Historical Context
Plath’s
novel begins by referring to one of the most important events of the early
1950’s: the executions of Ethel
and Julius Rosenberg. In 1950 the
Rosenbergs were arrested and accused of being spies for Russia; Ethel’s
brother, David Greenglass worked at the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, NM;
he gave the Rosenbergs information on nuclear weapons, which they then turned
over to the Soviets. They were
brought to trial and found guilty in 1951, and Greenglass was the chief witness
for the prosecution. Subsequently
they were both found guilty and sentenced to death.
In the two years that followed, the case was appealed through the courts
and in world opinion – many felt they were being unfairly punished.
But on June 19, 1953, they were both executed at Sing Sing Prison in New
York.
The
prosecution of the Rosenbergs was only one example of the fear of Communism
which gripped the nation and its leaders. This
was also the time of Joseph McCarthy, the U.S. senator who dominated the early
1950s by his sensational but unproved charges of Communist subversion in high
government circles. And in the year before the novel begins, 1952, Dwight D.
Eisenhower, a five-star general from World War II had been elected as president.
It’s difficult, however, to talk about the “historical context” of
the novel without examining Plath’s life:
the book is almost wholly autobiographical with the real names of people
and places only thinly disguised (one reason her mother didn’t want the book
published in the United States – see Points to Ponder).
Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts and spent her early childhood
years in Winthrop, a seaside town close to Boston (Esther visits this town in
chapter 12). Her father, a
distinguished professor of biology at Boston University, died when she was
eight. This brought radical changes
for the family, which included a younger brother and her maternal grandparents.
After her father’s death, the family moved to Wellesley, a conservative
upper-middle-class suburb, where her grandmother ran the household, her
grandfather worked at the nearby country club and her mother taught students in
a secretarial training program.
Like Esther, Sylvia was precocious and bright, winning prizes and
scholarships throughout her youth. In
September of 1950, she entered Smith College on a scholarship endowed by Olive
Higgins Prouty, a novelist, who later would become a friend and patron.
Plath excelled in college, becoming class president, had stories and
poems published in magazines, etc. In
the summer of 1952 she was chosen to be a guest editor at Mademoiselle,
which included a month-long internship in New York City. The Bell Jar
follows her life exactly – her return to Boston that summer, the electric
shock treatments which followed, along with her well-publicized disappearance
and her later hospitalization. This,
however, is where the novel leaves off.
Plath did return to Smith College and by the time she had finished, she
had sold more poems, won more prizes and graduated summa
cum laude. She also had won a
Fulbright, and spent a year in Newnham college at Cambridge University in
England. There she met the British
poet Ted Hughes, who she married in 1956. In
1960 she had her first child and published her first book of poetry, The
Colossus. But by 1962 Hughes had left her, and she spent a cold winter
in London, now with two young children, feverishly working on new poetry (which
would become part of Ariel after her
death). In January of 1963, The
Bell Jar is published in England. On
the morning of February 11, 1963, she committed suicide.
From the moment Ariel appeared
in print, it was a sensation, with a double-page spread in Time. The late 60s and
early 70s was the beginning of the women’s movement, and Plath’s poetry and
autobiographical novel were (and often still are) seen as proto-feminist texts.
