THE BELL JAR
The first and only novel written by Sylvia Path, a confessional poet who stuck her head in the oven and killed herself at the young age of 30, as famous for her life and work as she was her death, The Bell Jar is a roman à clef loosely based on the author’s own life.
Following the life of 19-year-old writer, Esther Greenwood, The Bell Jar chronicles Esther’s descent into depression and numbness in the 1950s, the decade of American exceptionalism, white picket fences and the picture-perfect, makeup-laden wives whose labor sustained the hypocrisy of men’s dreams.
Indeed, The Bell Jar is a feminist novel—although purely by accident. While Plath never identified as a feminist in her lifetime, her own struggle with mental health stemmed from the constraints imposed on women in that era. “I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a woman did. They could die or go to Spain. They could have fun while a woman had birth pangs,” Plath wrote in her journals.
After Esther sees a psychiatrist, she faces the rattling violence of electroshock therapy, acontroversial form of therapy which has often been used to pacify women deemed as ‘hysterical’ by the medical establishment, and older people.
A Bit of Backstory
Sylvia Plath started writing The Bell Jar in 1961, not long after publishing her first collection of poetry, and finished writing the novel in August 1961, after she had separated from her husband, Ted Hughes, and relocated to a Regency style-apartment overlooking Primrose Hill in London.
In 1994, Hughes wrote that Plath wrote the novel “at top speed and with very little revision from start to finish.” Much of Plath’s best writing was channeled in a frenzy of intensity, including thepoems in the posthumously-published collection Ariel which she concluded a couple months before her death.
The Bell Jar was first published in the UK in 1963 under the penname ‘Victoria Lucas’; Plath died by suicide a month after its release. The novel was later published in the US under her real name in 1971.
Sylvia Plath reads and interviews Elizabeth Bowen for Mademoiselle, May 1953. Smith College.
Esther Greenwood Was…
…a scholarship student, an overachiever, an aspiring writer, and an intern at the prestigious (and fictional) Ladies’ Day Magazine. An insert of Plath herself, The Bell Jar is testament to the fact that not only is truth stranger than fiction, but that the best stories borrow from real life.
Here’s What We Love About the Book
The Bell Jar remains universally relatable, particularly in the age of the internet where quotes from the novel and other writings by Plath circulate in depressed, alienated communities of youth who share and post about their mental health struggles, finding a refuge of expression in the internet which they might not access in real life.
Esther is pathologized for feeling trapped in the fairy tale falsity of the American Dream, and theexpectations thrust on her to be pretty, perfect, and a grade A student.
As she chafes against the veiled violence of American society at the height of the Cold War, notably feeling secretly horrified at the electric chair execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Americans accused of spying for the Soviet Union, her mental health unravels vis-à-vis a stunned feeling of numbness that prevails over the novel.
In this way, Plath is quite brilliant in capturing the suffocating dread of depression, the feeling of wanting to kill yourself even as everyone else is happy and smiling:
“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
And even better? “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
Sylvia Plath at Smith College's 1954 Quadigras event.
Esther had great style
In the earliest pages of the novel, Esther expresses a disillusionment with fashion, correctly seeing it as a front for projecting an image and persona in New York City, and the literary and media world in general, which may or may not be true.
Shopping at Bloomingdale’s for “patent leather shoes”, “a black patent leather belt” and a matching “black patent leather pocketbook”, and receiving an “elaborate strapless bra” from a corset company as a gift, Esther feels alienated by all the glitz and glam that surrounds her, and how these respectable, feminine clothes streamline and domesticate her body as a woman.
On her last night in New York, she sits on the edge of the sunroof of the hotel, and feeds “her wardrobe to the night wind”, bit by bit, watching her expensive clothes float and disappear in the darkness.
And Plath Had an Appetite
Digital Footprint
A line lifted from Sylvia Plath’s only novel has since become iconic, reverberating through theinternet with the power of self-affirmation:
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
Esther, the heroine of the book who struggles with mental illness, has just attended the funeral of a fellow ward at the hospital. As Esther observes the last rites, she affirms herself in her mind, hearing her own heartbeat: I am, I am, I am.
Plath’s words remain famous for their simplicity and punch, resonating with online communities discussing mental health or finding a safe space in the digital realm, and is probably the most widely-quoted line from The Bell Jar.
10 Things I Hate About You, 1999
Truth is Stranger Than Fiction
Plath’s own experiences with electroshock therapy and burn-out from being a scholarship student are inspirations for the autobiographical novel.
Chafing against the perfection required of women in the era, who could only aspire to be manicured wives serving the whims of men, The Bell Jar is an accidental feminist novel, stemming from Esther’s own sense of disassociation from performing femininity, aiming for academic success, and being expected to marry and have kids.
In Plath’s era, women were pathologized for failing to smile and perform to the satisfaction of their husbands. ECT and lobotomies were used to treat psychiatric disorders, including depression, and a 1951 study found that 60 percent of lobotomy patients were women.
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, 1963
A Blueprint for Pop Culture
The hit AMC TV series Mad Men, which dominated the 2010s, has an episode of the fifth season called “Lady Lazarus”, named after a poem Sylvia Plath wrote not long before her 1963 suicide.
The exhaustion with ‘housewife syndrome’ in the 1950s onwards precipitated the publication of Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, which in turn became the foundation for second-wave feminism. In 1975, The Stepford Wives released to iconic acclaim, satirizing the plight of white, upper-middle-class women in a creepy suburb where wives are murdered and secretly replaced by identical robots, who can’t think for themselves, wear nylon stockings, cook perfectly, and always say yes to their husband’s demands.
Plath conveys her discomfort with this phenomenon in her writing; Esther feels anxious about marriage and pregnancy, and is weirded out when she has sex with her longtime boyfriend, Buddy. Plath’s own marriage to poet Ted Hughes was abusive and tumultuous, and she escaped by ending her own life after a period of separation from her husband.
The Bell Jar appears in pop culture, often as an ominous signal that something isn’t right. Kat, thesmart, surly heroine of the rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You, who wants to go to the all-girls liberal arts college Sarah Lawrence, and is mostly unimpressed with boys (until she meets bad boy Patrick, played by Heath Ledger), is shown reading the book at one point in the film.
Plath remains a touchstone for women musicians, who discern a kindred spirit in the writer’s tortured, confessional poetry. In Lady Gaga’s 2009 song “Dance in the Dark”, Gaga lists trailblazing, tragic women like Princess Diana, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath, singing: “Tell ‘em how you feel girls.” Likewise, in Lana Del Rey’s 2019 song “hope is adangerous thing for a woman like to have—but I have it”, Del Rey expresses an alienation with “debutantes”, who are “smiling for miles in pink dresses and high heels on white yachts”, and then proclaims her own struggle with demons: “I’ve been tearing around in my fucking nightgown/twenty-four seven Sylvia Plath.”
Girl, Interrupted, 1999
Literary Legacy
The Bell Jar paved the way for literature about depression, mental health, and sadness in women.
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 1994 Prozac Nation, initially titled I Hate Myself and I Want to Die, is an unvarnished account of being a depressive mess, self-absorbed and self-deprecating at turns.
Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted, which came out the year before, chronicled her time in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s after learning she had borderline personality disorder.
The sad girl trope prevails in contemporary fiction, notably in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation about a WASP-y antiheroine who takes sleeping pills and rests in her Manhattan apartment for a year after her parents die, and in Stephanie LaCava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You, which focuses on a Hollywood nepotism baby with congenital analgesia, who physically can’t feel pain but confronts emotional trauma at every turn.
by Iman Sultan
Themes & Prompts:
Confessional
Plath is known as one of the earliest adopters of confessional poetry, a style that emerged in the1950s and typically references difficult moments, psychological breaking points, and traumatic events. The Bell Jar is her only published novel and reflects this same style. Although originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, the work is autobiographical, recounting many events of Plath’s twentieth year albeit with changed names. Plath’s biography reveals distinct similarities, and today, The Bell Jar would probably be considered autofiction, a burgeoning genre that blurs the line between fiction and memoir.
Prompt—
What are the implications of telling one’s life story as fiction? What’s lost or gained in choosing to fictionalize? What does it mean for a woman to do so?
Spectator to Life
From the very beginning, Esther is detached from the world around her. She can’t make sense of the Rosenbergs’ execution, is unable to relate to the women within her magazine cohort, and finds even the most minor acts, like ordering a drink in a bar, to be beyond her. Some of these disconnections are due to her age and the fact that much of the world is opening up to her for thefirst time. At the same time, she describes the pleasure she derives from watching others “in crucial situations,” those moments when she can be a spectator to life’s impactful events without participating. She is also often lonely.
Prompt—
Does Esther have the agency to change this lack of connection? How much of her detachment is due to her age, her values being discordant with those around her, or something else entirely?
Increasingly Disillusioned
Esther’s writing teacher describes a story she writes as factitious, artificial, not genuine, but Esther seems more clear-eyed than most. She understands the fabricated and deceitful nature of societal expectations, whether it be the superficial worries of her magazine cohort or the idea that one must be pure and virginal to be married. She finds life tedious, grows increasingly disillusioned, and refuses to acquiesce, and this lack of surrender is much of what has secured this novel’s place as afeminist classic. "I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like thecolored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket,” Esther says.
Prompt—
How much of Esther’s struggles are due to her desires clashing with the expectations placed upon her? How are her assertions of her self-worth taken as artificial? Or naive?
Madness
Mental illness pervades The Bell Jar with the narrative tightly wound around the contours of Esther’s growing depression. Shame and isolation emerge from this experience as she attempts to “improve,” particularly as she undergoes inadequate treatments like shock therapy and is detained in various asylums. She describes her condition at one point as “madness”–as does the cover of the 1972 paperback edition–a term no longer in use but that refers to a severe, intense mental state.
Prompt—
What fears does Esther share about her condition? How has the stigma of mental illness changed since 1963? How has it not?
Unraveling
As Esther's summer progresses, and she recounts incidents from her past in poignant flashbacks, her grip on sanity starts to unravel, she begins to act "oddly," and she feels more and more trapped by her personal “bell jar.” This is where Plath's skills as a poet (someone who uses language precicely) are most vivid: her descriptions are unusual, unsettling, and perfect; the whole novel has a languid, almost sluggish atmosphere punctuated by sudden spirals of panic, all of which mirror Esther’s mental state.
Prompt—
We already know Esther is fed up when her mental health begins to decline. Did readers follow Esther's descent into madness as a rational or inevitable occurrence? Does Esther want understanding? Might Esther be an unreliable narrator?
Recognition
After Esther tries to commit suicide and is readying to transfer to an asylum, she looks in a mirror and doesn’t recognize the swollen, bruised features and chopped hair of the person staring back at her. This lack of recognition is a powerful metaphor for her need to discover more of herself, and the novel brings readers through that process as Esther slowly establishes her self-worth and better understands her place in the world.
Prompt—
As she steps into the room in the last line of the novel, has Esther found herself? How has her recognition of herself shifted since the beginning?