Ten Things I Hate about You (1999) reads The Bell Jar; in an episode of The Gilmore Girls, the show's heroine reads Plath's diaries; and rockstar Ryan Adams's song Sylvia Plath (2001) testifies to the ongoing obsession of youth culture with Plath.