The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar: a summary

The storyline follows the coming of age of Esther Greenwood. She is a young woman from small-town Massachusetts in the 1950s. Esther wins a prestigious scholarship and then an internship in New York City. Her intelligence, hard work, and perseverance get her there. Still, she finds herself disconnected from the other women in her group, who were chosen to guest edit at a glamorous teenage fashion magazine. Equally, she finds herself underwhelmed by the superficiality of the magazine and disillusioned with New York.

Her boyfriend, Buddy Willard, is seemingly perfect as a handsome, intelligent, and ambitious medical student, but he doesn't understand her need to write poetry. After he confesses to having slept with another woman, Esther begins to lose interest in him, even though he wants to marry her. Her inner conflict between the fascination with losing her virginity and current gender expectations creates another layer of tension for her. At a country club dance, she narrowly avoids being raped.

Returning to her hometown after throwing her New York wardrobe off a rooftop, Esther begins to slide into a more complete version of the unreality she felt in New York. She becomes unable to focus on her novel about her alter ego, Elaine, and stops taking care of herself. Her mother takes her to a doctor who prescribes electroshock therapy, worsening her condition. She attempts suicide several times, ending in a hospital after a pill overdose.

During her stays in various hospitals, Esther eventually meets psychiatrist Dr Nolan, who manages to bring her back to some form of stability. Her progress allows her to leave the hospital occasionally, and she finally loses her virginity to Irwin, a maths professor. Her friend from the hospital, Joan, tragically commits suicide. The novel ends with Esther's hospital exit interview.

The Bell Jar's main ideas

What is the difference between a theme and an idea? A novel's idea is what it is about, its overt subject matter. The themes can either be directly stated or implied through the storyline. They are usually related to the message that the novel is trying to relay.

The Bell Jar's central ideas are to do with sanity, insanity, and suicide. The idea of what is sane and what is insane is a timeless literary subject, but suicide is a reality less often handled in mainstream literature. It was also quite rare when the novel was published for an author to write about mental illness and suicide from a lived experience point of view, using a first-person narrative style.

The Bell Jar's main themes

There are many themes in this novel, and many are connected or overlapping. It is worth looking at a few key themes that are still as relevant today as when authors first started writing about them.

Societal conventions and expectations

In 1950s America, women were generally expected to get married, have children, and become housewives, even if they had attended college. Esther feels alienated in this environment as an ambitious young woman who wants to be a poet rather than be a housewife. She believes these to be mutually exclusive and that there are no role models for what she wants to achieve. Even her successful benefactors, Jay Cee and Philomena Guinea are women whose literary outputs are limited mainly to teenage fashion and love stories. The women at her college tease her for her bookishness, suddenly switching to acceptance and respect when she begins dating Buddy, an outwardly very eligible man.

Apart from her professional goals versus marriage and children conflict, she struggles with the traditional expectation of female sexual purity and an always-cheerful disposition. Esther feels like her interest in pre-marital sex, dark humour and often gloomy outlook make her a failure in terms of society's female ideal. In this novel, the disconnect between what she is told she should be and think and what she does are connected to her sense of unreality and eventual mental break. Although she temporarily loses her sense of reality, she always highlights the irrationality of her world. Also linked to this broader theme are sub-themes of class and gender roles.

Fig. 1 - An advertisement showcasing 1950s gender roles.

Transformation

The novel deals with themes of death, birth, and rebirth. These can easily be seen as metaphors for transformation. These metaphors are often in contrast to what one would expect. Esther climbing into a small basement nook to overdose on pills is almost like a return to the womb but to die. Ironically, her near-death experience begins a rebirth or transformation that eventually allows her to leave the hospital. With characteristic wit, she says:

Babies and birth are handled with almost the same frequency and attention as suicide and death. In the first chapter, Plath writes that Esther has a baby, which means that she does leave the hospital and may have written the narrative. At least, as the narrator, she is depicted as having found an alternative to the imposed silence that she often mentions during the novel.

After following Esther's transformation from what is generally regarded as sanity to her mental illness and suicide attempts, we then see her journey back. Esther also relays her subsequent transformation into a mother, and we know that she is the narrator too. We never know how she achieved this, if she ever married or if she, too, like Plath, finally ends her own life at a later stage.

The Bell Jar's key quotes

This quote references the metaphor of a bell jar for Esther's sense of insanity or unreality and her disconnect from the outside world.

Unusually, this simple statement of fact directly and unemotionally addresses a taboo subject. It also depicts the emotional disconnect that Esther felt from herself and the world at that time.

Esther's mother speaks this quote; this quote sums up the lack of understanding of her mental illness demonstrated by many professionals and family in the novel.

Despite her ambition, Esther, like Plath, had doubts about her literary credentials but her life experience covered this and some other subjects.