51 pages • 1 hour read
Sylvia PlathThe Bell Jar
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 19-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary
Joan tells Esther that she is going to be released from Belsize on the first of next month. Esther is jealous; she too has been scheduled for release when winter term begins at her college but is peeved that Joan has beat her to the asylum gates. She promises to visit Joan but privately thinks it’s unlikely.
One day after Joan’s discharge, Esther meets a tall, ugly, but intelligent-looking man named Irwin at the library. Irwin invites her out for coffee and then takes her back to his apartment for a beer. As they drink together a woman named Olga appears at the door. Esther tells Irwin to bring her in, but he says Esther’s presence would upset her.
Esther calls Dr. Nolan and secures permission to spend the night away from the asylum by saying that she’s sleeping over at Joan’s in Cambridge. She thinks Irwin is the perfect man to lose her virginity to: he’s smart and experienced enough to make up for her own naivete, and he is a stranger she will never have to see again. Her virginity has felt like a ball and chain ever since she found out about Buddy and Gladys.
Irwin takes Esther out to dinner and brings her to his apartment. He doesn’t believe that she’s a virgin until they have sex. Esther waits eagerly for some great change to come over her, but all she feels is intense pain. Afterward she bleeds heavily but feels proud to be “part of a great tradition” of “blood-stained bridal sheets” (229). Irwin offers to drive her home and she gives him Joan’s address rather than the asylum’s. By the time he drops her off she is hemorrhaging. Joan brings her to the emergency room, where the doctor tells her that bleeding like hers is one in a million.
Esther returns to the asylum to sleep. Dr. Quinn, Joan’s psychiatrist, awakens her. Joan is missing. Esther denies any knowledge of her whereabouts. In the morning, Dr. Quinn returns to tell her that Joan hanged herself in the nearby woods.
Chapter 20 Summary
It’s winter, and Esther is a week away from release if she can pass an interview with the asylum board of directors. She worries about how everyone will react to her return. Esther’s mother has promised to act as if her six-month absence was nothing but a bad dream, Esther remembers everything. Under the bell jar, “the world itself is the bad dream” (237), and her experiences at the asylum will remain a part of her forever.
Buddy Willard visits Esther. Looking at him, she feels supremely bored. She helps him shovel snow from his car and he wonders out loud who will want to marry her now that she’s been institutionalized. He asks her if he was the cause of her and Joan’s mental illness, and she reassures him that he was not.
Valerie says goodbye to Esther. Esther wonders if “someday…anywhere…the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, [will] descend again” (241). She calls Irwin to ask him to pay her medical bill from the night of the hemorrhage and then tells him she never wants to see him again. She feels “perfectly free” (242).
Esther attends Joan’s funeral and wonders what she is burying. She listens to her steadfast heartbeat and repeats to herself: “I am, I am, I am” (243).
At Belsize, Esther sits in the waiting room ahead of her release interview. She had hoped to feel sure of her recovery, but instead she is terrified and uncertain. She thinks to herself that there should be some kind of ritual for “being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road” (244). Dr. Nolan appears to reassure her, and the novel ends as she steps into the room full of doctors.
Chapters 19-20 Analysis
Esther experiences several transformative moments leading up to her release interview. She finally succeeds in losing her virginity and, although the experience is painful and leaves her with physical trauma, she is happy to have freed herself from society’s sexual double standard. Her decision to have premarital sex with a stranger is her long-awaited strike against oppressive social standards, and it makes her feel both free and intimately connected to her fellow women. It also restores a degree of control over her body, which has been manipulated by both outside forces and her own erratic mind.
Joan Gilling’s death by suicide marks another moment of transformation for Esther. While Esther’s recovery is the result of her work with Dr. Nolan and her successful psychiatric and medical treatments, Joan’s suicide is the symbolic turning point marking the death of Esther’s dark side. Esther has long thought of suicide as a method of rebirth, but through her time at the asylum she has achieved rebirth in a slow and sustained process, eliminating her need to complete suicide. Joan’s death manifests the fate Esther once planned for herself. Esther is aware of this, demonstrated by her wondering what she’s burying at Joan’s funeral. As she processes the death of her dark double, her heart repeats its mantra—I am I am I am—reminding Esther that she survived (243).
Buddy’s visit to the asylum spotlights Esther’s estrangement from her old life and its set of expectations. Their relationship is definitively over because to Buddy, Esther is tainted by her experience and can no longer fulfill the role of his wife and Madonna. His wondering who will want to marry her suggests that the option of easy domesticity—which has both tempted and terrified Esther—may be gone for good.
Reflecting on her experiences in the asylum, Esther revisits the symbol of the bell jar and thinks that all of the women in Belsize and all of the girls at her college are under bell jars of their own. Plath is expanding the symbol to include not Esther’s only mental illness but the rigid constraints placed upon her female peers, limiting their freedom and happiness.
At the end of the novel, Esther appears to have recovered from her depression. Ironically, after spending the entirety of The Bell Jar scorning marriage, she compares her release interview to a wedding by using the phrase “something old, something new” (244). Because Esther’s life has been thrown off course by her depression, her milestones look different than other people’s. Rather than marriage or college graduation, release from the asylum becomes Esther’s rite of passage. Losing her virginity, Joan’s death, and her exit interview are all steps in her unconventional coming-of-age journey. She began the novel in an adolescent state of mind but is ending it as an adult, maturing through her trauma and recovery.
The sense of peace which closes out The Bell Jar is fragile. Esther, who now understands the nature of her mental illness, notes that there is no telling when the bell jar might “descend again” and trap her in its “stifling distortions” (241). However, the fact that the novel is narrated by an older version of Esther who shows no signs of young Esther’s depression provides hope that her recovery will last.
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By Sylvia Plath
