Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published in London under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in January 1963, one month before her death, depicted the suffocating social, bodily, and psychological constraints on an intelligent American woman in the 1950s. Though principally a novel, Plath's literary output as a whole — her poetry in Ariel (posthumously published 1965), in particular — is permeated by images of the female body constrained, medicalized, and disciplined in ways that evoke the corset's legacy of suppression.

Plath's poetry in The Colossus and Ariel made the female body — compressed, inspected, split — the central territory of American feminist verse. Her use of the bell jar as a symbol of suffocating social and bodily enclosure invoked the same cultural logic as the corset: the constraint of women's vitality within a transparent but impermeable shell. She is the most widely read poet whose work is centrally concerned with what it means to inhabit a female body under social pressure.