"You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here, but It Helps"

"And yet without the Plath life-story sitting alongside it, marking it out with an especial integrity, The Bell Jar starts to show its family likeness. I’m thinking here of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).

"That is, The Bell Jar’s Esther belongs to the empyrean of the beatified and the beaten just as much as Holden Caulfield or Sal Paradise. Its narrator speaks in a distinctly countercultural tongue. Like those literary works to which it bears such a striking affinity, it presents a portrait of the stifling conformism of postwar American society. And in the rebellion-cum-suffering of Esther it counters it."

 

Tim Black at Spiked considers Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar fifty years after publication.