North American Fiction and Film

Chapter 5: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

Table of Contents

The Bell Jar: Discussion

Critical Readings
Review questions
Works Cited


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An American late-adolescent novel

Steven Gould's summary of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar is a good starting point for this chapter. He writes that Esther is an American late adolescent, self conscious about her sex and seeking to negotiate a passage to adulthood without any rite-of-passage "ritual" to support her. She achieves a catharsis by giving herself permission to hate, and what she hates is the place allotted to women in the masculine economy-their position, the restrictions on their creative powers, and the negative psychological experience of their femininity. She chooses a form of self-annihilation as an antidote to the pain she experiences in being a woman. Esther is isolated, uncertain and emotionally empty. She resents men but cannot alter their behaviour. She believes that marriage and children would send her mad yet she wants to be both a housewife and a professional writer. However, the social arrangements of her time force her to choose (Sylvia Plath 114-120).

Gould believes that the novel accurately depicts the war between female desire and cultural expectations without necessarily resolving the tensions this war creates. It is significant that this war comes to a head in the "wasteland" which is New York, and that Esther's new world hypothesis ("I am, I am, I am" The Bell Jar 256) is a reaffirmation of American individualism. Gould sees Joan Gilling as enacting Esther's death impulse, thereby giving an image of the horror of death to Esther, who experiences it vicariously as a necessary step towards her rebirth. It is also significant that the last image of her is a rebirth, not to something completely new but like a retreaded tyre ("patched, retreaded, and approved for the road" Jar 257) (120-125). With this broad introduction in mind, we can now examine some specific issues relating to the novel.
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Is Esther Greenwood a thinly disguised Sylvia Plath?

One of the problems associated with the criticism about Sylvia Plath in general, and in relation to The Bell Jar in particular, is the way that critics view this novel as autobiographical. It is very difficult to find criticism which does not in some way refer to Plath herself when discussing this novel, or indeed any of her poems. In this sense, much of this criticism is both expressive realist and Leavisite in that it holds that the text is expressing the insights Plath has about the world around her, and in particular, about her lived experience. The fact that the "heroine" of The Bell Jar is called Esther Greenwood does not stop critics from making direct links between Esther and Plath. This raises a very important issue which needs to be considered in relation to this novel.

Contemporary criticism has encouraged us to see the life and times of an author as secondary or even irrelevant to our understanding of a text. Such criticism has argued that critics who claim to be able to determine an author's intentions are in the grip of an outmoded critical practice, one that places authors on pedestals to be adored by their reading public. It also shows how such claims are really nothing more than alibis for the critics' own interpretations. What are we to do with criticism which insists on making connections between characters and authors in this way?

The canon
One way of thinking about this is in terms of the canon which, as we know, is the term used to describe a collection of texts thought to possess "literary quality" and "value" by those canon-makers (educators, critics, publishers) whose "job" it is to make these judgements. Because the canon involves making a selection of texts, it necessarily involves certain exclusions, and possibly even certain denigrations, of texts which "aspire" to be in the canon but which for various reasons have not been included. Groups of non-canonical writers and critics have tended to make cases for their work to be included, or even for the canon to be abandoned because of its restrictive practices. Some have even proposed a "new" or "counter" canon which includes texts they believe have been unfairly excluded from the orthodox canon.

Feminism and the canon: Challenge, subvert, change
One group of writers and critics who have been very active in proposing a different canon (or, indeed, in challenging the very idea of a canon) might be loosely called feminist in that they believe that the writings of women have been largely ignored by the predominantly White, Anglo-Saxon, male canon-makers. Although the arguments that feminists have used to put their case for inclusion, be it through additions to the existing canon or through a counter-canon, vary considerably, many put the view that it is only through the legitimation and inclusion of the lived experience of women that the patriarchal hegemony will be challenged, subverted and changed.

These critics use the connections between author and text as a way of exemplifying the lived experience of women. They seek to highlight and explain how women live, how they have been constructed, used and abused by the cultural and linguistic systems which position them as women and in which they live and work, and also through which they have been denied a "voice," an "identity," an opportunity for "equal" participation.

They argue that to deny the gender (or race or ethnic grouping) of an author is to deny the very thing which in part legitimates the experiences recounted in the texts which give these experiences "life" (to use a Leavisite term). Consequently, the distinctions between the traditional categories of biography, autobiography and fiction have been blurred-a woman who writes fiction which in part resembles the lived-experience of an author, for example, becomes a justification for drawing comparisons between the author and the character(s) of her fiction.

At the same time that feminist critics were reifying the connections between the lived experience of women and their texts, contemporary critical theory was working to down-play the power and authority of that elusive figure, the "author". Critical theorists sought to re-emphasise the text in its cultural and linguistic contexts-a gesture which has been criticised for its propensity to abstract and therefore "undervalue" the particular lived experiences of the groups which make up these contexts.

Identity politics
Some feminists argue that it is typical of men to find a way of denigrating the very basis from which much feminist discussion gains its currency-the notion of identity politics. This notion suggests that in order to challenge, subvert and change the power of the hegemonic identity of the "naturalised" male under patriarchy, a counter-identity is necessary-one which is both a protest against the denigrations made by patriarchy, and a positive imago (an idealised mental picture of oneself or another; the final stage of an insect after all metamorphoses-obviously understood figuratively) of the liberated counter-identity.

To a certain extent, Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar represents an incipient protest against the hegemonic identity of the "naturalised" male, but she doesn't provide a countervailing imago (unless, of course, her survival "against the odds" is seen as a basis for the imago) because the novel ends with her facing the Board at the mental hospital where we know she has been "cured" but we do not know what form her new (the image she uses is 're-born') identity will take (other than the patched tyre already mentioned). However, we do find out very early in the novel that she is writing from some point in the future where she has a child, which suggests a "wife and mother" sort of identity-although this identity is only briefly hinted at (4). Incidentally, this is an identity against which she protests repeatedly in the novel. Now let's examine a critic who sees parallels between the lived experiences of Plath and Esther, and the lives and writings of Plath and Virginia Woolf.

Woolf and Plath: An inter-generational inheritance
Steven Gould believes that Plath relied heavily on Virginia Woolf as her model, both in her writing and in her life (this idea of an inter-generational inheritance between women will be pursued in more detail in the discussion of Like Water for Chocolate). For instance, he suggests that there are many parallels between Plath and Woolf's lives including their feelings of being disenfranchised from the hegemonic, patriarchal worlds in which they lived, their writing as an attempted "cure" for their disenchantment, and their repeated and ultimately successful suicide attempts (100-115).

Gould believes that Plath saw herself as a sort of persecuted "Jew," a connection Gould sees in Plath's suicide by "gassing" herself in her kitchen oven (101). He sees both Plath and Woolf as equating "writing" with "living," an equation exemplified in Esther Greenwood's inability to either read or write when in the grip of her "madness." This suggests that with the cessation of the "textual" voice, all three (Woolf, Plath and Esther) cease to live.[Woolf wrote in her diary the night before she died: "'the writing "I" has vanished. . . . That's part of one's death'"; Plath wrote in her suicide note: "'I can't fight any longer. . . . You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read'" (qtd in Gould 101); Esther writes: "I told Doctor Gordon about not sleeping and not eating and not reading. I didn't tell him about the handwriting, which bothered me most of all. . . . [M]y hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child" (137).]

The connection between textual catharsis and the ability to bear the "pain" of living is one which Gould explores in great detail. The problem is that although both Woolf and Plath can identify the ways in which a hegemonic, patriarchal identity excludes and denigrates them as women, neither, beyond the act of writing, is able to construct a workable imago which would take their self-esteem beyond the ravages of negative identity politics. Like some sort of absurd tale in "The Arabian Nights," both are forced to tell and re-tell tales of their disenfranchisement; the moment they stop, they are "condemned," so to speak, to death. It is only in the telling and the tale that they possess an "I" (character, narrator, author), and when this fails, as Woolf predicted ("'the writing "I" has vanished'"), death results.

The connections between the experiences of writers and characters, then, which Gould fleshes out with numerous quotations from the letters of Woolf and Plath, is not, according to this view, a hegemonic gesture of control by a critic (such as that made by Leavis), but a struggle to escape the negative identity politics such hegemonic gestures force on women. It is as if this struggle and the imago which is its prize are more than worth the accusations of alibis and fake intentions which contemporary criticism has levelled at those who remain convinced of the links between author and text. What do you think? Let's now concentrate on Esther herself.
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The "American dream"

The negative imago: Making women more attractive to men
Esther sees the "American dream," which positions girls of her own age as living for nothing but the hopefully inevitable proposal of marriage, as being responsible for the patriarchal imago of women as inter-changeable (sexual) objects of exchange. Just about everything she is expected to do on her trip to New York confirms this view. The magazine she works for is devoted to the cause of making women more attractive to men-tips on make-up, dress, how to get a man, how to choose a career which will complement rather than compete with a man's, how to make the home an enticing refuge from world affairs for the male, how to make interesting small talk, and so on.

This comes out when she goes to the cinema and sees a "football romance" whose characters appear to lack any personality of their own and are identifiable only in so far as they reflect the stereotypes of the American Dream:
The movie was very poor. It starred a nice blond girl who looked like June Allyson but was really somebody else, and a sexy black-haired girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor but was also somebody else, and two big, broad-shouldered bone-heads with names like Rick and Gil. (43)
Esther throws up during the movie, and although this is the result of a dose of food poisoning, the suggestion that this male-centred imago is making the "twelve" apostles of American girlhood very sick is unmistakable.

Esther, however, who knows that she is supposed to be making the most of her opportunities, can think of nothing but the impending execution by electrocution of the Rosenbergs for treason, and although she does not explicitly draw the comparison herself, this is precisely what happens to her-her refusal to conform to this imago (treason) results in her own "electrocution" (electro-shock therapy). We might interpret this as a message which suggests that the American Dream and the interests it supports are so powerful that non-conformity is punishable by severe violence, and even death.
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Diminution of affect

The way such interests gauge whether one is appropriately conforming to "the Dream" or not is by "measuring" one's response to its elements and opportunities (as Jay Cee does with Esther-see below). The social institution which exemplifies this gauging is psychiatry. It is no accident, perhaps, that the most common "cure" for non-conformity in the Western world, particularly in America, is to visit a psychiatrist who analyses one's deviations (from the Dream in dreams!) in an attempt to provide a "talking cure" before, if necessary, resorting to drugs and violence (electro-shock treatment) to ensure conformity. This form of psychiatric, institutional legitimation of the American Dream is on display here (and in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

The term psychiatrists use for their "gauge" is "diminution of affect," which, according to David Holbrook, means an abnormal lack of "appropriate" feeling-response- that is, not being able to respond "appropriately" to the stimuli one receives. For Esther, who is saddled with the male-centred negative imago of women, this diminution of affect is accompanied by a sense of inadequacy: "I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo" (3).

Jay Cee
Although something of a counter-point and a paradox within the American Dream (she is "ugly," intelligent, and appears not to care what men think of her), Jay Cee, the "best editor on any intellectual fashion magazine" (33), unwittingly participates in measuring Esther's "diminution of affect." Esther, who has already realised that something is wrong with her, is not only tired of "old ladies" trying to teach her things (6), she is also decidedly not performing her tasks to Jay Cee's standard. Jay Cee questions her commitment to the Dream ("Doesn't your work interest you Esther?" 32), and tries to inspire her with role models which are different from the norm, like the girl who came before Esther and who didn't bother with any of the "fashion show stuff" and who went straight from Jay Cee's office to "Time" (33).

This role model is one, we get the impression, that under slightly different circumstances would have appealed very much to Esther as it involves a career, independence, and creativity. However, Esther is not feeling herself, and she uses her "unmask[ing]" (30) by Jay Cee as an excuse to rattle off a long list of deceptions and inadequacies associated with her college life (31-40). The effect of Jay Cee's interrogation is to worsen rather than lessen the "diminution of affect" as Esther feels so "sad and tired" that she begins not to want to get out of bed. Even the silence seems insidious with intent: "I lay on my back in bed and stared up at the blank, white ceiling [and] the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it" (31).

The future seems more and more of a problem for Esther. Where she thought that she had mapped out what she wanted to do while she was at college, when Jay Cee asks her what she has in mind when she graduates, she responds with "'I don't really know'" (34) which she realises the minute she says it is "true." Instead of responding to her chances-her scholarship, her work at the magazine-with an appropriate zeal, Esther begins to see these things as insurmountable obstacles.
She finds the prospect of returning to college and finishing her thesis depressing, and the idea of learning German, with its "black, barbed-wired letters," frightening (34).

Jay Cee seems to re-appraise Esther (that is, down-grade her as a potential journalist), and this makes Esther feel even worse. Jay Cee, in other words, does not appear to recognise that in measuring Esther's potential, in mapping out her suitability or otherwise for aspects of the Dream, she is unwittingly contributing to the "diminution of affect" which Esther is experiencing. Jay Cee, for all her intelligence, does not know how to handle Esther, as is evident in her simplistic advice: "'Don't let the wicked city get you down'" (40).

The dramatic irony evident here (that is, where we as audience know more about a character's situation than the character does) is characteristic of Ether's accounts of her experiences, for although she recounts them, often with a keen eye for detail, she rarely draws conclusions or provides explanations which go beyond expressing the symptoms of her malaise, as Bundtzen argues (111-112), even though we know that she is writing all this from the future and has presumably survived the ordeal. Where this symptomatic rather than explanatory narrative technique becomes more ambiguous, however, is where Esther deals with her relations with men.
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Oh for a man who is not stupid

Esther is in no doubt about the kind of man she wants; she longs for a man who is not "stupid" but has "intuition." There are three characters who seem to possess intuition: Doreen ("Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my bones" 7); Constantin (this turns out to be illusory because after she has decided to allow him to seduce her, he fails to pick up on the cues, a failure she rationalises by thinking that she is not interesting enough for him and by seeing him as an "unattainable pebble at the bottom of a deep well" 88-89); and Dr Nolan (who blots her copy-book by failing to tell Esther that she is to receive electro-shock therapy 224-225).

That men never seem to pass this "stupidity" test is significant in that the women rarely seem to connect with them at a level beyond that which is dictated by superficial gender relations. Esther appears to know very little of men, though like most adolescents, she is curious about sex and the opposite sex. Unfortunately, her encounters are always disappointing. For example, when she and Doreen decide to avoid going to a party and go off with Lenny Shepherd, the disc jockey, Lenny's friends laugh with "a kind of low, know-it-all" snicker which Esther notes should have "warned" her (9), though about what she never specifies.

Doreen teams up with Lenny, and Esther finds herself attached to Frankie, in whom she has no interest. What does interest her ("I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations" 13) is the way Doreen and Lenny relate. Lenny keeps staring at Doreen, and Doreen seems to ignore his behaviour: "He kept staring at her the way people stare at the great white macaw in the zoo, waiting for it to say something human" (11). Like the snicker of the men, this "objectification" of women by men is yet another element of the negative imago of women, and Esther herself responds to it symptomatically and intuitively (that is, it makes her feel uncomfortable and seems all wrong, but she is unable to explain why).

This idea that neither Lenny nor Doreen have anything remotely "intuitive" to say to one another bothers Esther as she notes their animalistic and ritualistic behaviour: "Doreen was spooning up the hunks of fruit at the bottom of her glass with a spindly silver spoon, and Lenny was grunting each time she lifted the spoon to her mouth, and snapping and pretending to be a dog or something" (12). Doreen, of course, understands this as foreplay, but to Esther, it seems almost cannibalistic. Frankie drops out of the picture, and Esther goes with Lenny and Doreen to Lenny's apartment (which, incidentally, is done out like a ranch). Esther begins to feel depressed ("My drink was wet and depressing" 17) and detached, and Lenny and Doreen are by this time jitterbugging around the room.

This incident might seem trivial to most of us, but for Esther, perhaps because of the alcohol (which, by the way, provides an interesting image of what Esther's experience of living under the bell jar might be like), this is the moment that she has her first real sense of the bell jar descending over her, though she does not call it this until much latter in the novel. The stale air, stifling fumes and alcohol-induced fog of Lenny's apartment all form a seemingly impenetrable barrier:
I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine-panelling. I felt like a hole in the ground.
There is something demoralising about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.
It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction-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. (17)
The diminution of affect noticed earlier continues in this experience. On the one hand, her experience of "three's a crowd" is not uncommon, especially given that she has had a few drinks and is a little unsteady on her feet. On the other, she sees herself as a small dot, as a hole in the ground, as speeding away from the things she is observing and which ought to be more-or-less stable before her eyes. The narrative cleverly uses the experience of being slightly drunk to introduce the bell jar effect-her sense of being somehow cut off from the world around her, though by no means completely.

She leaves Lenny's flat when the jitterbugging takes an aggressively oral turn with Doreen biting Lenny, who in turn swings her about on his shoulder whilst trying to bite her through her dress (18). Despite feeling that what is happening to Esther is no different at this stage from something any teenager might experience during early experiments with alcohol and relationships, there is no doubt that her sense of self, both physical and mental, is becoming seriously compromised.

This negative imago of her "femininity" (Doreen is desirable but she isn't) is exacerbated by Esther's sense of herself as a poor physical relation to the girls about her. She sees herself as "skinny as a boy and barely rippled," a sense which adds to her feelings of alienation when she compares herself to the preening, fulsome "beauties" around her. She does, at this point, have a means of escape, of rebirth, and it takes the form of a bath ("I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath" 21). Everything which bothers her "dissolves" in the bath and she exits as "sweet as a new baby" (22). This image of returning to the safe and fluid womb to be reborn is also one which recurs throughout the novel.
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Sexuality and marriage

One of Esther's pet hates is the idea of being a slave to men. Mrs Willard, Buddy's mother, is fond of an aphorism which suggests that "'What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security . . . What man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from'" (74). This negative imago of women implies a number of things which Esther finds obnoxious. For example, she refuses to learn shorthand even though her mother tells her that if she knew shorthand, she "would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter." Esther responds: "The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters" (79).

When Buddy Willard is introduced to the story, we get the impression that he is one of the "stupid" ones without any intuition. He thinks that a poem is a "piece of dust" (58), invites Esther to the Junior Prom and treats her like a cousin (to which she responds: "I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions" 63). He also takes Esther along to see an anatomy dissection of a cadaver. It is here that Esther sees a baby pickled in a jar: "the baby in the last bottle was the size of a normal baby and he seemed to be looking at me and smiling a little piggy smile" (65). This image of being imprisoned in a (bell) jar is followed by a dissection and then a birth.

The combination of these gruesome images seriously affects Esther, but as usual, she merely recounts the symptoms. When Buddy says: "'You oughtn't to see this. . . . You'll never want to have a baby if you do" (67), Esther comments:
I was so struck by the sight of the table where they were lifting the woman I didn't say a word. It looked like some awful torture table, with these metal stirrups ticking up in mid-air at one end and all sorts of instruments and wires and tubes I couldn't make out properly at the other. (67)
The baby gets stuck, and the doctor has to cut the woman. Buddy tells Esther that the woman has received some drugs so that she will not remember the experience afterwards. Esther thinks that it's just like a man to invent a drug like that so that the woman will go home and have another baby right away (68).

She concludes by saying: "I didn't feel up to asking him if there were any other ways to have babies" (69). As if to add insult to injury, Buddy offers to show her himself later in his room. When he does this Esther unsurprisingly thinks: "The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed" (71). In the space of one day, Esther has seen death, birth and male genitalia. But there is more to come. Buddy then admits in response to a question from Esther that he has had an affair with a waitress the previous summer. Esther admits to herself, after she has counted the number of times Buddy had sex with the waitress, that she just "froze up" (73).

Again we see the diminution of affect. Buddy and Esther were not going together at the time Buddy had his "affair," so in this sense he was not being unfaithful. Yet Esther thinks that Buddy is being hypocritical because he "pretended" to be innocent, pretended that Esther was "sexy," and "must have felt like laughing in [her] face" (73-74). But Esther does not vent her anger at Buddy; she internalises it, almost with some relief for she has found an excuse, more-or-less, never to marry (as she later tells him).

What she has seen in the course of the day might be enough to put even the most idealistic woman off marriage and childbirth, and it is significant that she recounts her experience almost without response until Buddy confesses. It is also significant that while she does this, she hides behind her hair as she combs it. Her experiences of the day have been displaced into a disproportionate response to a confession by Buddy. Esther means to tell Buddy how she feels, but he catches TB and is shipped off to a "TB place" before she can (75). It is also significant that all this is preying on her mind while she is supposed to be enjoying herself in New York.
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Now we can be ourselves

Esther's view of marriage comprises fragments of information she has picked up from the adult relations about her. Mrs Willard, for instance, seems to spend her time cooking, cleaning and washing even though she is the "wife of a university professor" (88) (who normally, of course, do their own). In other words, what happens before marriage doesn't necessarily happen afterwards:
And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat. (89)
Even her own mother tells her that on her honeymoon, her father had said: "'Whew, that's a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves'" (89). Her mother, Esther notes, never had a minute's peace from that moment on.

When Buddy proposes to her ("'How would you like to be Mrs Buddy Willard?'" 97), she responds that she is "'never going to get married'" (97). Buddy thinks that Esther is neurotic (having an undue adherence to an unrealistic view of things) because she wants to live in both the city and the country (a figurative way of suggesting that she wants to be married but with the freedom of being unmarried, at least in so far as marriage constrains women). Esther responds:
"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days." (98)
Esther is faced with a dilemma: if she chooses marriage, she has seen enough of men to know that domestic and sexual slavery will result, and this is not what she wants at all. However, if she chooses a career or some other path, she will end up paying for her independence with loneliness (like Jay Cee). Not much of a choice for a girl brought up on the American dream.

Esther's sexuality
Esther's "sexual" encounters with men prove to be as unpromising as those with Buddy. Eric, for instance, believes that sex is animalistic (82) and that he couldn't have sex with any woman he loved because he would want to keep her free of "all that dirty business" (83). In any event, he believes that sex is as boring as "going to the toilet" (83), which is certainly not Esther's view. Although she recognises that men and women have different points of view about relationships and sex (84), she, at nineteen, believes that "purity" is "the great issue":
Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with someone and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line. (85)
Again, we have an adolescent if slightly repressed view of sexuality, one which is not helped by the men she meets who all seem to treat women as either "sluts" or saints, preferring to marry the latter and have sex with the former. This confuses Esther.

When Esther finally manages to lose her virginity, which "weighed like a millstone around [her] neck" (240), it is to a mathematics professor named Irwin ("I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent" 240). She feels nothing but a "startling bad pain" (241), and she begins to haemorrhage badly enough to need medical attention. Esther makes no overt comment about the experience, aside from recounting the slightly black comic aspects of it (that is, the chances of severe haemorrhaging are one in a million; 246), but we get a suggestion of her desperate desire to loose her virginity and her clinical method for doing it, which counterpoints the expectations she related earlier in the story, not to mention her obsession with purity.
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The fig-tree

When Constantin takes Esther for a visit to the UN, she sits there inside the sound-proof translators' booth (another bell jar) listening to the interpreters. The idea of being able to speak another language becomes an excuse for a meditation on all the things she can't do: cooking, shorthand, dancing, carrying a tune, horse-riding, skiing. She concludes: "I felt dreadfully inadequate" (79-80); and this from a girl who's been getting straight A's for years.

In one of those rare moments where she moves from symptom to explanation, she uses the image of the fig-tree from a story she has read to explain her dilemma:
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing meant loosing 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. (80)
The dilemma facing Esther here faces most people, and it is difficult enough to decide at any time of life which figs one might choose. But for Esther, stuck inside the sound-proof booth, the prospect is depressing and unsettling. In a rare moment of humour, however, Esther notes that after lunch, things did not look so grim. She comments: "It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach" (81).
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Suicide

Esther's thoughts turn to suicide a number of times in the novel, firstly through exaggerated interest ("STARLET SUCCUMBS AFTER SIXTY-EIGHT COMA," reads the headline 154), and then in actual if slightly (but darkly) comic attempts: she gets into a bath with a Gillette blade and cuts the calf on her right leg only to cover it with band-aids when she realises that it's time for her mother to come home (155); she tries to drown herself by diving under water but she keeps popping up like a cork (170); and she tries to hang herself with the silk cord of her mother's dressing gown only she can't find anything to fix it to, so she finishes up trying to hang herself, pantomime style, by holding the cord in the air with her hand (167-168).

What is curious and interesting about these attempts is not their melodramatic air but the mind-body dichotomy where the latter is seen as a necessary but unsatisfactory way of punishing the former. In thinking of slashing her wrists, for example, she reflects:
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenceless that I couldn't do it. 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, and a whole lot harder to get at. (156)
Esther almost succeeds when she secrets herself under the house and takes fifty sleeping pills. When she wakes up in the hospital, she initially thinks that she is blind, and a cheery voice says: "'There are lots of blind people in the world. You'll marry a nice blind man some day '" (181).

Aside from being the last thing that Esther wants to hear at this moment, the idea that blind marries blind is suggestive, somehow, of the things Esther has been thinking about marriage up to this point in the novel. Marriage is, or is predicated upon, a kind of blindness, and it is only those like herself who are stifling in the bell jar who can see it for what it is. To see, then, is, paradoxically, a kind of blindness.

Who is that face in the mirror?
Although difficult to tell how much the later consciousness of "madness" influences the earlier perceptions of Esther on her New York trip, Esther's "descent" into madness is accompanied by an increasing failure to recognise her own face in mirrors and reflective surfaces. For instance, when she makes it back to the hotel and into the lift, she notices the following: "a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman star[ed] idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used-up I looked" (19). Aside from the obvious (and unconscious) racism here, it is apparent from this moment on that she sees herself always as a distortion.

This distortion/transformation reaches its apex when she demands a mirror after her under-the-house suicide attempt, and finds not her face but a grotesque negative imago of the human form. The nurse knows this and is reluctant to give Esther a mirror:
The nurse sighed and opened the top bureau drawer. She took out a large mirror in a wooden frame that matched the wood of the bureau and handed it to me.
At first I didn't see what the trouble was. It wasn't a mirror at all, but a picture.
You couldn't tell whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman, because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly chicken-feather tufts all over their head. One side of the person's face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to sallow yellow. The person's mouth was pale brown, with a rose coloured sore at either corner.
The most startling thing about the face was its supernatural conglomeration of bright colours.
I smiled.
The mouth in the mirror cracked into a grin. (185)
Esther's total alienation from herself is "reflected" in the image in the mirror. Despite her strong sense that what she wanted to get at, to change, lay beyond her body, she has successfully imprinted on her physical self the ravage and decay of her mental self.
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The fractured imago

She is, of course, admitted to the Psychiatric Ward for her own protection, where nurses keep taking her temperature even though it's repeatedly "normal." She voices her objections both to the procedure and to the "tag" to the nurse and thinks: "I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head" (193).

The fractured imago figure is repeated shortly after when she kicks the tray of thermometers off her bed, and scoops up a ball of mercury, which becomes a figure for her shattered self:
I opened my fingers a crack, like a child with a secret, and smiled at the silver globe cupped in my hand. If I dropped it, it would break into a million little replicas of itself, and if I pushed them near each other, they would fuse, without a crack, into one whole again. I smiled and smiled at the small silver ball. (194)
Esther's appears not to understand that each of the fragments and the original ball would distort any face they reflect, much as a fish-eye lens. Or then again, perhaps she does and this is her way of expressing how she thinks of her self right at that moment. Her feeling, nonetheless, is that no matter where she might be at this time, she "would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [her] own sour air" (196).

Joan Gilling
Esther's relation to Joan Gilling is interesting in that Joan seems to provide Esther with both a reflection and a reverse image of herself. Joan's path to the psychiatric wards mirrors Esther's. She, too, has difficulty coming to terms with the self the dominant hegemony wants to permit her. She finds both work and relationships a problem, and when she decides that it is not worth getting up any more, she is sent to a psychiatric hospital. Joan is advised by the doctor that she needs "group therapy," and her response to this is to go home and write to him suggesting that he "'had no business setting himself to help sick people'" (209) (hear, hear!). Joan then reads about Esther, and runs away to New York where she slashes her wrists (211) by shoving them through her room-mate's window (212). Her parents come to collect her and she is admitted to hospital.

Joan forms a relationship with another inmate, DeeDee, and Esther catches them in a moment of intimacy (231). She asks Dr Nolan what one woman might see in another, and she responds: "'Tenderness'" (231). Despite her reservations about men, however, Esther remains avowedly heterosexual, and she tells Joan that she does not like her ("'You make me puke, if you want to know'" 232). Later, Joan is released, but then returns to the hospital. One night she goes missing: she has hung herself in the woods.

Esther wonders at one point whether she had made Joan up (231), and Buddy wonders whether he drives women crazy (he also had a relationship with Joan 252). However, Esther sees in Joan's funeral the negative imago or "shadow" of herself ("'I wondered what I thought I was burying'" 256). It is not coincidence that she chooses this moment in the story to declare that she feels "perfectly free" (255).
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Electrocution

The novel begins with Esther's reflection on the impending electrocution of the Rosenbergs for treason (1). Esther does not deal with the politics of their execution (tales of frame-ups, conspiracy theories, and anti-Semitism still surround the execution of the Rosenbergs for allegedly spying for the Russians), but she is fascinated by the horror of their mode of death. She does, however, let us know that she disagrees with their execution when she responds very negatively to Hilda's comment ("'I'm glad they're going to die'"); she breaks down at the photo session in Jay Cee's office immediately after (105-106).

Her fear and disgust of electrocution turns out to be justified when she herself is "electrocuted" by Dr Gordon during Electro-Shock Therapy:
There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath.
Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air cracking with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me until I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.
I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done. (151-152)
Dr Nolan, her second doctor, tells her this experience was a "mistake" and that if it is done properly "'it's like going to sleep'" (200). Esther remains unconvinced of this, and when Dr Nolan eventually orders that she be given shock-treatment, Esther experiences something quite different. The technician tells her to "bite down" : "And she set something on my tongue and in panic I bit down, and darkness wiped me out like chalk on a chalkboard" (226).

On waking, she notes that the effect is immediate:
All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. (227)
These treatments she receives, and the care of Dr Nolan, lead eventually to the moment when she faces the board of the hospital waiting to be discharged.
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Esther's father

Esther's relationship with her father is also significant in that it is after a visit to his grave that she attempts suicide under the house. Her father died when she was nine years old, and she frequently notes that it was at this age that she more-or-less ceased to be happy. For instance, when Constantin comes to take her on the visit to the UN, she reflects: "I felt happier than I had since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died" (77). When Esther, her father's favourite (175), goes to visit his grave, she cannot find it at first and her cemetery plea is both an indication of her state of mind and of the magnitude of her loss ("I couldn't find my father anywhere" 176). When she eventually does find the grave, she recognises in her tears that she had not yet cried for his death.

"I am I am I am"

For Esther, as we have seen, the self only exists in its repeated affirmation, but the opportunities for these imago-forming gestures seem limited to moments of severe crisis, and then only as a way of averting death or its consequences. When she tries to drown herself, for instance, in a moment which echoes Woolf's suicide by drowning, her heartbeat booms "like a dull motor in [her] ears": "I am I am I am" (167). Later, at Joan's funeral, an event which closely reminds her of her own possible fate, the "old brag of her heart" calls: "I am, I am, I am" (256), the difference between the "mad" self and the "cured" self comprising nothing more than the three commas inserted by this "cured" self.

Esther feels, however, that although she has been "born twice," she is nonetheless no more than "patched, retreaded and approved for the road" (257). She remains unsure whether she will go mad again: "But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that some day-at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere-the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" (254). It is tempting to see Esther's own story as the means of the "cure" (affirming the self through writing staves off death), but the imago of the self as a re-treaded tyre suggests no more than a temporary and fragile hold on this road, an imago which will need to be replaced (or reborn) yet again further down the track if the journey is to continue safely. This explanation will appeal to devotees of the Plath-as-Esther school of criticism given that Plath eventually did succeed in killing herself.
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Critical Readings


Mary Ellmann sees The Bell Jar as a series of "macabre conceits" on the theme of "one cracked mind," a series of snapshots, poetically rendered, yet at a "fun-house, nut-house angle" (221-222). The coming of age in America is shown as nothing more than a "cheap, smart lie" not just for Esther but for all young women (Doreen finishes up sleeping in her own vomit). Madness only alters the perspective of things as the boundaries between things fall down, which means that madness is as plausible as sanity (223-225).

Esther attempts to escape but finds only pits and cages, the most destructive of which is the bell jar in which Esther believes herself to be trapped (225-226). Esther finds herself trapped between two extremes from which she cannot escape:
The extremes of the novel are those of the poems, suicide and childbirth, erasing a line or writing a new one. Before madness, the person is crude, self-made and self-sufficient. After it, she is taken up by two elite societies-the dead inviting her to die, the unborn requesting to be born. Between these rival importunities she draws, for a time, her breath. (226)
David Holbrook believes that the central theme of The Bell Jar is impingement: "she who has had to make her identity out of scraps of 'being done to' is continually preoccupied with the relationship between being forced to conform and the true self that seeks to fulfil itself" (65). Holbrook believes that Esther is schizoid (that is, tending to schizophrenia-a mental disease marked by a disconnection between thoughts, feelings and actions, frequently with a retreat from social life). Esther provides, in this sense, a paranoid view (an abnormal feeling of persecution characterised by an exaggerated tendency to suspect and mistrust others) of the relation between the individual and society. Holbrook believes, nonetheless, that Esther points to a major weakness in American society, that "we fail to cherish being, to give individuals a chance to find the path to being able to I AM, by a loving encounter" (65). Or more simply, in response to the question "What is it to be human?" the answer Esther finds is that American society fails to place human considerations first (67).
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Review questions

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Works Cited

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Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
Phone: (079) 309240; Email: j.fitzsimmons@cqu.edu.au
Humanities Department
Faculty of Arts
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton MC Queensland 4702
Australia