Reflections in The Bell Jar: Esther Greenwood as Sylvia Plath

By Hannah White

Can we fully separate the artist from their art? This is not a new question, but one that repeatedly demands to be answered. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar can be appreciated simply as a standalone object, yet it rarely has been treated as such. And while I’m not looking into the morality of Plath’s life and whether or not this impacts the morality of reading her works, I want to examine some of the unmistakable similarities between The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood and Plath herself. We rarely talk about Plath’s works without talking about her life, particularly its tragic endin...