Searching for Connotations and Connections: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Paul Ricoeur,and the Language of Madness

Sylvia Plath’s first novel The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963 and released in England just weeks before she committed suicide in her London home (Ames 279). It was then published some eight years later in 1971 in the USA. The novel is a first-person account of Esther Greenwood; a nineteen-year-old aspiring writer who, while on a writing internship in New York, begins to feel that something is “wrong” with her. Upon returning home to the desultory suburbs of Boston, she discovers that she has not been accepted for a competitive summer writing course at Harvard. This news catalyses for Esther several suicide attempts and admissions to psychiatric wards. In short, The Bell Jar charts Esther’s experience of madness.

This article will argue that in The Bell Jar, readers are forced to engage with uncertainties of language. Plath's writing brings words that do not share obvious connections into relation through implicit and explicit omparisons-that is through metaphor and simile. These comparisons produce a semantic tension that surprises the reader.