The Bell Jar (1963). Content and Description

William Heinemann published The Bell Jar in England on January 14, 1963, less than one month before Plath took her own life and died of asphyxiation. The novel appeared under her own name in 1966 (Plath originally employed the pseudonym Victoria Lucas) but did not appear in the United States until 1971, in part because Plath’s mother, Aurelia, objected to the content, which she felt was uncharitable to those Plath had known and might adversely affect her reputation as a writer.

Of course, between Plath’s death and the American release of the novel, Sylvia Plath’s had become a well-known name; her dramatic death had elevated her works to cult status. Plath came upon the idea of writing about a woman imprisoned by society and mental illness around the time of her third pregnancy, during which she wrote in her journal: “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff.

I am a fool if I don’t relive it, recreate it” (Journals 495). While Plath wrote the novel in 1961, the action of the novel is set in the 1950s and is informed largely by Plath’s experience in 1953: her month-long internship as an editor at a woman’s magazine in New York City and the depressive episode, mental breakdown, and suicide attempt that followed. While it is tempting and even revealing to read the novel as an autobiography, Plath accomplishes more in the novel than record her own life and prefigure her own death. She captures America at a key moment in history, one in which women’s roles were clearly defined.

To understand The Bell Jar it is important to consider it within the context of 1950s America, a time of postwar prosperity and a time before the “second wave” of feminism that brought about so much change in the 1970s. As today’s fashion magazines offer unrealistic ideals of physical perfection and beauty, the stereotypical woman portrayed in 1950s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal was a stay- at-home mother and submissive wife who lived to keep the pantry stocked, cook, and focus on making her husband happy.

Marriage was depicted as the way to happiness, and the fulfillment of sexual satisfaction was equated with motherhood. After 1945 and the end of the World War II, the birth rate rose 18.5 percent, giving rise to a new generation of children dubbed the “baby boomers.” Corporate employment was seen as a goal; men were expected to be loyal to family and business; this society, in which members of the population were highly mobile, gave rise to the nuclear, isolated family unit, with a shift of women’s responsibilities to raising children. For Plath, the “bell jar” represented the confining 1950s patriarchal structure; her novel defied social norms. Of course, as with so much of Plath’s life, here we find a contradiction: a woman who tried to play the ideal role in society while creating subversive art.

The novel traces seven months in the life of Esther Greenwood, who has finished her junior year in college and is now working as a writing intern at a New York fashion magazine. As the novel opens, it is June 1953, the same month that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electrocution after being convicted of treason for giving the Soviets atomic secrets, an event that is referred to throughout the novel. In the first half of the novel Esther narrates her experiences during her first month in New York as one of 12 editors working on a college issue of Ladies’ Day magazine. As she runs from one event to the next—from photo shoots to meetings to lunches to dates to dances—Esther experiences a gradual mental collapse.

On her last night in New York, in a highly symbolic scene, Esther strips on a rooftop and discards the clothes that have formed her identity: “Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.” The second part and majority of the novel takes place back home in Boston, where Esther wanders the streets, becoming more and more unstable, and ultimately is hospitalized after swallowing a bottle of pills. What follows is a slow, harrowing recovery that consists of electroshock therapy and hours spent with psychiatrists.

When she finally encounters the humane Dr. Nolan, Esther begins to recover, regaining a sense of her self and feeling the “bell jar” lift. As the book ends, Esther, filled with “question marks,” is called to a weekly doctors’ board meeting to be considered for dismissal: “The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”

Typically, the novel is interpreted two ways: (1) as the story of a beautiful, accomplished woman who kills herself and becomes a martyr for women’s rights; (2) as a demonstration of Plath’s mental instability. Yet, there is more at play than a protofeminist diatribe or a psychoanalytic portrait of an author. The novel is very much about identity— the disorientation of the self, the necessity of filtering social messages, and the construction of a sense of self despite terrible odds. As such, it speaks for late adolescence and becomes a metaphor for the human condition. Like Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Esther is a social misfit, a protagonist doomed from the beginning who bears witness to the powerlessness of the individual in relation to the collective.

By using the metaphor of illness or insanity, Plath employs an ironic strategy, one that causes us to rethink who/ what is really sane: a disturbed individual or the social world. Throughout the book we see the disparity between maternity (conception, pregnancy, nurturing of infants) and motherhood (daily child care that necessitates a specific role to be played). Thus, on one level, the novel causes us to question whether motherhood is indeed “mutable”—a kind of sociological construct that must first be confronted and deconstructed before it can be escaped.

The Bell Jar portrays a suffering woman artist fighting with her own demons, laboring to know herself, searching for an acceptable role to play, and seeking fulfillment, joy. While it is difficult not to conceive of the novel in a semiautobiographical context, we do The Bell Jar injustice when we do not consider the literary value it holds. As do works by Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf, the novel speaks to those trapped with self-doubts, groping to find a way through the seemingly endless corridors of the mind.

As it captures a woman in the middle of 20th-century America making sense out of pain and laments the insensitivity of an often- cruel world, it deals with understanding, the struggle between self and other, interior and exterior, with its dream-filled visions and nightmarish pain. As Esther says near the end of the novel, “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

As Esther does, we all seek a stable self, one not bound by the psychological knots that confine us, one not tethered to the social exchanges that define us. While the novel depicts a suffocating world, it also conveys the power of art, the way fiction can provide a needed distance from suffering, the way novels can not only lead us to empathize with others but also help us to understand ourselves. Whether we choose to read The Bell Jar as an autobiography, as fiction, as a psychological portrait, as a representation of women in the 1950s, as a sociological essay on the sexual experience of women, or for the style of the narration and construction of the novel’s form, which in many ways mirrors the disjunctive experience of its narrator, we are drawn into a close narrative space with Esther, who, as we have, has an emphatic need to confront radical instability and make sense of the world.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. The Bell Jar continues to be a popular text with high school students. Consider why this is so. Evaluate the way the novel portrays adolescence. In what ways does the novel speak to the experience of growing up? Do you think it is an important work for high school students to read? Why or why not?

2. Both Sylvia Plath’s The BellJar and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye contain sensitive protagonists who suffer emotionally. Write an essay comparing the protagonists in each work, focusing on the way their psychological dispositions affect the way they conceive reality.

3. Read Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (the full text of the story can be located at <http://etext.virginia.edu/ toc/modeng/public/GilYell.html>). What similarities do you see between the works? How can each be said to explore the plight of women? Are the social issues that both works critique still relevant today? Why or why not?

4. On one level the novel focuses on the role of the mother. With this in mind, does or can maternity serve as catalyst for mental breakdown? To what extent is maternity (conception, pregnancy, childbirth, etc.) a fixed biological reality, and to what extent is motherhood (the daily care of children and the role of the mother) a social construct? Explore these questions in light of the novel.

5. Compare The Bell Jar with other 1960s novels: Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Why do these novels focus on mental illness, hospitals, and the need to escape? Taken together, what do they convey about the role of the individual within mid-20th-century society? Are these novels’ social commentaries still relevant today? Why or why not?

6. Plath sets the story of Esther in the context of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Why is this significant? How does this political context relate to the form and content of the novel?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Aird, Eileen. Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work.. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
Alexander, Paul. Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. New York: Viking, 1991.
Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971.
Axelrod, Steven G. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Barnard, Caroline King. Sylvia Plath. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Basnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath. Towata, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1987.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Sylvia Plath. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.
Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. London: Pearson, 2001.

Brennan, Claire. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Sylvia Plath. Plymouth, England: Northcote House (in Association with the British Council), 1998.