" Esther Greenwood, a college student from Massachusetts, travels to New York to work on a magazine for a month as part of a writing competition she won. She is thrown into a world of excitement, luxury, anxiety, and self-doubt as she attempts to redefine herself outside the context of her previous academic achievement, and fails. Insecure about her looks and her modest socioeconomic background, Esther tries to make sense of her new experiences, her family, her friends, and the men she encounters, but she is plagued by feelings of inadequacy and inertia. She thinks back to the men she has dated—in particular, Buddy Willard, who is in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, and wants her to marry him once he is healthy again. Buddy's confession of having slept with a waitress makes her feel cheated and deceived, and she sets out to lose her own virginity as though in pursuit of the answer to an important mystery.
Upon returning home to the Boston suburbs, Esther finds she cannot bring herself to sleep, eat, or wash her hair. She seeks help from a psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon, who prescribes electric shock therapy. After the treatment, still mentally unstable and newly distrustful of the medical profession, Esther tries to kill herself by ingesting sleeping pills. She wakes up in a hospital, where she is told she is very lucky to have survived with no permanent physical injury. She is sent to a city hospital's psychological ward until her college sponsor, Philomena Guinea, offers to pay for her to stay in a private hospital.
There, Esther comes to trust her new psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan, and begins to improve. At the same time, she is still struggling to define herself outside her family and the company of men. By the end of the novel, she is ready to leave the mental hospital, but with the knowledge that she can never fully recover from the feelings which led to her breakdown in the first place.
The Bell Jar is often described as the story of a young woman's struggle to survive in a society which does not take her talents or ambitions seriously. It is also, however, an autobiographical account of mental illness. To presume that Esther is driven to attempt suicide by society's misunderstanding of her is, perhaps, to discount the real mental trauma caused by her condition. By the middle of the book, it is clear that Esther is suffering from more than everyday depression: she is unable to sleep, eat, or read, and her behavior becomes erratic and irrational.
Yet, The Bell Jar is also not merely a medical history. Through Esther, Plath draws together several different strands of both personal and collective history: The Bell Jar is: a story of mental illness; a story of a woman struggling to be independent; a story of sexual discovery; and a story of 1950's America.
The Bell Jar was published near the end of Plath's life, and thus cannot escape the poignancy of her self-inflicted death. At no point in the novel does Esther look back with the detachment of one who has fully recovered from the incidents she is describing. Her first-person narrative inevitably draws the reader in to her slowly decaying thought processes, even while the distance of the past tense assures us of her awareness that all was not right. As Esther steps into her exit interview at the end of the novel we feel both her airy sensation of being carried out of a nightmare, and her looming anxiety that it might, at any moment, begin again.
"(http://www.sparknotes.com/guides/belljar/)
|