From Under The Bell Jar

By Sam Barnett

“I could tell we were his first crazy people.” -- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s semi autobiographical narrative of a young woman’s mental breakdown and suicide attempt, echoing the author’s own life and bleakly masquerading as fiction. Despite my expectations, the novel is not a suave, sprawling lace work of psychology. The novel isn’t grand or romantic in it’s descent into insanity.

It somehow manages to knock all of my expectations out of the ball park and exceed them, with the gut punching realism of it’s prose. The Bell Jar plays a horrific game with the reader--always too close for comfort, too bright, too loud, too crude, too honest, too relentless. The effect is brilliant.

The novel passes in the style of a tirelessly lucid dream. Livid and cagey in it’s portrayal of the subtle arrogance of perverted innocence, The Bell Jar holds it’s mocking feminist commentary on the social structure of the 1960s all under the tender pretense of sitting pretty.

The novel's narrative is filtered through the perceptive young Esther Greenwood, a ‘scholarship girl’ whose prestigious college remains unnamed (although presumably Smith College, which Plath attended in 1950 and graduated from in 1955). Esther specializes in unscrambling the structured anatomy of strait-laced academia. In other words, she is intelligent in the sense of knowing how to please, one of her main short comings.

Esther 'excels' through the school system by finding loop holes, hitting the right notes by studying just hard enough to earn herself a gold star. Through this method she's won several scholarships and a semester internship at a high end New York fashion magazine, throwing herself (and several other picturesque college girls who've also scored the internship) under the spotlight as, by everyone's expectations, the next up and coming It Girl of the intellectual socialite scene.


This is one of The Bell Jar's best executed ploys. Esther's life follows the exact patterns of the fictional cream colored bubble that is the American Dream.

Esther also struggles with the tentative long distance relationship between her and Yale student Buddy Willard. Buddy is the specimen of the golden guy, complete with a boyish masculinity and natural athletic celebrity. He hangs by a thread, a resilient parody of himself without losing contact with the painstaking regret that nails his humanity. As the novel progresses and Esther's world kaleidoscopes, Buddy appears as a mutilated shade of himself. The reader witnesses the results, with Esther's high school love, after the painted coating of idolization dries. Esther has built Buddy into a hero, categorizing him clearly. Maybe neither Esther or Buddy need to be saved.Or maybe they need to be saved from each other, from the ideals they have created.

The Bell Jar is effortlessly sly with it's dialogue. Every word spoken directly to Esther is sleek and condescending. When she is adressed in public by people she barely knows, she is nonchalantly given pet names. It leaves the reader to wonder: how much of Esther's mentality is a response to her society?

Esther constantly observes the easy uniformity of freshly drawn life. She comments in one passage while viewing patients in a waiting room hospital:

"I made out men and women, and boys and girls who must be as young as I, but there was a uniformity to their faces, as if they had lain for a long time on a shelf, out of the sunlight, under the siftings of pale, fine dust." (p.g 115)

The hospital is seen as having the same harrowing mechanics of a living doll house.

Later Esther day dreams different scenarios in which she takes her own life. In one of these passages, Esther carefully plots over dosing on her mother's pills. She counts out the time it will take her to stash away enough pills if her mother gave her one to take each night at bed time, before stumping herself:

"And in fifty nights, college would have opened, and my brother would have come back from Germany, and it would be too late." (p.g 137)

Esther plans her suicide around the start of her college and, as a scolded child, doesn't dare break the uniformity and therefore cannot imagine suicide once school, the institution, resumes. Is this even more chilling than Esther's desire to kill herself? The lovingly methodical, calculating way in which she structures death around the restlessness of registered life? Life which consistes of plotted routine and the sexism of the fairy tale ending, where Esther has no choice but to attempt breathing within the corset of the American Dream she wears. What is this world of The Bell Jar? How closely it mirrors our own.