Sylvia Plath

Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath, both educators. From the time Plath was the age of five she was writing complete poems. She was a brilliant and gifted high school student, having her response to an article in The Atlantic Monthly published. In Plath's response to the article that was titled A Reasonable Life in a Mad World, she argued that "beyond reason, one needed to connect with and embrace inner divinity and spirituality to fully live" (Mondragon 1). It was a connection Plath would never fully make.

One of the most dramatic events in Plath's early life was the untimely death of her father. Thinking he had lung cancer and there was no help for him, Otto Plath neglected his health and refused to see a physician. Once his suffering became unbearable he was ordered to see a doctor and discovered he did not have lung cancer but an advanced case of diabetes. His leg was amputated and his conditioned deteriorated rapidly, bringing about his death in November, 1940. Plath considered her father's death a form of suicide since he refused to seek assistance, and when told of his death at the age of eight she responded, "I'll never speak to God again" (Mondragon 1).

Plath's college experiences were quite influential on her, in terms of both her writing and influences she would meet. Her works found publication at times, but a continual stream of rejection slips created depression in her which sh

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self-destructive young woman then describes herself as being "twice born patched, retreaded, and approved for the road" (Plath 275). The Bell Jar is often quite revealing of the entrapped and confined sphere in which Plath felt she existed. She often felt like the warmth of the world was something not accessible to her. As Barnard points out, Plath uses the Bell Jar and the image of a "black, airless sack" that permits no exit to describe Esther's sense of claustrophobic isolation and confinement within the disaster of her own life (28). The glass walls of the Bell Jar permit Esther to experience only tantalizing, often distorted visual contact with the "outside world" (Barnard 1978, 28). Eventually, Plath would take her own life after Hughes' affair with another woman and his confession that he could not stand living with her any longer. As one biographer maintains, "Inwardly she felt exhausted and barely able to carry on, unwilling to let the world know and her circumstances pressed in on her" (Welz 2). Plath would become more successful after death than before, with a collected book of her poems assembled by Hughes winning the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, a rare occurrence. If we look at Plath's The Mirror, we see the ar

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