The first critical issue to confront the reader of The Bell Jar is the problem of classifying the book. Is this book really a novel? It is presented in the form of a long fictional work. Nevertheless, one might argue that the flatness of all the minor characters, plus the inability of the major character, Esther Greenwood, to come to any real dramatic resolution of her problems makes the work a second-rate piece of fiction — if indeed this is fiction at all. Hailed as an important literary work because it takes a liberated view of the plight of the modern American woman is not justification for calling this book a great, or even a good, work of art. Good social commentary or good narrative description of a problem is not necessarily art. This work, in fact, is a good example of what John Barth says of most contemporary women's fiction: "secular news reports."
So if The Bell Jar is fiction of questionable quality or even, questionably, fiction, how does one label the book? First, the reader should have some idea about the life of the author, Sylvia Plath. For example, one should know that Plath is best recognized for her poetry and also that she committed suicide when she was thirty. Reading about Plath's life makes it clear that in The Bell Jar, originally published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, Plath was recording much of her personal experience, very lightly veiled as fiction. Plath attended Smith College and went to New York City in her junior year as a winner of a Mademoiselle writing contest; she tried to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills, and she was hospitalized before finally finishing college. So is this book really just a documentary of Plath's college years? If so, why did she present it as fiction? Wouldn't the mental hospital scenes have had more power to change things if they had been presented as the real experiences of an accomplished female poet? These and other questions can never be satisfactorily answered. What we have, then, is a book about a certain era, published in a certain guise. Perhaps that is commentary enough on Sylvia Plath's life, her historical situation as an adolescent in the early 1950s, and commentary enough on her major piece of fiction.
