The Bell Jar

“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 dull, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the surrounding hullabaloo.)”

This quote occurs in Chapter 1 and indicates the beginnings of Esther’s first depressive episode. Looking back, older Esther recognizes that her reactions to the events in her life were not normal, but young Esther cannot bring herself to care very much. She feels listless and empty in the midst of a time that is supposed to be glamorous and exciting.

“I said to myself: ‘Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore. I don’t know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure.’”

Despite disliking the sexual double standard and the idea that women should be pure, Esther craves symbolic purity. She wants to forget everything bad and traumatic that has ever happened to her and start afresh, undergoing a process of rebirth. As the novel progresses this idea of rebirth will become entwined with her suicidal thoughts.

“What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I’d be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.

‘I don’t really know,’ I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”

This is the first moment in which Esther admits to herself that she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, an anxiety which will come to torture her and worsen her depression. Her frantically perfectionist mindset doesn’t allow her to accept that confusion about one’s future is a normal part of being a young adult.

“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 home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”

Esther is uncomfortable in her womanhood. Because of her traumatic experiences in a male-dominated society, she associates femininity with suffering. She rejects the traditional expectation that a young woman should want marriage and children. This is cemented by witnessing a live birth and realizing that what she imagined as a beautiful and poetic moment is primal and painful.

“I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue—which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn’t have the same idioms as our idioms—and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. It mightn’t make me any happier, but it would make me one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.”

Uncertain in her sense of self, Esther flirts with several identities as she tries to figure out who she is and what will make her happy. This scene is a literal visualization of the way she mentally tries on other peoples’ lives to make up for her failure to coalesce a cohesive identity of her own.

“I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldn’t seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. He’d go to a whore if he had to and keep the woman he loved free of all that dirty business.”

Eric’s attitude toward sex encapsulates a misogynistic double standard that heavily influences Esther’s sexual decisions. The men in her life sort women into two mutually exclusive categories: those who are worthy of love and those who are sexually desirable. Like most young adults, Esther wants to explore her body and experience physical pleasure but is implicitly told that if she does so she will lose value as a potential wife.

“The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

Although Esther does not self-identify as a feminist, quotes like this make it clear that she desires independence and freedom from rigid gender roles—even if she isn’t sure what she wants to do with that freedom.

“The interior voice nagging me not to be a fool—to save my skin and take off my skis and walk down, camouflaged by the scrub pines bordering the slope—fled like a disconsolate mosquito. The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”

Plath introduces Esther’s suicidal ideation through Esther’s characteristically calm, sharp inner voice. Esther’s tone dulls the shock of a dramatic turning point in the novel and helps us understand the pervasive nature of her mental illness.

“All through June the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap.”

Esther’s rejection from the Harvard writing course is a huge blow and starts her serious spiral into depression. In these lines she sees her own body from a distance, symbolizing her depersonalization.

“I thought he was going to tell me his diagnosis, and that perhaps I had judged him too hastily and too unkindly. But he only said, ‘I remember your college well. I was up there, during the war. They had a WAC station, didn’t they? Or was it WAVES?’

I said I didn’t know.

‘Yes, a WAC station, I remember now. I was doctor for the lot, before I went overseas. My, they were a pretty bunch of girls.’

Doctor Gordon laughed.”

Dr. Gordon’s comment about pretty girls at Esther’s college comes on the heels of him ignoring her description of her symptoms and before he hastily prescribes her electroshock therapy. He is a male psychiatrist who makes no effort to understand Esther’s mental state, instead writing her off as a hysterical woman. His casual sexism bleeds into his judgment and affects his ability to effectively treat Esther as a patient.

“I thought I would swim out until I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears.

I am I am I am.”

In the face of Esther’s repeated suicide attempts, her body sabotages her again and again. In this scene she tries and fails to drown herself. The beating of her heart is a constant reminder that she still exists and its mantra—"I am I am I am”—betrays a desire to keep living despite the agony caused by her depression.

“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.”

Esther makes her most serious suicide attempt by overdosing on sleeping pills. As she drops into unconsciousness, she regards the “tatty wreckage” of her life. While this sentiment that her life is a failure seems extreme coming from a bright and accomplished 19-year-old, it’s indicative of Esther’s despair.

“At first I didn’t see what the trouble was. It wasn’t a mirror at all, but a picture.”

Waking in the hospital after her suicide attempt, Esther doesn’t recognize her bruised and battered face in the mirror. Her inability to see herself highlights her disassociation and estrangement from any sense of self.

“Some of them looked so young I knew they couldn’t be proper doctors, and one of them had a queer name that sounded just like Doctor Syphilis, so I began to look out for suspicious, fake names, and sure enough, a dark-haired fellow who looked very like Doctor Gordon, except that he had black skin where Doctor Gordon’s skin was white, came up and said, ‘I’m Doctor Pancreas,’ and shook my hand.”

At the city hospital, Esther’s depressive symptoms escalate into paranoia. Moments like these show the intensity of her mental illness.

“I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

As her benefactress drives her to a private hospital, Esther feels completely helpless. Changes in setting used to affect her mood but now, no matter where she goes, the bell jar of her depression shuts her out of the world completely.

“’I read about you,’ Joan went on. ‘Not how they found you, but everything up to that, and I put all my money together and took the first plane to New York.’

‘Why New York?’

‘Oh, I thought it would be easier to kill myself in New York.’”

This moment between Joan and Esther establishes Joan’s role as Esther’s double. Their lives share passing similarities (Joan dated Buddy Willard, for example). However, Joan’s copycat suicide attempt is the key thing which unites them and makes Esther view Joan as her mirror. This moment also reminds the reader that even though we spend the entirety of the novel inside Esther’s mind, her actions are not occurring in a vacuum. Her suicide attempt affects not only her but her friends and family.

“Joan had walk privileges, Joan had shopping privileges, Joan had town privileges. I gathered all my news of Joan into a little bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me.”

As Joan’s recovery appears to outpace her own, Esther is tormented by jealousy. Watching the woman she sees as an extension of herself recover while she continues to struggle reminds Esther of the smart, accomplished girl she was before her mental break. She feels that she has lost her best qualities to depression and resents that Joan seems to have retained them. This dynamic belies Joan’s upcoming suicide and Esther’s recovery.

“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.”

Administered under the eye of the compassionate Dr. Nolan, Esther’s second round of electroshock therapy eases her depressive symptoms. Although the mental health system that treats Esther seems archaic to the modern eye, Plath begins to plant seeds of hope for Esther’s recovery.

“I smelt a mingling of Pablum and sour milk and salt-cod-stinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender. How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway?”

Even though Esther is ambivalent toward the roles of wife and mother, she sometimes feels sadness at her perceived failure to live up to what a woman “should” be. Her inability to be happy following a traditional and conservative life path makes her feel alienated and defective.

“‘We’ll take up where we left off, Esther,’ she had said, with her sweet, martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’

A bad dream.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead body, the world itself is the bad dream.”

To the end, Mrs. Greenwood can’t understand the science of Esther’s depression. As Esther’s treatment concludes, her mother suggests compartmentalizing the experience and trying to forget it, not understanding that Esther’s experiences will always be a part of her and that she can never truly be sure that her recovery is final.

“It occurred to me that the blood was my answer. I couldn’t possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of a great tradition.”

After being fitted for a diaphragm, Esther fulfills her long-held goal of losing her virginity. Although the sex is lackluster and painful, she succeeds in mentally casting off the confines of the sexual double standard. Her choice to lose her virginity in a safe and consensual manner restores her feelings of ownership over her own body and makes her feel connected to her fellow women.

“‘I wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther. Now you’ve been,’ and Buddy’s gesture encompassed the hill, the pines and the severe, snow-gabled buildings breaking up the rolling landscape, ‘here.’

And of course I didn’t know who would marry me now that I’d been where I had been. I didn’t know at all.”

Although Buddy’s words are crass, his sentiment is likely shared by many of Esther’s peers. A woman who has been institutionalized would not be considered marriage material by many young men in the 1950s. Esther has toppled from the Madonna pedestal and lost the option of being Buddy’s docile wife, but she never truly wanted it in the first place.

“There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan’s grave.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.

I am, I am, I am.”

Joan’s death reaffirms Esther’s life. As she watches her double’s funeral, the mantra of her heart, which she also heard right before her suicide attempt, returns to remind both Esther and the reader of her continued survival.