Being enclosed—in plaster, in a bell jar, a cellar or a waxhouse—and then being liberated from an enclosure by a maddened or suicidal or "hairy and ugly" avatar of the self is, I would contend, at the heart of the myth that we piece together from Plath's poetry, fiction, and life…. The story told is invariably a story of being trapped, by society or by the self as an agent of society, and then somehow escaping or trying to escape. (p. 592)

[In] poem after poem, she tried to puzzle out the cause of her confinement…. For her central problem had become, as it became Jane Eyre's (or Charlotte Brontë's)—how to get out? How to reactivate the myth of a flight so white, so pure, as to be a rebirth into the imagined liberty of childhood? (pp. 593-94)

Especially in Ariel, but also in other...