Sylvia Plath in Context

doi:10.1017/9781108556200

2019

DOI: 10.1017/9781108556200

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Sylvia Plath in Context

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Cited by 5 publications

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The Bell Jars

Hoag

2024

Environmental Humanities

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Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar chronicles prize-winning college student Esther Greenwood’s descent into melancholy and attempted suicide. An emerging writer, Esther sees clearly the paths available to her under 1950s US patriarchy: homemaker or eccentric intellectual. Each on its own is untenable, and choosing one precludes the other. The bell jar metaphor conjures a sense of confinement and suffocation, but this essay offers a multispecies reading that shows why such an interpretation is too narrow. The essay looks carefully at the bell jar, its function within her story, and the context within which Plath encountered it, namely, as a student of botany at Smith College conducting lab exercises on photosynthesis using the South African silverleaf geranium (Pelargonium sidoides). Through archival research on Plath and botanical instruction at the college, the essay shows that the bell jars Plath used were not tools of oppression. Rather, they were tools for growing plants from faraway places that require higher atmospheric humidity: technologies for making dislocated life possible. Plath’s cross-species encounters with exotic plants at the conservatory were critical to her conception of life as a woman under patriarchy—like the silverleaf geranium, living in a world not built for her.

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The Bell Jars

Hoag

2024

Environmental Humanities

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Lady Lazarus: resucitaciones de la obra y la figura de Sylvia Plath

Saucedo Dimas,

Villanueva Noriega

2024

An. de Let. Mod.

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Modernist Women Writers and Whimsy: Marianne Moore and Dorothy Parker

May

2020

Humanities

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This article assesses the work of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) in relation to the aesthetic category of whimsy. It considers how whimsy has been used as a term of dismissal for American women poets, outlines ways both writers’ receptions have been informed by this context, and explores questions of cost, worth, and value raised by their work. It situates whimsy in relation to Sianne Ngai’s account of diminutive modes in Our Aesthetic Categories (2015) and suggests why American women’s modernist poetry can be a useful context for exploring the aesthetic and cultural associations of whimsy.

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Sylvia Plath in Context

Cited by 5 publications

References 79 publications

The Bell Jars

The Bell Jars

Lady Lazarus: resucitaciones de la obra y la figura de Sylvia Plath

Modernist Women Writers and Whimsy: Marianne Moore and Dorothy Parker

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