Sylvia
Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts to European
immigrant parents: Otto and Aurelia Plath. She spent her early childhood years
in a seaport town of Winthrop, then, just after her father’s death in 1940, she
moved to the town of Wellesley, Boston’s suburbia. It obviously influenced Plath’s life, but also left a truly
significant mark on her literary work, as the theme of the absent father is
visibly present in her texts. That, and other themes, as well as Plath’s own experiences
are somewhat depicted in the The Bell Jar,
which eventually allows the readers and critics to consider it a
semi-autobiographical novel. It is a sort of a coming-of-age story, but instead
of a stable and subtle progress into maturity and adulthood, the protagonist,
Esther Greenwood, slowly regresses into distortion and madness.
