THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath convincingly portrays a woman, Esther Greenwood, who is slipping into madness. Plath exposes Esther’s fragile grip on her life in an understated way, with unique descriptions and metaphors, so that the reader is lulled into Esther’s insanity with her. Plath’s masterful characterization allows Esther to develop three dimensionally for the reader, while remaining sympathetic.

From the beginning, Plath establishes Esther’s character as a normal college student like her friends, “There were twelve of us at the hotel. We had all won a fashion magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs…” (p. 3), but at the same time different, with something dark and destructive running inside her, “… I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.” (p. 1).

We see Esther as a simple girl, brought up with little money, out of her element among all the glitz and glamour of the New York fashion industry, because Plath shows the reader this through Esther’s experiences and reactions: “The city had faded my tan, though…. Ordinarily, I would have been nervous about my dress and my odd color…” (p. 8), “My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died, and secretly she hated it…” (p. 39), “Before I came to New York I’d never eaten out in a proper restaurant.” (p. 24).

As the story develops, Esther is on a quest for connection with other people, through her search for a lover and friends, but remains somehow isolated within herself, so that even the most tenuous connection with another person seems bigger than it is. Plath illustrates this uniquely when Esther and Hilda discuss the impending electrocution of the Rosenbergs: “‘Yes!’ Hilda said, and at last I felt I had touched a human string in the cat’s cradle of her heart.” The connection is short lived, when Esther is disappointed by Hilda, as she is by most of her relationships.

The reader begins to experience the unraveling of Esther’s sanity when she goes to the roof of the Amazon hotel, standing on a chair at the edge of the wall. It is the specific details of the scene and Esther’s actions that pull the reader into the scene so that s/he fears for Esther’s life – the “cornflower-sprigged bathrobe,” the “stiff breeze,” the “city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.” (p. 111). When Esther releases her clothes into the wind the reader is relieved that she has not killed herself, while simultaneously feeling anxious that she’s not well, and in fact this is the beginning of Esther’s rapid descent. Plath show’s the reader Esther’s state of mind when Esther says of herself “The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian.” (p. 112).

Esther’s depression is beautifully illustrated with “I saw the years of my life spaced along the road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three … nineteen poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.” (p. 123). Using the unique metaphor of an ordinary line of telephone poles, Plath clearly shows Esther’s inability to imagine her own future.

Plath continues to characterize Esther’s decline through a series of events or situations. Esther is unable to write, she stops sleeping, stops showering, and doesn’t change her clothes. These actions are believable because Plath has already set up Esther’s fragile state and slowly deteriorating grasp on reality.

The reader begins to fear for Esther’s life as she begins an obsession with methods of suicide, fantasizing about Japanese disemboweling, “It must take a lot of courage to die like that. My trouble was I hated the sight of blood.” (p. 138). Esther practices and plans for cutting herself, “Then I thought maybe I ought to spill a little blood for practice…” (p. 148), considers drowning in the ocean, attempts to hang herself, and then attempts to drown herself.

Plath illustrates Esther’s state of mind with a look at the items in her pocketbook, “… paper scraps and the compact and the peanut shells and the dimes and nickels and the blue jiffy box containing nineteen Gillette blades…” (p. 146), ordinary items although not necessarily found in pocketbooks, with the most detailed description for the razor blades. And when Esther is remembering a play that a friend had told her about, “The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.” (p. 155).

After Esther makes an earnest attempt to kill herself, by taking sleeping pills and hiding in a crawl space under the house, Plath does not let the reader easily off the hook. Esther is admitted to a series of asylums and the reader watches uncomfortably as Esther slowly improves, but always with the feeling that Esther may not ever recover. “I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome…” (p. 182).

When her friend Joan shows Esther the newspaper clippings of her disappearance, attempted suicide, and rescue, Esther is disassociated from it, distanced, referring to “this girl” (p. 198) rather than herself. In this very subtle way, Plath shows the reader that Esther is still not fully aware of or connected to her own situation, actions, and consequences.

Even as Esther recovers, the reader is not permitted to get comfortable with the recovery or fully believe it. “I decided to practice my new, normal personality on this man …” (p. 226). The reader knows that Esther is pretending and practicing to behave in a socially normal way, though she may have not changed or recovered to that degree. When her mother says that they will forget the incident like a bad dream, Esther thinks “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.” (p. 237).

Sylvia Plath, in The Bell Jar, uses subtlety through description, simile, and metaphor, to develop the character of Esther Greenwood and show the reader her illness. In doing so, Plath establishes Esther as a sympathetic character that the reader can connect to and route for. The reader is not turned off by Esther’s struggles, though s/he is made uncomfortable in places. This approach is important because it would be easy for the reader to lose patience with Esther for not taking charge and improving her situation, and lose concern for her spiraling deterioration.

I am fascinated by Plath’s ability to create a character that could easily be less than sympathetic in a way that keeps the reader attached to both the character and her story. I am also intrigued with her ability to show the character’s madness through subtle details, description, and metaphor, without over writing or directly telling the reader what the character’s mental state is. This is an aspect of The Bell Jar and Plath’s writing that I would very much like to accomplish in my own writing. I would like to go back through my story and look for places where the ordinary can be described in new and different ways that develop the characters.

(Page numbers based on Harper Perennial, 2005, paperback edition)