"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

(The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Smith College 1950-1955, p. 83.)

Synopsis

Arguably Sylvia Plath’s best work, The Bell Jar takes an extremely perceptive look at adolescent alienation. The novel’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a thinly veiled persona of Plath herself, and the whole novel is autobiographical. The Bell Jar follows Esther, excellent student, prize-winning writer, and socially awkward adolescent, through one summer of gradual mental breakdown, and her subsequent time in mental hospitals.

"I was supposed to be having the time of my life"

The Bell Jar begins in the summer of 1953. Esther Greenwood is in New York on a guest-editing job at "Ladies' Day" magazine. The first sentence of the novel foreshadows Esther's progressing internal conflicts. "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenburgs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."(p. 1) The immediate references to death and insecurity set the tone for Esther's forboding crises. However, almost immediately, the reader is aware that Esther does have a future. There are references to Esther still having some of the gifts she received that summer, later on in her life. "I still have the make-up kit they gave me, fitted out for a person with brown eyes and brown hair..."(p. 2-3) The lives she sees in New York, full of wealth and conformity, make her "so jealous that she can't speak", yet she gets no joy from all the gifts, fine food, and special treatment she receives in New York. It is obvious, right from the beginning, that Esther is confused about what she wants. Esther makes two friends while in New York, the cynical society girl from the South, Doreen, and the innocent, sweet girl from the Midwest. Esther wants to identify with Doreen because she is cynical and wise and can see through the hypocrisies of society. "...being with Doreen made me forget my worries. I felt wise and cynical as all hell." (p. 6) Later, after Esther witnesses Doreen and Lenny, a man they just met in a bar, becoming more and more attracted to each other, she feels withdrawn and unattractive. Esther slips away unnoticed and walks the forty-three blocks back to the hotel. Doreen comes back later, sloppy drunk, and colapses in Esther's arms. Esther leaves her in the hall and closes her door. Esther decides that she should be loyal to Betsy; she decides that she is really innocent at heart. Esther spends her time alternating between blaming others for her own unhappiness and blaming herself for being dark and perverse.

Esther suffers from indecision. She has never been able to decide what she really wants. All of her life she has been winning prizes and getting excellent grades. Esther feels all her worth is in her intelligence but she does not know how to transform the A’s and laudations into a future. She feels constantly in danger of failing. During her summer in New York, her editor, Jay Cee, has told her how to become a great editor if she wants. Esther sees her advise as criticism. She feels her worth is ending.

Esther's main antagonist in The Bell Jar is her first and only boyfriend, a man named Buddy Willard. Esther has admired Buddy from afar for many years; their parents had been friends. During her years at college, Buddy started to pay attention to her. Buddy is a medical student, as practical as Esther is dreamy. They do not make a logical match. Esther does not seem really interested in Buddy; she seems to be most interested in sharing her news of going to the Yale prom with the girls on her floor and the abstract of "having a boyfriend". Esther alternates between hating Buddy for his hypocrisy and tolerating him. Buddy possesses the typical male attitudes of the day, he believes that poetry is flighty and insignificant. Buddy thinks that Esther will give up the notion of being a poet when she has a baby. However, in spite of these ideas, Buddy does want to impress Esther, he writes a poem and has it published. Esther recounts the time that Buddy showed her a live birth. Buddy tells her that they have given the woman drugs to put her in a sort of "twilight sleep". But Esther hears the woman moaning and thinks that she obviously can feel all the pain or she wouldn’t be moaning. Esther thinks that it is unfair that the woman feels all the pain and does not even get to experience the birth for herself. Esther sees it as another way men are out to get women. "I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight homeand start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been..." (p. 53) Buddy also dates another girl from their hometown, Joan. Esther does not like Joan because she makes her feel "squirmy". She is college hockey champion, president of her class and a physics major. Joan is everything that Esther is not and later Joan will shadow Esther's own descent into madness.

"I had nothing to look forward to"

When Esther returns from New York, she finds out that she did not get in to a writing class she had applied to for the summer. She has never spent a summer in the suburbs and she says that it is impossible for her to live with her mother. Esther's senses become hightened, every tiny noise drives her crazy. Esther dumps Buddy and decides to spend her summer writing a novel. After her first day of writing, Esther decides that she cannot write a novel because she does not have enough life experience. Then she decides to learn shorthand from her mother. Her college expects scholarship girls to work during the summer so Esther decides to tell them that she took a shorthand course instead to be able to support herself after school. Esther is hopeful about learning shorthand; however, after a short lesson with her mother she decides that learning shorthand is pointless because she does not want any jobs that use shorthand. Finally she decides to spend the summer writing her honors thesis to get ahead. She is unable to read now and her last stab at normalcy fails. "Words, dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain." (p. 102) This fact and the fact that she can no longer write convinces Esther that she is losing her battle with mental breakdown. After that she is unable to sleep at all, and she does not see the point in showering and changing clothes because she will just have to do it again tomorrow. She asks her doctor for more sleeping pills and the doctor suggests that Esther see a psychiatrist. When Esther goes to see the psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon, she tells him about her problems and he does not seem to care. Esther does not like him instantly. After her second visit, Dr. Gordon suggests that Esther recieve some shock treatments at his private hospital. The nurses mess up the shock treatment and Esther decides not to see Dr. Gordon ever again. Esther decides that death is the answer. She plans to kill herself and determines that she must do it before it will be too late. She decides to die because she imagines years being trapped, crazy, in her body. Esther tries razor blades, hanging herself and drowning. Each time she is unable to die. Her body is already beginning to trap her. "I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all." (p. 130) She unlocks her sleeping pills and hides herself in the basement one day and takes them all.

"I felt the darkness, but nothing else..."

When Esther wakes up she is in a hospital. She cannot see and a nurse mockingly tells her that she is blind. Later a doctor comes and removes the bandages from her head and she can see. Only then does she realize that she is not blind. Esther does not want any visitors and she does not want to see anyone. She refuses to talk to the doctors and will not participate in any therapy. She still wants to die and she tries to appeal to her mother's sympathies to get her out so she can try again. When she asks for a mirror to see herself, she is so horrified by the image that she breaks the mirror. Esther is then sent to the state mental hospital. Esther does not like it there and she misbehaves. Philomena Guinea, the rich novelist who's scholarship Esther has at Smith, finds out about her condition. Philomena Guinea wants to make sure Esther's trouble is not a boy and Esther's mother assures her that her trouble is her writing. Philomena Guinea herself had spent time in a mental hospital and she sends Esther to the private hospital that she went to. Esther feels no difference between the old hospital and the new one, wherever she goes she will still be cut off from others, trapped in her own misery. "...it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat...I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air." (p. 152) At the new hospital, Esther gradually moves up throught the ranks. She has a new doctor that she almost trusts, Dr. Nolan. When Esther moves to a new room, she discovers Joan lives next door. Joan read about Esther's suicide attempt in the papers and thought it was a good idea. Esther does not like Joan but is fascinated by her. "It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own." (p. 179) Esther recieves shock treatment at the hospital and begins to feel the madness lifting. "The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feel above my head. I was open to the circulating air." (p. 176) Joan is released before Esther, but soon she disappears. She is found in the woods near the hospital, having hung herself. Immediately following Joan's death, Esther finds out that she will be released if she passes her interview with the board of directors. The novel ends with Esther entering the room. Esther knows that she will be released but she also knows that she will never be normal. She feels the bell jar hanging above her head, ready to descend and smother her at any moment. "How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere-- that bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" (p. 197)

Literary Comparisons

In A Room of one's Own, Virginia Woolfe confronts many aspects of being female and she confronts the idea of madness. According to Virginia Woolfe, a woman needs "A Room of One’s Own" in which to write. It is impossible to write when you have no privacy. Esther never has "a room of her own". She goes from a hotel room that is not her own, to sharing a room with her mother, to a room at a mental institution. All of Esther’s "rooms" have been prepared by someone else. Her rooms all come complete with other people’s expectations of her. Even at the end, a board "room" judges Esther’s mental health. All of Esther's rooms are inadequate and cold. Esther is, first and foremost, a writer. A writer with no "room of her own" cannot write. Esther is different than what the world expects of her. She felt she needed to keep these differences a secret in order to win her prizes and praises. The constant struggle of presenting one persona and being another inside finally causes Esther to crack. The pressure of being a writer while having the stifling pressures of the world's expectations preventing her from being able to write could very well have caused Esther Greenwood's descent into madness.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is very similar to The Bell Jar. "The Yellow Wallpaper" begins, as does The Bell Jar, with a young woman in a different setting than she is used to. The speaker in "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been moved, for the summer, to a colonial mansion. Esther Greenwood is in New York for the summer, guest-editing a magazine. However, in "The Yellow Wallpaper", the woman is moved to the quiet old house to recuperate from a previous mental illness, while in The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood has never been mad. Both stories show the descent into madness from a first person female point of view. Both protagonists are writers and are somehow kept from writing. The woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been forbidden to write by her husband, a doctor. He does not want her to write until she is well. Esther feels pressure not to write from her boyfriend, a future doctor. He believes that Esther should want to have a family and be a mother. The woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" sees herself as a woman trapped in her wallpaper. She wants to free the woman thus freeing herself from the confines of her own life. Her madness offers her freedom. Esther sees herself trapped in the bell jar. The bell jar represents the confines she feels from pressure to perform. Being under the bell jar represents Esther's defeat, her succumbing to the pressures. Esther's madness traps her even more. And one quick note, the walls in Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's first apartment together were "ghastly yellow". Coincidence?

Anais Nin's work, "Birth", can be compared to the scene in chapter six of The Bell Jar when Esther goes with Buddy Willard to see some of the things he does in medical school. The medical students have babies that had died before birth preserved in bottles. Esther sees one "smiling" at her, she sees the babies as human. Esther and Buddy observe a woman giving birth. The medical student delivering the baby is more concerned with having to deliver eight babies before he graduates than with the woman having the baby. Buddy explains that the woman can't feel the pain because she is drugged. Esther thinks that this is not fair because she is moaning so she is obviously in pain, and she does not get to see her baby being born. Esther feels that the most important thing would be to see the baby being born to make sure that it was yours. In "Birth", the narrator is told that her unborn baby is dead. The doctor are pushing her to give birth quickly, but she is not yet ready part with the "dead fragment of herself". The doctor is angry at her because he has to be with her all night. The nurses discuss their own difficutlies with birth, which resulted in live children. When she finally delivers the baby, she needs to see it. Even dead, the baby is still a part of her. Men treat the patients as objects, the dead baby is just one more thing to get rid of, the delivery is just one more thing that the medical student has to do before he graduates. In both works, women are angry at being treated as objects.

435

Much Madness is divinest Sense--
To a discerning Eye--
Much Sense--the starkest Madness--
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail--
Assent--and you are sane--
Demur--you're straightway dangerous--
And handled with a chain--

"Much Madness is divinest Sense", by Emily Dickinson, seems to capture the very essence of The Bell Jar. Esther Greenwood posseses a hightened "sense". She is smarter than most people and sees through to the hypocrisies that they miss. She is constantly thinking and analyzing. Because she is so much more intelligent and perceptive, she is not accepted. She is not accepted socially but more importantly, she does not accept herself. She feels constant pressure to "assent" while she wants to "demur". The line between genius and madness is very thin. Her constant thinking and analyzing give way to madness. Emily Dickinson says that the popular opinion of sense is actually madness. She could see through the hypocrisies also. Dickinson also says that many people who are thought to be mad actually have more sense than the common person. Esther Greenwood had been believing this idea for so long that she felt that she had to keep her true nature a secret. She was terrified of being thought of as mad. Esther handled her own self with a chain.

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