“A Ritual for Being Born Twice”: Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ by Marjorie G. Perloff

http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/perloff.html

Perloff analyzes the The Bell Jar while focusing on Plath’s choices for developing the character of Ester Greenwood. She discusses Esther’s struggle for identity as one that struggles between the “inner self” and the “false-self” as termed by R.D Laing in The Divided Self. Perloff discusses how Plath’s protagonist embodies the struggles we face daily in life, the struggle to become one’s own self rather than what others expect.