Plath, Sylvia (Vol. 17) - Stan Smith
STAN SMITH
In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses the psychological alienation of the heroine, Esther Greenwood, to reinforce … aesthetic alienation. Esther's 'madness' offers her an increasingly 'objective', exterior view of the 'eating customs, jurisprudence, and love life' [in Bertolt Brecht's words] of the culture she has inherited. 'Manners', provide an important motif of the book. Using the finger-bowl at a special lunch, Esther, for example, 'thought what a long way [she] had come' …, and recalls that in her first encounter with a finger-bowl, she drank the water and the cherry blossoms in it because 'I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup'. Esther's 'oddity' is here revealed as, in origin, no more than a social disjunction, between her own learnt expectations and the codes of manners within which she comes increasingly to move. A clue to the process at work is revealed in her memory of a poet who in 'do[ing]...
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