BEYOND THE BELL JAR: A COMPARISON BETWEEN SYLVIA PLATH’S LIFE AND FICTION

Resumo

Sylvia Plath‘s poetry is known by its great account of themes as depression, sadness and despair. Her words are powerful and the subjects of her writing are usually based on personal experiences and feelings. Plath‘s premature death left a great amount of poetry but only one novel,The Bell Jar, which tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a young woman who suffers from the society‘s pressure and attempts suicide. Taking this information into account, this paper presents the genres which approach the art of transposing real life to literature as well as the theories which support this practice: Autobiography, Autofiction and Autobiographical Novel. Moreover, basing fictional characters on real people is also discussed, mainly considering Candido‘s theory, which explains the topic and classifies the characters according to their distance from reality. This paper also analyzes Sylvia Plath‘s only written novel The Bell Jar considering and focusing especially on its autobiographical elements. In order to accomplish the autobiographical analysis, Sylvia Plath‘s novel is compared to her personal letters as well as to an authorized biography. Finally, this paper fitsThe Bell Jar in one of those genres as well as exposes where the main character of the novel fits into the classification regarding its distance from reality.