Sylvia Plath was an amazing poet and writer who unfortunately never lived to experience the height of her fame after she took her own life. She wrote a large array of poems, but she only ever wrote one prose novel. The subject of Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, is a young woman spiraling into madness who attempts suicide, and eventually recovers from her mental illness. Plath’s poetry often follows the same subject matter, but the conventions of genre within poetry and the fiction novel are very different, and each tells Plath’s story in a unique way. All of the differences between these genres could be summed up under one term: density; between the length, the subject matter, the use of literary devices, and every other tactic at work within these genres, there is a large difference in the density of material presented that affects how the reader consumes each work.
The most obvious difference between poetry and the fiction novel is length. Most novels are many chapters long, and The Bell Jar is no exception at 200 pages with twenty chapters. In contrast, poems are often shorter, being read through in less than five minutes. While it may seem counterintuitive for the short poem to be denser than the long fiction novel, it does make sense. Just the simple characteristic length of each of these genres speaks to the density of the work; a fiction novel taking hours to read is usually not as dense as a short poem, because there is simply too much material for it to be pored over and critically analyzed. However, with a poem being of a much shorter length, it is reasonable that it could be packed with imagery, allusion, metaphor, etc., and still be palpable; the short length of the poem lends itself to being thoroughly analyzed by an everyday reader for comprehension.
Each of these genres handles its subject matter differently, too. The fiction novel usually comes right out with what it is about, lays out its characters, and sets the scene. In The Bell Jar, the reader is immediately introduced to the “I” of the novel, and the setting: “It was a queer, sultry summer… and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York” (Plath 1). Whereas in Plath’s “Ariel,” the first stanza of the poem is very vague and introduces no one: “Stasis in darkness. / Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances” (1-3). This, again, comes back to the topic of density; the novel is less dense and is meant to be read through easily, so it doesn’t make you work so hard to figure out what it is about, whereas the poem is much more dense and less information based than the novel, and requires more focused attention and analysis to understand its meaning.
While both the poem and the novel are full of literary devices, their use in each genre varies. The novel uses literary devices such as imagery and metaphor to further the reader’s understanding of the character’s emotional state:
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America… and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest. (Plath 63)
The novel intertwines the informational prose of the story with intricate similes and metaphors that deepen the complexity of emotions from the characters. However, the novel is not mostly or entirely made up of these literary devices; most of the novel is informational storytelling that a reader is easily able to follow and digest.
In contrast, the poem is mostly made up of these literary devices, and has little to no informational story telling that clues in the reader as to what is going on in the poem. Plath’s poem “Ariel” is a great example of this:
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
In this poem Plath gives glimpses of what is going on, but she is not telling the entire story. Rather, she creates these glimpses in a way that you get a feeling of what is going on, more than you do an understanding. This poem only takes about a minute to read, but upon that first reading it is unclear what the poem is really about. It takes quite a while to delve into the subject matter of the poem, understand the metaphors and the allusions, and actually get a grasp on what is happening here. Further, Plath doesn’t give her readers a very important bit of information crucial to the understanding of the poem: Ariel was the name of Plath’s horse, and it wasn’t until after her death that this was explained by her family. This is an essential detail that this poem completely ignores. Given this detail, the poem is much easier to understand; however, given that Plath did not include this detail, it would seem that understanding was not the aim of the poem. Rather, keeping with genre expectations, “Ariel” is more about an expression of feeling and emotion coming across on a page than telling a whole story.
The form of each of these genres is also significant to how the text is read. A fiction novel written in prose encourages the reader to read continuously as they delve into the storyline. There are some breaks in text, usually for indicators of time change, and there are chapters that offer convenient spots to take a break, given the length of the novel. But all in all, the form of the fiction novel lends itself to being read quickly for entertainment. On the other hand, the form of the poem encourages the reader to take pauses to contemplate its meaning. The stanzas are broken up into lines, each of which can be read on its own and together with the stanza, possibly taking different meanings from each. The lines are broken up in a particular way by the author to create multiple meanings within the text. Further, the division between stanzas offers a moment to pause and reflect on the meaning of that stanza’s lines. The form of the poem, while shorter than the fiction novel, invites readers to spend more time evaluating each line of its work to fully understand its meaning.
Plath’s works fall into the conventional genre expectations of both the poem and the fiction novel. The poems are shorter, more structured, and densely packed with literary devices; they are glimpses of moments in time, feelings and emotions displayed by the author with the intent of making the reader understand the emotional state. These dense works are palpable because of their short length, and enjoyable for the feelings they readily evoke in the reader. However, had Plath written her 200 page novel with the same dense brush as her poetry, it would render it a nearly incomprehensible read. The genre of the fiction novel is meant to be read fairly quickly, while still grasping an understanding of the material. There is still, of course, opportunity for analyzing the material to gain a greater nuance of understanding, but this is not the purpose of the genre. The purpose of the fiction novel is entertainment by story line, with literary devices used to highlight characters emotions and contexts. Plath sticks to the fiction novel genre expectations in The Bell Jar, and tells a riveting story that can be quickly read, while understanding the subtle distinctions between characters and their emotions. Interestingly enough, while all of these differences between genres can be examined and defined, most times readers at a college or above level already have expectations of each genre, and change their reading style automatically for the different genres of poetry or the fiction novel to match its needs.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Bantam Books, 1972.
Plath, Sylvia. “Ariel by Sylvia Plath.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49001/ariel.