"With the bravado and despair of a young person, she tore apart the elegant poetic forms of the 1950s, and, using the raw language of everyday speech, she gave voice to the storms that raged inside her, thus freeing herself from the nightmarish visions that had long tormented her. In her novel The Bell Jar, she leads us into the dark corridors of the inner hell that led to her mental breakdown and brought her to the brink of her first attempt at suicide. It is a cruel, stifling world, whose black gates carry the inscription "no exit." Plath took the fact that she was the daughter of parents of German origin as the symbolic definition of her life. It was a fact that could neither be denied nor changed. In her poems, she called the father whom she loved, and who died when she was a child, a Nazi bastard. She, the Aryan child of the postwar generation, reimagined herself as symbolically Jewish, estranged, persecuted, rejected, and condemned."