I first encountered “The Bell Jar” in my late teens, a time when I was grappling with my own identity and place in the world. Sylvia Plath’s words illuminated the corners of my psyche I hadn’t dared to explore. Now, decades after, I find myself returning to this seminal work, curious to see how time and experience have altered my perception of Plath’s masterpiece.
A Queer, Sultry Summer in New York
“The Bell Jar” opens with Esther Greenwood in New York City during the sweltering summer of 1953.
The air is thick with more than just heat – it’s charged with the electric current of societal tension, perfectly mirroring the inner turmoil of our protagonist. She’s won a month-long internship at Ladies’ Day magazine, along with eleven other girls.
But from the very first sentence, we sense Esther’s disconnection:
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
The glittering promise of New York quickly tarnishes for Esther. She feels out of place among the other interns, particularly Doreen, a cynical southern belle, and Betsy, a wholesome Midwestern girl.
We’re witnessing the slow-motion detonation of the American Dream, with Esther as our unwitting guide through the fallout.
Esther’s attempts to fit in feel like trying on ill-fitting clothes. She accompanies Doreen on a night out, only to end up alone and depressed in her hotel room.
When Doreen returns drunk and vomits, Esther helps her, but resolves to distance herself.
The bell jar of depression begins its slow descent as Esther navigates a world that feels increasingly alien.
She attends fashion shows, accepts gifts from the magazine, and goes on dates arranged by her editor, but none of it brings her joy.
After a bout of food poisoning from a Ladies’ Day luncheon, Esther’s disillusionment deepens.
The Gilded Cage of New York
New York City in the 1950s – a glittering playground of possibility, right? Wrong.
Through Esther’s eyes, we see the city for what it truly is: a labyrinth of false promises and hollow ambitions.
The glamorous fashion magazine where Esther interns becomes a funhouse mirror, distorting the image of womanhood into something grotesque and unattainable.
As I follow Esther’s descent, I can’t help but draw parallels to our modern world. Have we really progressed, or have we simply traded one set of impossible standards for another? The Instagram filters of today seem like direct descendants of the airbrushed magazine covers that haunted Esther.
The city itself becomes a character in Plath’s hands.
Its towering skyscrapers and bustling streets are both awe-inspiring and terrifying, much like the opportunities and challenges that face Esther.
I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s essays on New York, particularly “Goodbye to All That,” where she writes:
“New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”
Plath and Didion both capture the dual nature of the city – its promise and its peril.
I find myself empathizing more with Esther’s sense of displacement. How often have I found myself in situations where I was supposed to be living my “best life”, only to feel utterly disconnected?
The Hypocrite: Buddy Willard
As Esther’s time in New York progresses, we learn about her relationship with Buddy Willard, a medical student she once idealized.
Through flashbacks, we see how Esther’s perception of Buddy crumbled. She discovers he’s not the paragon of virtue she imagined, but a hypocrite who expects purity from women while secretly engaging in sexual relationships.
A pivotal moment occurs during Esther’s visit to Buddy at Yale Medical School. As they watch a baby being born, Esther is horrified rather than awed.
Later, Buddy dismisses her poetry ambitions, asking, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?” and answering his own question with, “A piece of dust.”
With this exchange, Plath explodes the myth of the supportive male partner. Buddy’s dismissal of Esther’s poetry is a grenade lobbed at the heart of female ambition.
It’s a moment that makes me want to reach through the pages of time and shake some sense into him – or better yet, hand him a copy of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own“.
As a teenager, I remember feeling a mix of anger and confusion at Buddy’s character. Now, with decades of experience navigating relationships and workplace dynamics, I see him as a perfect encapsulation of the well-meaning misogyny that still permeates our society.
How many Buddy Willards have I encountered in my life, men who profess to support women’s rights while unconsciously undermining them at every turn?
In “The Bell Jar”, Plath’s portrayal of Buddy also serves as a critique of the American education system and the limitations it places on critical thinking. Despite his prestigious medical education, Buddy lacks the ability to question societal norms or see beyond his short-sighted perspective.
It’s a failing that resonates strongly in our current era of “fake news” and echo chambers.
The Descent Begins
As Esther’s internship ends, her mental state deteriorates rapidly. She returns home to suburban Boston, only to learn she’s been rejected from a prestigious writing course.
The bell jar descends fully as Esther’s depression takes hold. She can’t sleep, can’t read, can’t write.
She considers taking a summer school course but can’t bring herself to sign up.
Her mother’s attempts to help only exacerbate her feelings of inadequacy and alienation.
Esther’s obsession with death grows.
She reads newspaper articles about suicides, imagining herself in the victims’ places. She attempts to slit her wrists but finds she can’t go through with 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.”
As Esther’s mental state deteriorates, Plath’s prose becomes a fever dream of despair. The metaphor of the bell jar is so viscerally realized that I find myself gasping for air alongside Esther:
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
This isn’t just depression – it’s existential claustrophobia, a suffocation of the soul.
Plath’s genius lies in making us feel the weight of the bell jar, the distortion of reality, the slow asphyxiation of selfhood.
Plath's genius lies in making us feel the weight of the bell jar, the distortion of reality, the slow asphyxiation of selfhood. Share on XThe bell jar as a metaphor for depression is so potent that it’s entered our cultural lexicon.
It also serves as an apt description for the isolation many of us feel in the digital age.
We’re more connected than ever, yet many of us feel trapped behind screens, watching a distorted version of reality unfold before us.
Plath’s description of Esther’s descent is painfully accurate. As someone who has grappled with depression, I find myself nodding in recognition at passages that once seemed alien to me.
The lethargy, the disconnect, the sense of watching life happen at a remove – it’s all rendered with brutal clarity.
But Plath doesn’t just describe depression; she makes us feel it.
The claustrophobia of the bell jar becomes our own.
We feel the walls closing in, the air growing thin. It’s an uncomfortable read, but an important one, especially in an era where mental health is still often misunderstood or stigmatized.
Keep reading: ‘The Midnight Library’: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Infinite Lives
The Psychiatric Experience
Finally, Esther is referred to a psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon. He seems uninterested in her as a person, focusing instead on electroshock therapy. Her experiences with him are traumatic.
The description of electroconvulsive therapy is particularly harrowing:
“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 crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.”
After this experience, Esther’s suicidal thoughts intensify.
She attempts to drown herself, to hang herself, but her body rebels against these attempts.
Finally, she hides in a crawl space in her house and takes an overdose of sleeping pills:
“The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.”
Institutionalization and a Glimmer of Hope
Esther wakes up in a hospital, alive but initially blind.
She’s moved to a psychiatric ward and then, through the intervention of her benefactor, Philomena Guinea, to a private facility.
Here, she meets Dr. Nolan, a female psychiatrist who seems to understand her better than anyone has before.
Under Dr. Nolan’s care, Esther begins to improve. She undergoes more electroshock therapy, but this time it’s not the traumatic experience it was before.
She forms a friendship with Joan, a fellow patient who had dated Buddy Willard.
Joan’s presence serves as a kind of mirror for Esther, reflecting her own struggles and progress.
Reading this, I’m reminded of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest“, another searing critique of psychiatric care. But where Kesey’s Nurse Ratched is a clear villain, Plath gives us a more nuanced view.
Dr. Nolan, Esther’s female psychiatrist, offers a glimmer of hope – a reminder that sometimes, it takes a woman to truly hear another woman’s pain.
Sometimes, it takes a woman to truly hear another woman's pain. Share on XA Tentative Rebirth
As Esther improves, she’s granted more freedoms.
In a significant moment, she visits a doctor to be fitted for a diaphragm, taking control of her sexuality in a way that was radical for the time.
She decides to lose her virginity to a professor named Irwin, but the experience is painful and results in heavy bleeding.
Shortly after this, Joan commits suicide, an event that deeply affects Esther.
At Joan’s funeral, Esther reflects on her own survival: “
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
This triumphant heartbeat of selfhood reverberates through the final pages of “The Bell Jar”. It’s a declaration of existence, a refusal to be silenced or suppressed.
And yet, knowing Plath’s tragic fate, it’s impossible not to hear a note of desperation in this mantra.
“The Bell Jar” ends with Esther preparing for an interview that will determine if she can leave the hospital.
There’s a sense of cautious hope, but also uncertainty.
As she waits to be called in, Esther wonders:
“How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”
The Bell Jar: Plath’s Unflinching Gaze into the Abyss
Reading “The Bell Jar” is akin to witnessing a psychological autopsy, is like watching a slow-motion car crash – you can see the disaster unfolding, but you’re powerless to stop it.
Plath’s prose, razor-sharp and unflinching, peels back the layers of Esther Greenwood’s psyche with surgical precision. “The Bell Jar” a masterclass in translating the intangible weight of depression into visceral, tactile imagery.
The bell jar isn’t just a metaphor; it’s practically a character in itself.
Esther’s description of “sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” encapsulates the suffocating isolation of depression with haunting accuracy.
Plath doesn’t just tell us about depression; she traps us in it alongside Esther.
What’s truly unnerving about “The Bell Jar” is its stubborn relevance. Swap out the 1950s setting for today, and Esther’s struggles would fit right in.
The societal pressures may wear different masks now, but their essence remains unchanged.
As Betty Friedan pointed out in “The Feminine Mystique,” the “problem with no name” that plagued 1950s housewives has simply shape-shifted, not disappeared.
Plath’s exploration of mental illness in “The Bell Jar” was revolutionary for its time and remains powerful today.
She rips away the romantic veil often draped over depression in literature, exposing its ugly, debilitating reality.
The description of Esther’s suicide attempt is brutally poetic:
“The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.”
It’s beautiful and horrifying in equal measure.
“The Bell Jar” treatment of women’s sexuality is equally groundbreaking. Esther’s acquisition of a diaphragm is a quiet revolution, a reclamation of bodily autonomy in a world that seeks to control women’s bodies.
It’s a thread that runs directly to current debates about reproductive rights.
Plath’s critique of 1950s America goes beyond the obvious targets. She exposes the insidious nature of societal conformity, the gaslighting pressure to be grateful for opportunities that feel more like traps.
It’s a pressure that still exists today, albeit in different forms.
The ambiguous ending of “The Bell Jar” is its final gut punch. Esther’s recovery is tentative, the threat of relapse ever-present.
Her mantra of “I am, I am, I am” is not a victory cry, but a desperate affirmation of existence in the face of an illness that seeks to erase her.
“The Bell Jar” is not a comfortable read. It’s not meant to be. It’s a challenge, a provocation, a demand that we confront the uncomfortable truths about mental illness and societal expectations.
It’s a reminder that the battle against our personal bell jars is ongoing, but not unwinnable.
In the end, “The Bell Jar” is more than a novel. It’s a mirror, reflecting our own struggles, our own societal pressures, our own quest for identity.
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