Chelsea Swan

The bell Jar by Silvia Plath. In Perloff’s article “A Ritual for Being Born Twice: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar,” she says, “If we take the division of Esther’s self as the motive or starting point of the novel’s plot, the central action of The Bell Jar may be described as the attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self system so that a real and viable identity can come into existence” (509). I think Perloff is trying to say here, that to truly find oneself and for that desired identity to be whole and complete, the individual must cancel out her “inner vs. false” self so that there can only exist one self- the real one. The problem is that Plath was not then able to be her true self. She was born at a time when she was conditioned to want marriage and babies without thinking it through. This time and again tears women apart. Esther, in the book, increasingly struggles to keep the outward self she presents to the world united with the inner self that she experiences. Her failure to recognize her own reflection stands for the difficulty she has understanding herself. Marjorie Perloff argues Plath writes about the human condition, mostly as women, as a “Divided Self”, a term coined by psychiatrist R.D Laing indicating a split between the outer self and the inner self. Plath exemplifies this dichotomy within women with different archetypes of what society believed a woman should be and tries to reconcile who she believes she truly was by the end of the novel. This inability to reunite the self, to try to live both lives is treacherous. You can either make art that is a lie and conform or you can make art that is true and let go of being ‘normal’ and fitting in’. In books like The Girls, Lolita, My Dark Vanessa, The Ophelia Girls, The Virgin Suicides we can see that the time of girlhood is fraught with dangers, extreme behaviours and emotions, confusion, sadness, and the pressure to conform, that there is a tearing apart of the self in order to project the image desired, and the popularity of these books is in their ability to reflect back at women the feelings that they already know so well and can feel comforted in knowing that they’re not alone in the turmoil at never being known, and also in being perpetually stuck in a state of girlhood, unable to ever leave that time as it is when we last knew ourselves.