ABSTRACT
In a recent essay on postmodernity, Perry Anderson situates the emergence of postmodernity in Hispanic America, and describes its emergence in terms of a new voice within modernism: ‘a muted perfectionism of detail and ironic humour, whose most original feature was the newly authentic expression it afforded women’ (Anderson 1998: 4). That voice – of irony and humour – is predominant in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. It is a voice of resistance, of resistance to the organising and authoritarian limitations of conventional autobiography that at the same time proposes a realisation of the limits of the self. The Bell Jar, in its many fictional selves, avoids the controlling form of the conventional autobiographical self, yet suggests to its readers that the self is only possible through contradiction and ambiguity. In terms of the moral and social agenda of the USA (and indeed the accepted conventions of autobiography), it is a deeply disturbing (and heretical) thesis. For all its apparent simplicity, and tone of fauxnaïvete, I will argue that The Bell Jar opens up possibilities within the autobiographical form which still demand recognition and development.
