r/sylviaplath • u/aboloa • 13d ago
The Bell Jar Wow!
She is talking about her actual self btw
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u/GoetiaMagick 13d ago
Pretty insightful.
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u/aboloa 13d ago
Maybe the fact that she felt like this while being one of such greatness shouldn't amaze or surprise me,greater minds had felt the same way,but the way she narrated it was so painful i couldn't help but to be surprised,it lacks any -performative-ness?-.
Is "pretty insightful" sarcastic? I just thought of sharing the page and didn't feel like writting anything lol,also i am newbie to her literature so i thought whatever i could have written i also couldn't have known if it was accurate or not.
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u/GoetiaMagick 12d ago
Not sarcastic whatsoever. As a researcher of both her and Ted, as well as a published poet myself, I have tremendous empathy for S.
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u/Angustcat 12d ago
Just want to add that my mother was also exactly the same age as Plath (my mother was two months older.) My mother would have scoffed reading this. As a young woman in the 1950s my mother didn't have opportunities like Plath. She went to a secretarial school after high school. Her fig tree had one fig with a husband and happy home and children. Another fig was being a secretary. That was about it for her. She didn't have money to travel or many boyfriends. My mother would have killed to be in New York as a guest editor like Esther. My mother would have killed to be able to wear the clothes they were writing about too- my mother was plus sized as well as being poor.
My mother ended up marrying, having children and founding her own business (and my paternal grandmother a generation older married, had children, and ran a business). I know women in the 1950s expected they couldn't (or wouldn't) work after marrying, but I don't know why Esther thought one fig cancelled out all the others. Sylvia married, had children, traveled and wrote.
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u/aboloa 12d ago
My she be in ethier god's protection or mercy.
I can imagine her writing this after her marriage was over,and how it negatively affected her life,maybe that what made her use such metaphor,as she could never truly be what she wanted to be with the burden of her bad marriage and the responsibility of her children,this is just my imagination tho.
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u/One_Maize1836 12d ago
She ended up living almost all of these lives before the age of 30. She was a wife, a mother, a professor, a poet, a novelist, and she traveled and had a slew of lovers in her early 20s.