The Bell Jar Summary: Sylvia Plath's Only Novel Explained
What The Bell Jar is about
The Bell Jar is the only novel Sylvia Plath wrote. It appeared in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and Plath died by suicide a month after that first UK publication. Her name was put on the book in 1966. It did not reach American readers until 1971, in line with the wishes of her husband Ted Hughes and her mother Aurelia Plath. In the United States it became an instant bestseller. It has since been translated into more than forty languages.
The story opens in the summer of 1953. Esther Greenwood, nineteen and an undergraduate from the suburbs of Boston, has won a summer internship at a magazine called Ladies' Day in New York City. It is the kind of prize that is supposed to feel like the start of everything. Esther feels almost nothing. The clothes, the parties, the work and the city leave her flat, anxious and disoriented while the other interns seem to glide through it all.
Plath keeps the surface of these weeks oddly funny. There is a radio host called Lenny who tries to seduce Esther and her fellow intern Doreen, and a mass food poisoning at a lunch thrown by a women's culinary magazine. Underneath the comedy, Esther's internal monologue keeps circling death, violence and the narrow set of lives available to women she knows. Flashbacks fill in her relationship with Buddy, a boyfriend who considers himself her fiancé.
The novel is widely treated as a roman à clef. Esther's descent into mental illness runs close to Plath's own experience of what may have been clinical depression, with names and places changed.
The main characters
Esther Greenwood narrates. She is clever, watchful and funny on the page, and increasingly unable to connect any of that to a future she wants. She comes from a working-class family and attends college on a scholarship. Her whole sense of herself has been built on doing well academically, which leaves her with nothing to stand on once school ends.
Doreen is the other intern Esther is drawn to, sharp-tongued and adventurous. Betsy is her opposite, old-fashioned and guileless, and Esther finds she identifies with Betsy's piety even while she enjoys Doreen's company. Buddy is the boyfriend, confident about a marriage Esther has not agreed to. Philomena Guinea is a formerly successful writer of women's fiction who funds Esther's scholarship and later intervenes again. Dodo Conway is the neighbour at home with a great many children, a living example of one of the few paths on offer. Dr Gordon is the first psychiatrist Esther sees, attractive and apparently not listening. Dr Nolan is the female therapist she meets later. Joan Gilling, another patient, used to date Buddy too.
The themes
Identity is the engine. Esther has been rewarded for performance since childhood, and when the rewards stop she cannot find a self underneath. The options laid out for her are motherhood or a stereotypically female job such as stenography, and none of them fit.
Freedom runs alongside it, and Plath ties it directly to the body. Esther tells Dr Nolan that she envies the freedom men have and fears pregnancy. Being fitted with a diaphragm releases her from both that fear and the pressure to marry the wrong man to make sex permissible.
Madness is handled through the book's governing image. Esther describes her depression as being trapped under a bell jar, struggling for breath, able to see the world but sealed off from it. The treatment she receives is part of the subject: electroconvulsive therapy administered badly and then administered properly, and huge doses of insulin given to produce a reaction, a method of the period later disproven.
Class sits quietly beneath everything. Esther is in these rooms on a benefactor's money, and it is a benefactor's money again that decides the quality of care she gets.
What happens later (spoilers)
At a country club party Esther is set up with a wealthy Peruvian man, Marco, who treats her roughly and then tries to rape her. She breaks his nose. That night she throws her new clothes off the hotel roof. Back in Massachusetts she learns she has not been accepted onto a writing course, and the summer collapses. After ineffective ECT under Dr Gordon she makes several half-hearted attempts on her life, then a serious one, hiding in the cellar with her mother's pills. She is found alive. Poor treatment in several hospitals follows until Philomena Guinea pays for an elite centre, where Dr Nolan and correctly administered ECT lift the bell jar.
Why it still matters
Few novels describe depression from the inside with this much clarity and this much dry humour. The bell jar image has outlived the book's immediate context and is still used to explain the condition. The publication history, the pseudonym, the delay in America, Plath's death, all of it has kept the novel surrounded by argument about where the author ends and Esther begins. It remains one of the defining accounts of a young woman weighing a set of futures she does not want.
