『벨 자』를 중심으로 구축된 대중문화 속 실비아 플라스의 이미지

The Enduring Legacy of The Bell Jar and Sylvia Plath in Popular Culture

Sylvia Plath's only novel The Bell Jar has become synonymous with the oft-melodramatized life and suicide of the author. The coupling of the two has been further consolidated by popular cultural depictions of Sylvia Plath. Plath has been often juxtaposed with self-destructive young female characters who exhibit a penchant for her only novel, rather than her poetry. This essay proposes that The Bell Jar animates an intimate group of female readers marked by anxiety, paranoia and their conflicting views on domesticity, all of which belong to the milieu of the American 50s and beyond. By correlating the image of Sylvia Plath and the novel in popular culture, I also demonstrate how the shifting critical evaluations of Plath's poetry have been in fact yoked together with the responses, both positive and negative, toward this type of affective female readership. On the one hand, the often violent and suicidal propulsions that pulsate her writings and her image in popular culture may have undermined Plath's canonical status as one of the major female writers. On the other hand, however, the enduring legacy of The Bell Jar will continue to make the second wave feminism and its emphasis on women's experience relevant for the new generation of young female readers, suggesting ways for them to appropriate patriarchal popular culture from a feminist standpoint.