LEXICAL-SEMANTIC METHODS OF SHOWING THE SELF-REALIZATION OF A WOMAN IN THE NOVEL «THE BELL JAR»

Abstract

Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the twentieth century. By the time she took her life at the age of thirty, Plath already had a following in the literary community. In her ensuing years, her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death.
Sylvia Plath integrated her own personal values, and her own personal life accounts into the autobiographical novel. «The Bell Jar» is the only novel by Sylvia Plath. Her prose, however, took a turn from the mediocre to the remarkable; her poetry had already taken this turn. The poet Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, described Plath’s rather sudden change from talent to genius as a «plunge into herself,» into the subjective, the imaginary. That the novel contains so much of «herself» was her reason for publishing it under a pseudonym. She did not want to offend anyone she knew; the characters in the novel had their counterparts in life. «The Bell Jar» makes apparent the oppressive force (at least for women) of the model of separative selfhood that dominates patriarchal culture.