Re-reading Sylvia Plath through the bell jar

Although the name Sylvia Plath has always been associated with schizophrenia, madness, trauma and ambiguity, and although her works have been read in the light of these key words, which form the kernel of the Plath myth, reading The Bell Jar with an objective mind supplies a completely different picture. In relation to this, analyzing The Bell Jar through psychoanalytic and feminist literary criticism reveal the fact that Sylvia Plath not only managed to create an organic form of writing, which encapsulates her poems, short stories and journals, all of which turn back to The Bell Jar, but also built her powerful political discourse upon The Bell Jar, which was not a pot boiler, but a reflector of the sociology of Cold War America. Therefore through dividing the novel into three parts as, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, the protagonist Esther Greenwood reveals the hidden traumas of the Cold War by creating a psychic landscape, including various Virgil's, guides, which is a form of simulacra as opposed to the one created by the dominant patriarchal ideology. At the end of her story, thanks to the play of language, Esther achieves the preservation of her true self through killing the false selves which are postulated by Cold War America. As a result, Esther's story reveals the fact that Plath's entire works must be read as literary works that are part of the sociology of twentieth century America and literature, not fantasies