The Bell Jar 869prostitution. One of the men who tried to buy her
services turned out to be her mother’s first husband,
the girl’s own stepfather. Out of guilt and a sense of
obligation, the stepfather allowed his former wife
and her second family to move in with him and their
eldest son.
The characters are locked in their parts or
roles, as are many traumatized people, and they
continually replay the past. The Father makes two
statements about justice in the first act of the play.
First, he points out that so-called real people are
themselves really many people in the course of a
day, depending on the other people with whom they
interact. He argues that it is unjust to condemn all
the facets of an individual based on one interaction,
no matter how heinous. He makes this argument in
the context of the Stepdaughter’s constantly refer-
ring bitterly to his actions toward her in the dress-
maker’s shop. In addition, the Father argues that “a
fact is like a sack”—an empty container that needs to
be contextualized with the emotions and thoughts
of the people involved. A fact without context can-
not lead to fair judgments.
Natalie Tarenko
SuFFerInG in Six Characters in Search of
an Author
The characters in the play Six Characters in Search
of an Author seek relief in expressing their suffering
to the author, who, they feel, is responsible for it
and should at least be aware of it. Their suffering is
inexplicable to them and is tragically out of propor-
tion to their actions. The six characters seek relief
by trying to express their suffering to the one they
hold responsible, their author. They settle, however,
for telling a theatrical producer, who they hope will
rewrite their situation.
For the six characters, their suffering is tragically
out of proportion to their actions. As we learn from
their story, in the beginning were the Father, the
Mother, and the Son. The Father noticed that his
wife and his male secretary/assistant had fallen in
love. Probably already tired of his wife, the Father
brought it about that his wife and his assistant
would go off together and have a relationship, while
the Son stayed with him. The mother and the for-
mer assistant had three more children, a daughter—
called the Stepdaughter—and the Boy and Little
Girl. Then the Mother’s lover died, leaving her with
financial difficulties.
In an almost Greek-tragedy instance of nonrec-
ognition, the Father propositions a young girl who
is working for a seamstress; he does not know that
this is actually his stepdaughter, his wife’s oldest
daughter. The Stepdaughter bitterly resents that her
mother did not protect her from prostitution; the
mother aches for the love of her oldest son, whom
the Father kept; the Little Girl drowns, and the Boy
shoots himself.
The six characters’ suffering is repetitive. What
they tell the stage director is only their latest reen-
actment of their grief and torment. In discussing
literature, critics often talk about Shakespeare’s
plays and other classics as still occurring; Here, the
characters bear the burden of that claim, for they are
stuck in an endless reenactment of their situation.
Most of all, their suffering is real to them. Over and
over again, they try to communicate the reality of
their suffering to the producer and other actors. Act
3 even includes a play on the words game and reality,
using the rhetorical device known as antimetabole.
That kind of repetition with reversal blurs distinc-
tions between the “game” of theater and the “reality”
of the audience’s lives.
Natalie TarenkoPLaTH, SyLvia The Bell Jar (1963)
Originally published in 1963 under the pen name
Victoria Lucas, The Bell Jar has since become one
of the most popular novels in post–World War II
American literature, indelibly connected with the
life of the real author, the poet Sylvia Plath (1932–
63). Appearing in England less than a month before
Plath’s suicide by asphyxiation, the novel is widely
acknowledged as a semiautobiographical account
of Plath’s own mental breakdown and first suicide
attempt. The Bell Jar depicts in evocative detail
the personal experience of depression and insanity
brought on by pressures to conform to society’s con-
tradictory expectations and desires.
Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of The Bell
Jar, represents the ideal female student of the 1950s.
When her carefully conceived plans for the future