When life imitates art

The relationship between art and life is one of aesthetic impossibility. Art stands as a recipient, perfect and restrictive, at times destructive. That life imitates art was already suggested in Plato's Republic. Plato wants an Apollonian republic, rational, and stable. He does not want Dionysian irrationality and ecstatic states. To him, poetry is a madness, a form of possession, and the poet creates through divine inspiration. Not only poetry indulges in its irrational nature, but it is also contagious, capable of arousing passions and feelings that should instead be controlled. Therefore, to avoid that this ‘madness’ can be passed to the audience and eventually break the Republic, Plato decides that his guardians should not read poetry and that the poets should not be allowed inside the State unless they sang “praises on famous man” (Plato, 2006: 35). Accordingly, he suggests to “obliterate many obnoxious passages” (Plato, 2006: 20) of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey not because unpoetical but because they might have a fallacious influence on the youths and harm future warriors: “there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them” (Plato, 2006: 21). Implicit in Plato’s position is the notion that life might imitate art, epic in his case. On the other side of the spectrum, life is an immediate experience but never sufficiently captured. Aristotle set the tone of Western tradition by claiming that tragedy is a mimesis of an action. Ergo, Western art can be explained with reference to the notion of representation. Art plays out as a substitute for human reality, and concrete situations; real objects functioning as works of art, are usually associated with religious, political, and social pursuits.

However, in “The Decay of Lying” (1888), Oscar Wilde, rather provocatively, reverses the Aristotelian assumption by creating an anti-mimesis theory reminiscent of the Platonian stance. Characteristically, he holds that it is life that imitates art—“Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life” (Wilde, 2004 [1888]: 719)—thus reversing that which the naturalistic movement (and of course common sense) imagines. Simply put, rather than art being a reflection of our creative imagination, human actions and thoughts are directly inspired by the artistic representations we come across. “This,” Wilde (2004 [1888]: 725) writes, “results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy.” Based on the premise that art changes our perception of life, what we see in nature is what art suggests us to see. Wilde argues that what we find in life or nature is not a pre-existing element; instead, it is what artists have taught us to find there. By way of example, as Romanticism reaches its climax:

people see fogs not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London (…) But no one saw them (…) They did not exist till Art had invented them. (Wilde, 2004 [1888]: 722)

According to Wilde, great art anticipates life and shapes life's expressions, to an extent that art molds the patterns by which we perceive history and nature: “Consequently, nature and history are human constructions, and what makes them credible is primarily a matter of style” (McGrath, 1999: 19).

Perhaps the most famous example of the imitative effect of fiction on moral life is Goethe's Werther (1774), with 15 reeditions in the first 10 years after its appearance, banned in Leipzig because it was repeatedly accused of contributing to the increasing numbers of suicides. Indeed, Werther's shot reverberated all over Europe, prompting Madame de Staël to write: “Werther has caused more suicides than the most beautiful woman in the world” (cited in Arvanitakis, 2019: xxxiv). ¹ Camus (1979) rejects suicide on the grounds of rebellion, Dürkheim (2005) explains it as a sociological phenomenon, and yet self-destruction is an aesthetic phenomenon of the 20th century. Flirtation with death is less central to contemporary fictional characters than it is to their creator. Virginia Woolf drowned herself, Amedeo Modigliani and Dylan Thomas drank themselves to death, Mayakovski allegedly shot himself once through the heart, Ernest Hemingway followed his father's example and did the same. Anne Sexton gassed herself, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko followed suit. Each of these deaths has a logic of despair whose analysis goes beyond my purposes here. History shows that any radical belief comes with some sort of violence. On the other hand, as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famously wrote in 1842 (Shantz, 2010), “the passion for destruction is a creative passion,” that is, destruction hides a call to build new realities. With both these viewpoints in mind, Wilde's nonmimetic conception of art as archetype can be applied to reconsider texts such as Cesare Pavese's Among Women Only (1949) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), the former merely labeled as ‘personal’ and the latter as a ‘semiautobiographical’ novel. The aim of the present work is not another attempt at answering ‘the whys’ of Pavese's and Plath's suicides, but to present their suicides as a version of Oscar Wilde's assertion that life imitates art. Life accommodates itself to art until the dissonance between the artistic representation and reality becomes too wide, at which point the business of living takes an absurd turn. Therefore, I will have to reject Ronald Beck's (1972: 64) statement: “the novel cannot in any literal sense be life, it follows that it is made-up, constructed, artificial.” It does happen sometimes that life in the real world is the same as life in the novel. Fiction and life overlap not as a shallow postmodern imitational endeavor, but as a consequence of unheard cries for help. In Cesare Pavese's and Sylvia Plath's case, they turn their inner solitude into an implacable performance of death.

From the scholar's perspective, to write about them is to write about their suicide. It is not plausible to write about their work without connecting to their extreme action. What Elizabeth Hardwick (1973: 13) has written about Plath, that her “fate and her themes are hardly separate and both are singularly terrible,” is valid for Pavese as well. For both the crux of their experience is the incapacity to love and to receive love. Hence, the text becomes the source, literary and phenomenical, of their suicide. They camouflage, more or less successfully, within the narrative lines a longing for death, and finally, once the text is complete, they shape anguish into an extreme gesture. What is artificial then is not the novel but life itself, reduced to an imitation, an artificial construct of its artistic form. It follows, as Wilde indicates, not that the artist uses life as raw material, but that art is the raw material through which life is molded. But if imitation it is, which imitation is it? A personal experience. There is in these contemplative novels an existentialist disposition that is to be traced back to the authors’ stand on life. Humans are condemned to freedom, whether working to liberate themselves from the clutches of consuming attachment or living a leisured life of wealth. The pointlessness of life stains Pavese's routine, for he “was incapable of enjoying things and loving them when he had them” (Ginzburg, 1962: 14). For Plath, the world was simply rotting in a “repetitive meaningless” (Plath and Kukil, 2000: 142). With the fictional transposition, Plath and Pavese transfer their demons into female protagonists (Esther and Rosetta) that are not ‘object of desire’ but ‘desiring subjects.’ By so doing, they temporarily crawl away from the specter of suicide which has haunted them since childhood. An obsession that finally overwhelms life. Both novels are placed in the wake of a painful evolution, highlighting the impervious path toward the affirmation of one's subjectivity and the cunning that lies behind the future. Rosetta's and Esther's final journey is the same in kind but different in degree. It is less a Romantic aesthetic than it is the artistic need to make the suffering-self a work of art. Fatally, neither Pavese nor Plath were capable of sublimating their personal suffering in fiction. Instead, they used life to enact their art. Consequently, the impossible gap between living and writing has been filled by a violent death.

Cesare Pavese: Among Women Only (1949)

With his father dead when he was six years old and a desolate childhood, Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) developed into not only a loner but also one of the tragic poets of the 20th century. His literary career developed between the fascist regime and the Second World War. He knew the rigors of war, political persecution, and prison; torn between repression and violence, Pavese was a man of existential suffering and incurable loneliness: “My lot is to hug shadows” (Pavese, 2017: xiii). Natalia Ginzburg, in her 1957 heartbreaking essay on Pavese's life and suicide, “Portrait of a Friend,” describes the nature of his city, Turin:

The city's essential nature is melancholy; the river loses itself in the distance and disappears in a horizon of violet mists which make you think of sunsets at midday, and at any moment you can breathe in the same dark, industrial smell of soot, and hear the whistle of the trains. (Ginzburg, 1962: 11) ²

Thus, a direct connection is drawn between the city and Pavese's melancholic nature: “Our friend, stubborn and solitary, walked with his long stride throughout the city; he hid himself away in remote, smoky cafés” (Ginzburg, 1962: 12). Among Women Only (Tra Donne Sole) bears the same melancholic undertone. The text belongs to the European artistic canon of psychological portraits in post-war societies. It is one of the three novellas that make up La Bella Estate (The Beautiful Summer), a work that won the Strega Prize in 1950, the year in which Pavese took his own life (Pavese, 1940). Using Turin as the backdrop, the text explores solitude, the quest for affection, and the potential happiness of lifestyles that the protagonists never possessed.

Pavese makes a narrative choice of postmodern experimentation. He does not tell the story of Clelia in the third person but entrusts the narrative to the ‘I’ of a character named Clelia. Following the end of the Second World War, Clelia, a well-known fashion designer, relocates to Turin to oversee the opening of a new boutique in the city where she had spent her childhood in poverty. There is something of Pirandellian humourism in Clelia. ³ As a sad Arlecchino, she arrives in Turin during the carnival season. She lives precariously between a lost past and a fragile present that cannot fill the void that has resulted. Her complex organizing activity cannot make up for the lack of memories; in the end, she is a single woman among single women.

Returning means leaving time to its linear run and swimming against the current, losing touch with the present in order to truly possess it. But Clelia can't do that. At best, for her, the myth – the past – is only an indication of how successfully she has advanced into history. (Musumeci, 1980: 123)

As she arrives, the lightness of the carnival is broken by the suicide scene which involves her alter-ego Rosetta, “a fact that (…) performs the function of contrasting the tragedy of life with the gaiety of the party and prelude to even more traumatic experiences” (Scappatticci, 2009: 185). Clelia's professional status allows her to engage with the city's hedonistic lifestyle, the high bourgeoisie symbolized by her fur coat, which is also a reminder of that earthly success she has triumphantly achieved. At first, she appears as a sort of Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, someone more concerned with what one seems to be than what one actually is. But then she turns into a tolerable version of Isabel Archer, intellectually independent and spiritually lonely. While trying to escape frustration and boredom in a mindless search for pleasure, she is drawn into a group of young people whose lives have become full of futility and boredom: “They have the vices of the old but not the experience” (Pavese, 2004: 24). Men are objectified into vacant creatures for casual sex, women are cynical and frivolous, proud and lonely, gifted with a false sense of emancipation given by their wealth and a sterile freedom. As the group spend their time between parties, gambling, and “useless Sunday” (Pavese, 2004: 98), Clelia realizes the vanity of her own dream: “[I] wondered if it was worth the effort to work and get where I had got and not be anything” (Pavese, 2004: 64). She fits nowhere, not with the moneyed socialites (“It's not easy to avoid leisured people”; Pavese, 2004: 64), nor with those she was previously acquainted with. The sense of desolation becomes most sharp when she meets Rosetta, the most fragile and therefore the most ‘human.’ Rosetta does not adapt to the female stereotype with whom Clelia engages but this is not enough to guarantee salvation. The novel opens with her failed suicide attempt and ends with her successful attempt, which poignantly foreshadows that of Pavese a year after this text's publication.

The narration is permeated by an atmosphere of disgust—disgust with living:

Momina was telling me how strongly she was overcome at times by disgust—not just a nausea from this or that person, from an evening or a season, but a disgust with living, with everything and everyone, with time itself that goes so fast and yet never seems to go. (Pavese, 2004: 49)

Rosetta, fragile and violent at the same time, corresponds to a depressive personality: “For a long time, nights had made her shudder, the idea of having got through another day, of being alone with her disgusts, of waiting for morning, stretched out in bed—all became unbearable” (Pavese, 2004: 60). With her, the mal de vivre assumes a tragic dimension, for from the outset she is the predestined victim of an environment dominated by the rule of fiction and exteriority. Yvonne Hauser-Rüegger's (2004: 214) statement on the issue is representative: “The superficial life she has known does not allow her to access the dimension of being. Rosetta feels an absolute desire in the context of a social existence that is mere appearance, theater, worldly spectacle.” Thus, her desperate need to be clashes against a world in which “nothing is worth anything” (Pavese, 2004: 91) and where drinks and empty laughter make up for all the intense relationships she is incapable of nurturing. Fictional characters exchange perpetual comments without ever connecting to each other. Apathetic condition this one that not only reflects Pavese's personality but the overall status of Italian neorealist fiction:

Those of us who have tried to write novels in our time know the discomfort and unhappiness that appears as soon as we reach the point when we have to make our characters talk to each other. For page after page our characters exchange comments that are insignificant but pregnant with a desolate unhappiness. (Ginzburg, 1962: 44)

With Among Women Only, Pavese speaks and behaves through his female protagonists. He lives in Clelia, the narrative voice to which Pavese lends his voice, someone with no family of her own, a working and somewhat masculine woman, full of hatred and love toward her life. They share the same sense of immense solitude; each encounter is a fulfillment in itself but not a promise: “There's nothing like spending a night together on the same pillow to understand that people are made differently and have their own road to follow” (Pavese, 2004: 86). It was Italo Calvino first to see in Clelia a female version of her creator:

And the thing that shocks the most is that hairy woman-horse, with a cavernous voice and breath that tastes like a pipe, who speaks in the first person and from the beginning one understands that it is you [Pavese] with a wig and fake breasts who says: “Here is what a woman should seriously be like.” (Cited in Foti, 2012: 161)

But Pavese recreates himself also in the figure of Rosetta. In her memories, Natalia Ginzburg recalls the nights spent among friends and Pavese among them. He would sit aloof in silence and would not speak or answer any questions. Suddenly, he would take his coat and bid goodbye, leaving his friends wondering whether he had failed to find pleasure in their company or “if instead he had proposed, simply, to spend an evening in silence under a lamp that was not his” (Ginzburg, 1962: 12). Similarly, Rosetta does not talk: “She sat there silent, sulky, stubborn” (Pavese, 2004: 89). Like Rosetta, Pavese feels a vacuum and has contemplated suicide: “the suicidal is a victim, after all, naive, she is the most innocent of all, and if she dies it is precisely because out of everyone she is the only one still able to feel what she lacks” (Pavese, 1966: 460–461). What is it then that Rosetta and Pavese lack? “Everyone asked how anyone like Rosetta who had such a need to live could want to die” (Pavese, 2004: 100). While love is truly lacking in her life, it is not lack of love that triggers her desperate action. She was naive but introspective. We can take Momina's answer at face value: “Not for love, I’m sure of that” (Pavese, 2004: 49). Then what was it? “She wanted to be alone, to isolate herself from the uproar” (Pavese, 2004: 67). The place chosen for her death is the place that the artist creates. Rosetta rents a painter's studio to kill herself. There are but a few pieces of furniture, a reference to the essentiality of an existence devoid of artifice; outside the window is the panorama of Superga, an allusion to an alternative realm from the chaos of the city, and an opportunity for solitude and introspection. Symbolically, this is the death of art. Art is punished because it is incapable of sublimating life. The doubt remains whether Rosetta wanted to commit suicide or to enact it. After Rosetta’s first failed attempt, Momina asserts: “If you really wanted to do it (…) shooting would have been better. It worked out badly” (Pavese, 2004: 44). Despite the warning, she uses barbiturates for her second (successful) suicide attempt as well, thus, perhaps, she did not want to die but to be found again. Given this, one also has to wonder whether Pavese's suicide is not another mise-en-scene that went too far. It is the painter Loris who reveals the Pirandellian secret of life, that living is acting: “we can't do it without a mise-en-scène (…) we are part of a mise-en-scène that we have to accept or reject. Any ambiance at all is a mise-en-scène” (Pavese, 2004: 21). From this perspective, living and acting are simply different ways to look at the same thing but are not different things. It might be that Pavese, as much as Plath, no longer saw the difference and in the eternal race between the person and the artist, they attributed the same value to life and life-in-fiction. “Is it conceivable,” asked Pavese (2017: 73), “to murder someone in order to count for something in his life? Then is it conceivable to kill oneself so as to count for something in one's own life?” Entries like this one cast doubt on Pavese's intention. Was he trying to add stature to his reputation? He was not. Death constantly accompanied Pavese throughout his life. The references in his diary are countless; he analyzed it and understood it almost as if it were a heroic act, an ‘absurd vice’ with a recurrent call to curiosity and hope. ⁴ As early as April 10, 1936, he noted in his diary, This Business of Living (1952): “My basic principle is suicide, never committed, never to be committed, but the thought of it caresses my sensibility” (Pavese, 2017: 32). It is a dominant thought that frames his imagination, hence in the poem “Paradise on the rooftops” (Il paradiso sui tetti), prophetically, death is awakening from sleep:

The day will be still, the light cold like the sun rising or setting, and the windowpane will seal the stagnant air from the sky outside.

The predominant feeling of the poem is that of inevitability, made even more looming by the almost exclusive use of the future tense. The inevitability of a future fulfillment seals humans’ defeat at the hands of fate. Yet fate takes the forms of familiar places—the window, the staircase, the bed. Thus, paradise, enlarged to the dimension of eternity, becomes attainable, behind the window, it borders the rooftops, it is a dawn that becomes light. Even so, death does not pacify Pavese’s solitude. The past is reduced to ‘lumps of shadow,’ not redeemed, memory is and will always be a flare that was burning until yesterday and is now sealed with eternity. Somewhere along the line, a few days before dying, Pavese had written: “This is the end of the unfinished year, which I will not finish,” and on August 18 he had closed his diary with his last written words: “The thing most feared in secret always happens (…) It seemed easy when I thought about it. Weak women have done it. It takes humility, not pride. All this is sickening. Not words. An act. I won't write anymore” (Pavese, 2017: 350). A diary is a literary testament and, in this respect, we should evaluate Pavese's as one of the great literary testaments of the 20th century. If we consider his diaries as a source of intellectual intimacy, and if we understand that they were his only means of repressing the specter of suicide, it makes sense that he waved goodbye to writing before to life. Afterwards, life complied with the written word.

On the morning of Saturday, August 26, he asked his sister Maria to pack him a suitcase as if he was going away for a weekend trip. The scene is closely reminiscent of Goethe's Werther when Werther arranges his suicide. Lotte is the one handing over the pistol that will kill Werther: “Slowly she walked over to the wall and, with hands that trembled, took the pistols from the rack, dusted them, hesitated” (Goethe, 1962: 124). Is Pavese fictionalizing his life, or is he implying his sister's share of guilt in his tragic ending? On the night of August 26, 1950, at the summit of his public success, Pavese, after swallowing more than 10 sachets of sleeping pills, died. ⁶ He was found in a hotel room, near the train station, dead like a foreigner in the city that belonged to him. Again, one cannot avoid perceiving in the modus operandi of his self-annihilation an imitational tendency as theorized by Wilde. The overdose of barbiturates that kills him was already in Among Women Only's opening chapter: “On the stretcher lay a girl with a swollen face and disordered hair, shoeless but wearing an evening gown of blue tulle” (Pavese, 2004: 7). And of course, the overdose of barbiturates is what kills Rosetta in the end. He had just published The Moon and the Bonfires (1950), and won one of the highest Italian literary awards for fiction (the Strega Prize). Seemingly, the unhappy affair with little-known American actress Constance Dowling is the ante-fact that triggered his gesture. They had met a few days before, and to her he had dedicated his last composition, “Death will come with your eyes.” On hearing of his death, Dowling’s only comment was reportedly, “I didn't know he was so famous” (cited in Alvarez, 1973: 80).

However, to believe that Pavese took his life for one or more unrequited loves is to undermine his existential condition: “One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love—any love—reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness” (Pavese, 2017: 345). ⁷ In Alan Williamson's (1997: 40) words:

One could argue forever whether the sense of a fundamental, ontological lack was the driving force in Pavese's life, and his erotic failures merely fueled it; or whether his conviction of being unloved and unlovable was the more essential thing. The two fed each other, in an endless circle.

As it appears in his diary, in which women are labeled “bitter as death” (Pavese, 2017: 49), it is undeniable that Pavese's own attitude toward women is disillusioned and at times cynical. Lajolo, referring to the ‘woman with the husky voice,’ one of Pavese's first heartbreaks, suggests a more overreaching dimension than physical satisfaction: “By losing this woman he loses hope, tenderness for the woman, the sense of family, the security of being a man, the sweetness of fatherhood, the enchantment of being able to have a child” (Lajolo, 1960: 104). And yet, there is more to it than that. Some 10 days before committing suicide, Pavese (2017: 350) writes in his diary: “In my life I am more hopeless, more lost than then. What have I accomplished? Nothing.” From a cognitive perspective (see Beck, 1991), the triggering events (rejection by a woman) activate his core belief that he is incompetent as a writer. Instead, from a Wilde-like perspective, Pavese is reenacting and bringing to closure the disturbed personalities of his characters. As Clelia “wondered if it was worth the effort to work and get where I had got and not be anything” (Pavese, 2004: 64), Pavese convinces himself that he has accomplished nothing. As Rosetta is incapable of coping with the ghost of a mounting solitude, “now she was alone again and couldn't do anything, little by little she became desperate, and finding the Veronal in her bag” (Pavese, 2004: 60), Pavese convinces himself that life is a curse healed by death: “Loneliness is pain; copulation is pain; piling up possessions or herding with a crowd is pain; Death puts an end to it all” (Pavese, 2017: 74–75). The impossibility to acquire sense compels Pavese to acknowledge death as a liberation:

The reality that surrounds him is alien to him and his inner self cannot establish a balance with it. Since he was unfit to accept the limits imposed by life, he identifies the idea of suicide as the defining and absolute gesture, the way out of all its contradictions. Death represents the last step in his ascent towards self-improvement, liberation, to use the words of Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (Andino, 1978: 144)

Suicide assumes in Pavese a stoic connotation, for it is the attempt to dominate life by choosing death; in other words, the act of rebellion against the ferocious power (nature) that leads human life. With this reading, Rosetta is stronger than Clelia, for she refuses to live in a world that she knows lacks what she needs. “People who die should be left alone” (Pavese, 2004: 85), she observes a few days before dying, hence once more marking her stoic perception that there is no salvation when life is no longer a possibility. But we need to remember that it is Pavese speaking through Rosetta. Indeed, with Rosetta, Pavese had time to take a live picture of his own death, plan it in advance, give himself another chance or choose an aseptic room. So it is that in August 1950 he confesses to Romilda Bollati, some 20 years his younger, the woman to whom he said “Ti Voglio un faló di bene,” that he is leaving for a trip. He writes:

I was curious about the future, curious about myself – life seemed horrible to me but I still found myself interesting. Now it's the reverse: I know that life is beautiful but that I am cut off from it, all for my own sake, and that this is a futile tragedy, like having diabetes or smoking cancer. (Pavese, 1966: 559)

A pendulum between despair and boredom, Pavese has seen his life burning into ashes, and fiction has come alive.

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar (1963)

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was a child prodigy, with her first poem published when she was eight. Portrayed in a variety of ways: as an ambitious, fragile immigrant daughter shattered by the loss of her father early in life; as a dedicated mother and wife whose love was crushed by her worshipped husband's betrayal; as a righteous proto-feminist casting off her husband and children; as a feminist fighting against culturally prescribed patriarchal norms. In the end, she is the unbalanced artist who used and sacrificed everything for the sake of her art, including her own life. The Freudian psychoanalyst Ruth Barnhouse, Dr Nolan in The Bell Jar, was the first to reveal Plath's Electra complex, ⁸ which is also a way to explain Plath's suicide as a result of unresolved mourning for ‘the bee king,’ her father. ⁹ Meanwhile, the relationship with her mother is one of expectations to be fulfilled: “My enemies are those who care about me most. First: my mother” (Plath, 2000: 121). ¹⁰ An example of a roman á clef, The Bell Jar (1963) is a confessional text in which Plath projects her self-image in her writing. As she told Alfred Alvarez, the text is “an autobiographical apprentice-work which she had to write in order to free herself from the past” (Alvarez, 1973: 24). Psychoanalysis claims that writing is always autobiographical because it is impossible to fully move outside the self. On the other hand, because to write an autobiography is to write a representation of one's self, an autobiography is also by nature a fiction, thus a novel. ¹¹ Nevertheless, it is the very same Plath who holds the “opinion that the most interesting poetry was that written out of personal experience” (Martin-Wagner, 1988: 194). Therefore, not surprisingly, a month after The Bell Jar was published in London she kills herself, thus accomplishing or performing what the younger Esther could not. The events that Plath reports in The Bell Jar are a loyal reconstruction of her life in the summer and autumn of 1953, thus the writing Plath is 10 years older than her fictional representation Esther. In the summer of 1953, a college student, Esther Greenwood, the fictional name for Sylvia Plath, is a guest editor for a fashion magazine in New York City. However, a letter from Harvard University rejecting her from a fiction-writing class triggers her underlying depression and sense of failure. The novel charts Esther's breakdown and suicide attempt, her hospitalization, and her later plan to return to Smith College.

The opening sentence is a foreshadowing filled with a sense of oppression. That summer the Rosenbergs were electrocuted. ¹² Esther herself will experience what it is to be “burned alive all along your nerves” (Plath, 1971: 1). With this opening, the tone of the narration is set. Sickness is everywhere. Her friend Doreen lies on the corridor floor with her head dropped into her “brown vomit” (Plath, 1971: 8), all the girls are suffering from food poisoning at the Ladies’ Day Food Testing kitchens, and Buddy Willard, Esther’s official boyfriend, develops tuberculosis. Esther is a brilliant college student who has depression. As her condition does not improve, she submits to psychotherapy and electroshock treatments described as some sort of punishment for a crime she did not commit: “I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done” (Plath, 1971: 45).

Rather plainly, she is mentally unstable and emotionally fragile. After having broken her leg, she moves back home with her mother. That summer, she might go to Europe and have a lover or she might read Joyce's Finnegans Wake. She might take a gap year from college and become a pottery maker or she might be a waitress in Germany. Inclined to chaos, as we have already seen in Pavese, Esther enters into a labyrinthine mise en scene in which Plath is Esther and Esther becomes Elaine. In fact, Esther finally decides to spend the summer writing a novel in which “My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine” (Plath, 1971: 37). Unlike Rosetta, Esther might have a schizoid personality. RD Laing (1970: 94) observes that in subjects suffering from schizophrenia, “the ‘inner self’ is occupied in phantasy and observation. It observes the processes of perception and action.” That is to say that the schizoid individual observes her/himself living as if they were another self. In a similar fashion, Esther has a “chorus of voices” (Plath, 1971: 46) speaking inside her head. When asked by Jay Cee, the Ladies’ Day editor, what she intends to do after graduation, Esther replies “I don't really know” (Plath, 1971: 11). Her professor of physics, Mr Manzi, sees in Esther the ideal student, but she hates physics: “Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it” (Plath, 1971: 12). Her only formal boyfriend, Buddy, believes Esther to be sexually experienced: “he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was” (Plath, 1971: 22). When she is offered the opportunity to take some courses at Cambridge, “the hollow voice said, ‘You better count me out’” (Plath, 1971: 37). In each of these cases, Esther is so detached that she seems not to notice that ‘the other self (selves),’ in other words the masks she wears, are eclipsing the human being that lurks behind. The veil is, in this case, a conscious choice of the artist, defending the ego at the expense of the world: “It is a terrible thing/ To be so open: it is as if my heart/ Put on a face and walked into the world” (Plath, 1968: 185). ¹³ Readers familiar with Plath's poetry collection Ariel (1965) and her journals will know that she was a woman of many masks and veils: “Masks are the order of the day” (2000: 184). Accordingly, Esther is the same; unconsciously, she ‘put on a face.’

The dissolution of Esther's self into a myriad of Pirandellian identities has to do with her being always out of place. New York's glamour and entropic relationships, its artificiality, is irrelevant to her but so is her small hometown in Massachusetts: “a world [of] vacuous domestic life” (Plath, 1971: 79). She copes by putting on masks of confidence, until she no longer recognizes her expression in the mirror. In New York, she detects her own figure in a reflecting door: “I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course” (Plath, 1971: 7). After Marco's attempted rape of Esther, “[t]he face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian” (Plath, 1971: 35). Marjorie G Perloff notes that “[a]s the self becomes increasingly disembodied, the reflection in the mirror gradually becomes a stranger” (Perloff and Plath, 1972: 510). Mirrors in Plath reflect distorted images; in psychoanalytic terms the distorted images she sees are no more than the hidden aspect of her fragile and murderous psyche: “Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms/ In which a torture goes on one can only watch/ The face that lived in this mirror is the face of a dead man” (“The Courage of Shutting Up,” in Plath, 1981: 176). ¹⁴ Thus, in her journey toward disintegration, Esther becomes invisible: “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow” (Plath, 1971: 46). At first, she no longer washes, changes her clothing, or puts on make-up: “the reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly” (Plath, 1971: 40). At last, she retreats into the original womb that Esther-Plath visualizes in her mother's basement, “crawled to the farthest wall” (Plath, 1971: 53), to become an invisible shadow. But nobody is invisible in a bell jar.

The hardest task, Plath suggests, is to be oneself. If Pavese lacks love, Plath lacks role models. Certainly, her mother, conceived as a loveless figure, could not represent one. Esther, like Plath, does not have a solid identity because she is incapable of choosing one. In one of the novel's key moments, she envisions her career options as a green fig tree in which each branch is a life opportunity:

I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. (Plath, 1971: 24)

We know that Esther is an excellent student, and could easily choose any of these figs, yet she finds herself unfit to do so. Implied here is her neurotic character, “wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time” (Plath, 1971: 29). Gayle Whittier (1976: 130) locates the source of Esther's neurosis in the clash between social convention and desires:

According to her society's standards, “an intellectual woman” is herself a cultural contradiction in terms, a disharmonious combination of biology and intelligence. It is in part from this sense of self as a living paradox that Esther grows increasingly depressed.

Is she incapable of integrating her ambition and her self-image as a woman? Back to Massachusetts for the summer, surrounded by mothers and housewives, without intellectual perspective, Esther capitulates to her sense of failure. Trapped in a routine with no future, Esther describes her status as a bell jar in which she is “stewing in my own sour air” (Plath, 1971: 58). ¹⁵ Used in laboratory experiments to cover and protect material in a vacuum, the bell jar is the aesthetic metaphor Plath creates to admit that she is suffocating in a vacuum of her own making. As Esther will have recourse to sleeping pills to break the asphyxiating routine of her present, Plath's quest for a destination becomes a form of madness when she realizes there is no destination to attain: “The train is dragging itself, it is screaming/— An animal/ Insane for the destination,/ The bloodspot,/ The face at the end of the flare” (“Getting There,” in Plath, 1981: 249). Significantly, Murray Schwartz and Christopher Bollas (1976: 151) write: “Torn from an object world that must have supplied her with psychic nourishment, the train that takes her away becomes a persecutory vehicle which catches her in some inexorable drive that cannot be undone.”

In a second moment, incapable of choosing and interacting (she lets an unconscious Doreen lie in a pool of vomit), Esther falls into the trap of alienation. She is alienated from the city of New York, from which she feels rejected: “every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour” (Plath, 1971: 6). She is alienated from her body. Referring to her virginity, she says, “I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it” (Plath, 1971: 71), because her “virginity weighted like a millstone around [her] neck” (Plath, 1971: 71). Esther's final sexual encounter is symbolic of Plath's relation to the world. After having arranged birth control and seduced the young math professor from Harvard, Irwin, the outcome of their lovemaking is literally painful. Esther has a severe hemorrhage, with the bloody wound emblematic of the relationship between the sexes: not one of tenderness but of war. At last, she is alienated from her writing, thus in the middle of the page all she can compose is a Dadaist sentence the likes of “bababadalgharaghtakammmarronnkonnbronntonnerronnttionnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” (Plath, 1971: 39). In Yōko Sakane's (1998: 35) words, “Esther becomes a woman without sexuality and a poet without language.” And the bell jar becomes an iron cage: “I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to” (Plath, 1971: 36).

According to Laing (1967: 79), “the experience and behavior that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.” To what extent was Esther/Plath’s life unlivable? The entry in her diary dated October 13, 1959 reveals her sense of marginalization: “I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness” (Plath, 2000: 581). As with Pavese, it would be misjudging Plath’s life to reduce her suicide to a case of unrequited love. Ted Hughes had left her for another woman. The winter of 1962–1963 was the coldest in 150 years. The power stations broke down, abandoned trucks froze on the roads, and the trains froze on the tracks. The gas failed, the lights failed, candles were unobtainable. The water pipe froze too, the children—now two years old and nine months old—were often sick, and the house had no telephone. Did she commit suicide because her nerves failed her too? ¹⁶ Alvarez (1973: 36) defines Plath's suicide as “‘a cry for help’ which fatally misfired.” Possible. Why, otherwise, would she sign a five-year lease on her London flat if she had planned to end her life? Simply because she had not planned it. Why would she leave her doctor's telephone number? (“Please call Dr …”) if not to be saved? On the line of comparison and imitation, it is worth noting that both Esther and Plath approach suicide by ‘going downstairs.’ The former goes down into the cellar, the latter walked down to the kitchen. ¹⁷ Plath's suicide was the attempt to escape from the desperate corner into which her life had boxed her. Plath, as much as Esther, lived with the “conviction that to be an adult meant to be a survivor” (Alvarez, 1973: 22). Unfortunately, “Plath created in her poetry a world in which she could no longer find the possibility of survival” (Schwartz and Bollas, 1976: 150). With a 10-year gap between Esther and Plath, it is plausible that Esther, that is Plath in her early 20s, lingers toward the future with shades of optimism. Indeed, as the novel ends, while shoveling Buddy's car out of the snow, Esther observes with pleasure the sun emerging from the clouds: “as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase” (Plath, 1971: 75). On the other hand, Plath's message on a scrap of paper indicates that she wanted to be saved as Esther was, but her world never shifted slightly.

Scholars have suggested that her suicide, almost a desire for death, is linked to her fantasy of joining her beloved dead father, in her mind a monumental image of a lost god: “O father, all by yourself/ You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum” (“The Colossus,” in Plath, 1981: 129). ¹⁸ In most of her early poems, the father figure is either loving and affectionate or the absent man she yearns to bring back into her life. The giant father persona in “Colossus,” in Linda Wagner's (1999: 12) view, suggests “a sense of the father as an unattainable sphinx-like status, an entity more foreboding than real.” On the contrary, Margaret Dickie Urrof (1979: 37) introduces the idol-like colossus as a deity or a silenced god of poetry: “Perhaps the colossus is not the actual father but the creative father (…) The concentration of mouth imagery to describe the colossus also points to his identification as a speaker or poet.” Regardless of different interpretations, the vacant space he left is a doom of absence, hence suicide becomes a passionate act of love and despair. The well-known poem “Daddy” singles out an experience of abandonment that has built up inside Plath for the subsequent 20 or so years, increasing rather than decreasing: “At twenty I tried to die/ And get back, back, back to you/ I thought even the bones would do” (in Plath, 1981: 224). Not surprisingly, Esther goes to weep at her father's grave just before swallowing 50 sleeping pills: “I couldn't understand why I was crying so hard” (Plath, 1971: 52). If we consider her pre-adolescent identification with her father and the quasi-erotic nature of it, it is adequate to say that his death is Plath's first suicide. In The Bell Jar, Esther desires “some flawless man” (Plath, 1971: 25), and for a brief moment she fantasizes she has found him in Constantin, a simultaneous interpreter at the UN. Yet, he seems to have no need for intimacy. Then it is Marco, Constantin's negative double, the man who tries to rape her. Instead of washing, Esther takes the train back home with her cheeks stained in blood, to her a “relic of a dead lover” (Plath, 1971: 35). Along with the search for her father, no wonder that Esther loses her virginity to a professor of mathematics, a father figure, experienced and reassuring. Similarly, Plath had found her father figure in Hughes, “a voice like the thunder of God” (Brown and Taylor, 2022: 2), in her journal referred to as the ‘savior.’ “Plath's grief must have been compounded because surely she was grieving not only the break-up of the relationship but also the ending of what was to be an ideal lifetime marriage” (Morse, 2000: 84). As her ideals are denied, grieving the loss of a marriage becomes grieving, once more, the loss of a loved one. Clearly, being his betrayal not metaphysical but truly physical indeed, Plath felt to have been abandoned for a second time. At this altitude, Esther first and Plath later, unable to re-find their father in the outside world, hope to re-find him in the afterlife by dying.

But there is more to it than that. Plath's tragedy is not about the ‘anguish of betrayal,’ about a Medea-like figure that instead of infanticide takes her own life. George Simpson, in the editor's introduction to Dürkheim's (2005: xxv) sociological study on suicide, marks the notion that “the most widely accepted view today in psychoanalysis is that suicide is most often a form of ‘displacement’; that is, the desire to kill someone who has thwarted the individual is turned back on the individual himself.” As Esther is approaching her breakdown, she is in the bathroom considering cutting her wrists with a blade. The view of her white skin, defenseless to her cruelty, makes her desist: “It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, a whole lot harder to get at” (Plath, 1971: 46). What is it that Esther wants to kill? In view of Simpson's analysis, we should ask not what but who Esther (Plath) wants to kill. If the oedipal structure is valid, then “[o]n the deepest levels, Plath's murderousness is aimed at the mother” (Schwartz and Bollas, 1976: 163). In a letter to her younger brother, Plath writes about their mother: “She is an abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease” (Letters, May 12, 1953: 126). What Plath sees in her mother is the embodiment of self-sacrifice, passivity, and self-annihilation, still widely diffuse in puritan America. ‘The Angel of the House’ that Virginia Woolf had killed with her writing was remarkably alive next to Plath, and consequently suffocating her female creativity. According to Yōko Sakane (1998: 41), Esther's suicide attempt is an attempt “to escape from the everlasting repetitiveness of reproduction.” In this vein, Esther considers motherhood as an obstacle to artistic creation. But while Esther's motherhood remains unknown to the reader, we know that Plath's motherhood was made of struggle. Even in her final weeks, tormented by depression and insomnia, she would write from 4 to 8 a.m., when her children woke up and needed her. This is how Plath transforms the rebellion against her mother into a rebellion against the gender roles. Lynda Bundtzen (1983: 137–138) explains Esther's unsuccessful suicide as “an act of revenge against both parents – against her father for dying and deserting her, and against her mother for being born a woman.”

In the dance between life and death, the text suggests, if there is no rebirth, the alternative is self-destruction. Esther re-enters the world of human relationships but we know it is not for long. The novel ends in a “ritual for being born twice” (Plath, 1971: 77), an aesthetic space of salvation in which Esther is admitted and of which Plath could never find the opening. In virtue of the different life stages in which they find themselves, Esther holds to her statement of being with a positive assertion, “I am, I am, I am” (Plath, 1971: 76), while Plath cannot. “I think I would like to call myself ‘the girl who wanted to be God.’ … But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I- I am powerful, but to what extent? I am I” (Plath, 1975: 40). This entry in her diary clearly marks the ambivalence between her ambition and the limitation of her being, a sense of self always swaying between the roles of housewife and career woman. Thus, Esther's Cartesian assertion becomes in Plath a skeptical doubt: am I? In this sense, while The Bell Jar ends with Esther's new emotional strength, Plath's life remains limited by self-doubt. “I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?” (Plath, 1971: 76). Indeed, a few weeks after her book was released, in Europe, the bell jar did descend again on Plath.

Conclusion

Once the bell jar is lifted, Pavese's and Plath's isolation, their suffering, made it impossible for them to forget. The material landscape that surrounds their life made of existential antinomies closed in on them. The end of life, artificial rather than natural, displays aesthetic lineaments proportional to the artist's attempt to make art the subject matter for the novelist's life. Simultaneously, this view asks the reader to assume a primitivistic attitude toward the novel, to forget that it is a work of art and to treat it as if it were a biography. By so doing, the aesthetic discourse is replaced by a wider consideration on the nature of imitation. It is safe to say that the unknown creates a space for art; as Barthes (1974: 143) stated, “it is because the world is not finished that literature is possible.” The texts I have analyzed question the relationship between art and life; they send us back to a truth outside fiction, thus beyond art, which unfortunately we begin to understand only when it is art no longer. Limited to the art of writing, this is a cathartic process that translates thoughts into words and helps the writer to better cope with what they are writing about. It should be a process of confrontation, but, ultimately, in Pavese's and Plath's case, it is anxious, troubled, uneasy, and restless. In their final self-destruction there is a great deal of converging between art and life. While I tend to believe that their artistic dimension is preponderant over their choices, thus in the end it is the text (art) that inspires their actions, one senses that Pavese's and Plath's gaze is never on outward things, but rather inwards. Because they were not quite comfortable with the ‘trade of living,’ they tried to find in art another form of life. Yet writing revealed itself as a failed escape. And when art no longer offers secrets to its creator, the creator's life loses its significance. Here perhaps lies the whole misunderstanding, that is, for most of us existence proceeds uniformly without secrets. Neither Pavese nor Plath ever loved the quotidian, which was simply incomprehensible to them. Ergo, their novels, if read from the perspective of the future, become a warning against the inability of art to save a life. Art is not necessarily curative. The artist is not automatically freed from his/her fantasies by expressing them. Instead, their obsessive re-creation generates a perverse logic that endlessly reflects the obsession and ultimately makes it available. And the artist, in a Dorian Gray moment, becomes the image that is being reflected. We should all act more like Albert Camus’ affirmation of individual life, in itself and for itself, desirable even if it is a Sisyphean absurdity without final meaning or metaphysical justification.