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SOME NOVELISTS MAY STRIKE us as more philosophical than others, and the rare novelist may strike us as primarily philosophical. Sylvia Plath is one such writer. From the opening of her well-known The Bell Jar, the reader senses that a kind of individualism, cast perhaps in phenomenological terms, will pervade the piece, and that this is one work that cannot be read lightly or without attention.1
Plath's psychological states are frequently analyzed in connection with her poetry, and indeed, with respect to at least some of the poems, they cannot be given a full reading without such allusion. But The Bell Jar was until recently the sort of work that took the place in many curricula now occupied by other adolescent novels detailing the angst of growing up and the very real miseries of family relations. The parallel between, for example, Plath's frequent fugue states-referred to in her poems, and even in the titles of some of her poems-and portions of the descriptive material of her novel has not been explored in depth. Nor has there been a close examination of the semisolipsistic philosophy that seems to permeate the work, a type of view that, even without the electroshock episodes and the denouement, might make one fear for the author's sanity.
Plath was widely held to be deracinated, and she seemed incapable of creating or establishing the sorts of emotional ties that others might find to come naturally. But the ontology of Plath's work demands attention, and it has so far not received the sort of commentary that it deserves. It will be the argument of this paper that a philosophy is to be found in The Bell Jar, and that it can and should be set out.
I
One of the hallmarks of The Bell Jar is its ability to translate everyday experience into the dissociative fugues of Plath's character, Esther Greenwood. For Esther, life has lost its quality of the mundane, and is a series of disjointed experiences that are unrecognizable to her as experiences of her own life. This cut-offquality is not unknown in philosophical work, and is something that we identify with, for example, the more profound parts of Descartes's Meditations, or even with the work of Kierkegaard.2 But Plath exhibits...