Mastery and manipulation : Sylvia Plath's prose revision of her life

Sylvia Plath and her heroine Esther Greenwood of Plath's The Bell Jar, are neither solely the creation of American Culture in the 1950s, nor are they entirely the result of subversive individual subjectivity. The female subject, as Plath makes clear in The Bell Jar, is partly the result of historicized experience. Sylvia Plath's personal relationship with her culture, however, permits her to revise her historic or biographical experience as presented in her journals and letters, transforming the events of her own life into a subversive myth of survival that not only resisted rigid American constraints, but revised the very idea of femininity for an entire generation of women. For both herself and her heroine, Plath struggles in The Bell Jar towards emancipation from restrictive social forces and their internalization which threatens to reduce all women to repressed stereotypes. Her attempt also demonstrates Plath's desire not to be dominated by any idea of femininity other than the one she herself had constructed. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, demonstrates that female subjects are not only the result of social structures, but that they have the ability to reflect upon and alter or revise these structures. Evidence of this revisionary process can be traced through a comparative reading of The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, and The Bell Jar. Events and emotions appearing in Plath's private writings are re- invented, re-created, and revised in The Bell Jar. Thus, the relationship between Plath's life and her writing is not so obvious as garbage to receptical. Plath wrote beyond her actual experience, establishing control over her words and distance form her subject matter, allowing her to successfully transform her life into art. The Bell Jar cannot be said to reproduce Sylvia Plath's life directly, but instead offers a mythology of her female identity, and a representative look at the lives of innumerable American women in the 1950s. While Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar may reproduce certain aspects of existing structures present in America in the 1950s, this in no prevents the same text from modifying those very structures. By presenting the existence of certain contradictions, the space in which change may take place is widened.