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.

What Makes a Classic a Classic?

By: Athena Meno

It is universally known that a story with enough tenacity, gusto, and with enough gumption to withstand the test of time is thereby called a classic.

But my question is: What makes a classic a classic? Is a classic found in the tragic death of two star- crossed lovers who died because of their family differences? Is it found in the life of a boy, who flies with the clouds at his heels, and at times risks his life to fool a notorious pirate with a hook? Or is a classic found in an attic where a girl, no older than her teens, hides away in order to avoid the harmful fate of a death camp? Certainly that is how those classics became such, but does it stand the same for all?

Can the struggles, of love, youth, and survival really be the hidden messages all writers strive for in order to truly obtain, for their stories, the title “Classic.”

Although I must say that the stories mentioned (which are: Romeo & Juliet, Peter Pan, and The Diary of Anne Frank) are in fact magnificent classic tales, I do believe that what makes their stories and all other classics is far beyond the story alone, but the characters and the message within the story that make it perpetual.

I believe what captures the wide-spread high acclaim of the stories we call classics, is how it mirrors mankind by portraying humans at their best and their worst. Classics tell tales of the struggles of man and how far people could go to achieve what they believed was impossible, what was true, and what was right. It gives us an idea of the lifestyle that people had to live through at a certain time frame, with or without complaint and how they adapted to a situation that was presented to them. It tells us tales of dreams, wishes, memories, hopes, and fears that people go through almost every day.

Classics also have a wide-spread amount of various characters, with their own stories to tell, and can practically walk and talk all on their own. Characters such as the ones described, stay with readers long after they had finished those last few pages. And who truly live on; not only in pages and texts, but in the life and mind of those select few who cared to listen to their tale.

That is what truly makes a classic a classic; a story with characters, which live beyond their pages, and message that, is worthwhile for all ages to come. It is in this that writers try to recapture what so many knew before them so that they too can be a writer of a classic.