The Bell Jar: Why a Golden Girl Could Not Go On

What is a bell jar?

Anyone who has done a biology or chemistry practical will remember the object: a glass dome shaped like an upturned bell, sealed tight around whatever sits inside. It is completely transparent, so you can still see out, and everything looks normal. But it is also completely sealed, so you can never take a breath of genuinely free air.

The feeling is not unfamiliar. Everyone has been low — the world going on as usual, you apparently doing fine, and yet something invisible and intangible holding you in place. You suffocate, you despair, and you cannot move.

The Bell Jar is about exactly that state. Its author was the American poet Sylvia Plath.

Plath was young, clever, and called a prodigy almost from childhood: a place at a prestigious university, a scholarship, poems, fiction, early attention from the literary world. That is more or less the CV of her heroine, Esther Greenwood. The book is a roman à clef: the same diligence, the same excellent grades, the same escape from a small town, the same prize that sent her to New York to work at a fashion magazine — and the same collapse afterwards.

Plath’s poems are cold and bright, and fiercely conscious of what it means to be a woman. She thought hard about anger, depression and death, and The Bell Jar takes the emotions that detonate in the poems and turns them into a single continuous story.

So this is not simply the tragedy of a brilliant woman poet, and not simply a novel about depression. Through one girl’s breakdown it asks a sharp question of the society around her: why should a girl so intelligent, so hard-working, so accomplished arrive at the conclusion that life holds no hope? Why, when she had done everything she was told to do, was she still swallowed by that invisible jar?

1953, New York: A Beautiful Con

The story opens in a blinding, head-spinning summer.

Esther has won a writing competition, and the prize is a month at a well-known fashion magazine in New York. The premise sounds like the opening of a Cinderella story: a group of pretty, articulate college girls installed in a luxury hotel, taken to banquets, fashion shows, luncheons and parties, every face carefully made up, every girl looking like a favourite of fortune.

But Plath is not writing a pink soap opera. She is writing a black comedy about a small-town high achiever who falls headlong into the New York fashion world.

The opening is funny. Those society dinners read today like field notes on the strange, expensive food of the rich. Esther’s attitude to a refined banquet is disarmingly simple: I am here, so I might as well get my money’s worth — and the magazine is paying. She orders the expensive, the rare, and eats enormously. Any small-town kid let loose on capitalism’s free lunch would grin in recognition.

The city girls, by contrast, are all on a permanent diet: a few leaves of salad eaten elegantly, a little grapefruit juice sipped with restraint. They are not eating a meal; they are performing taste.

Esther soon arrives at the one truth you need for a high-end dinner table: it does not matter whether you know the rules. What matters is that you look as if you do.

She notices that the most admired people in fashion and literary circles are often the least observant of the rules. The editor takes her to meet a celebrated male poet. He is rumpled, and at dinner he reaches into the salad bowl with his bare hand and stuffs leaves into his mouth, as gross as someone stealing leftovers in a kitchen. Nobody is embarrassed for him, because he does it with total assurance, holding forth the while about nature, art and the life of the spirit — and everyone immediately decides that he is wonderfully original, wonderfully talented.

That is the unwritten law of the milieu: a young woman must monitor her table manners, her posture, her tone, her tact at every moment; a famous man may eat leaves like a caveman and be praised for style.

Food is equally absurd. Plath describes a food shoot at the magazine: apple pie with ice cream. The difficulty is not the pie but the ice cream, which melts the moment the lights come on, so a toothpick is hidden behind it to hold the shape, or several portions are prepared and swapped in as each one collapses. The beautiful food is not there to be eaten. It exists to be photographed, to manufacture desire rather than to nourish a body.

The classic set piece is the caviar banquet. Esther’s obsession is almost scholarly. She first surveys the bowl nearest her: excellent — the girl opposite cannot reach it, and a small mountain of marzipan stands in the way. This bowl is mine. Then she eyes a second bowl and calculates how to move it closer before anyone else can, since the girl beside it will be too polite to snatch it back.

The feast has no happy ending. The elegant banquet turns into a collective bout of food poisoning, and the culprit is not the caviar but a very refined avocado and crab salad — avocado halved, stone removed, filled with crab and mayonnaise. It sounds like luxury; the girls are back at the hotel within hours, vomiting in turn, almost all of them down.

These comic passages all say the same thing. New York’s fashion world appears to encourage young women to become more polished, more accomplished; in fact it trains them to perform, to diet, to socialise, to fit themselves into the role of a decorative vase.

Esther wants to eat, to look, to reach out and take hold of these lovely things. Slowly she discovers that the whole stage smells of hypocrisy and boredom.

The Fifties: Elegance as a Cage

Esther is the classic small-town top student. Her problem is that she is living in 1950s America.

It was a deeply conservative time for women. Women’s lives looked genuinely beautiful: cinched waists, high heels, hair salons, posture classes, beauty treatments, dieting — everything glowing with retro elegance. But the elegance was also a constraint, because its central demand was this: a woman must be slender, soft and feminine in order to be worth loving.

The fifties were a period of retreat for feminism. During the war, with men away and labour scarce, married women had been pushed into the workforce, and women’s social standing had risen with them. When the men came back and the economy boomed, society did not welcome women into public life; it used domestic virtue and consumerism to push them home again.

You could shop, beautify yourself, dress, attend salons and tea parties — but the jobs were quietly disappearing. The fashion of the decade looked like an invitation to enjoy life. It was in fact a discipline, more exquisitely packaged and more decorative than before.

The magazine where Esther interns is called Ladies’ Day. Hair salons, cocktail parties, food columns, fashion shows: all of it looks like urban cultural life, and all of it is teaching women how to be better women.

The abundance is deceptive. Women appear to be the consumers, the magazine’s target readers, the centre of the banquet; they remain the object of the gaze, the thing shaped, the thing disciplined. They can buy a great deal, but the professions open to them are narrow. They can live beautifully, and that beauty is often only a more suffocating form of restraint.

Jay Cee: A Standard Workplace Script

For Esther, New York begins as a gift from the sky. Her family is ordinary; she has studied conscientiously for more than a decade, taken A after A, worked to make her teachers like her, won scholarships, written competition essays, and worked her way to a green light that led to New York.

She believes that if she keeps working, keeps excelling, the world will keep rewarding her.

She discovers very quickly that New York is not a school. It is a con, beautifully packaged. Its most concrete embodiment is her female boss, Jay Cee.

Jay Cee’s entrance is misleading. In a cultural industry where women struggle to gain a foothold, she looks conspicuously successful: not pretty, but extremely capable, tastefully dressed, fluent in several languages, entirely at home in the professional politics of publishing. She seems to look after Esther, and she keeps giving her manuscripts to read.

Then her nature surfaces. She says: this month is precious to you. If you work hard, if you learn everything you can, you will get somewhere. The girl who sat at your desk is now an editor at The New Yorker.

Esther takes this as encouragement, and the next sentence is a bucket of cold water: how many languages do you speak? Only a little French beyond English? That is not enough. To get into publishing you need far more than that. Hundreds of girls come to New York every year wanting to be editors. You have to be better than all of them.

This is the standard brainwashing of the workplace: you have promise, but you are not good enough yet, and therefore you must keep sacrificing yourself for this precious opportunity.

So Esther reads manuscripts for Jay Cee, runs errands, does the chores; the month is frantic, an extraction without end.

The irony is that of the twelve girls chosen by the essay competition, Jay Cee selects only Esther to exploit. Why? Because Esther is the one who genuinely works, genuinely dreams: she wants to be a poet, to write, to edit, to have a place in publishing.

What better material could there be? Jay Cee paints her a delicious picture of the future and gives her no real chance at all.

Esther finally understands: New York is not where dreams come true. However hard she works, she will never be issued a ticket to that world.

Love Cannot Catch Her Either

If there is no future in work, what about love and marriage? The answer is just as cruel.

Buddy Willard is more or less Esther’s childhood sweetheart. The two families know each other well, and both sets of parents assume the children will marry.

On the surface Buddy is a promising boy: sunny, outgoing, a good student, studying medicine, destined to become a respectable doctor. The better Esther knows him, the clearer it becomes that he is a hypocrite and a narcissist.

He is, by his own account, experienced — flirting with classmates, sleeping with a waitress at summer camp — yet in front of her he performs innocence, pretending to be wholly pure in matters of sex. Esther, of course, must remain chaste, because a girl who takes the initiative is by definition loose.

Once, showing off, he takes her to the hospital to watch a woman give birth. The delivery room is full of male doctors and male students; the woman in the middle is surrounded, screaming, and the scene is bloody and terrifying. One of Buddy’s classmates leans over and jokes in Esther’s ear that this is no sight for a woman; once you have seen it you will never want children, and at this rate the human race will die out.

It gets worse. After the blood and the screaming, Buddy takes her back to his office and asks, with perfect seriousness, whether she would like to see a man. Then he starts taking off his trousers, describing as he does so his nylon mesh underwear: cool, and his mother says it washes easily.

In that moment, staring at the naked Buddy, what enters Esther’s mind is not desire, not shame, not romance, but turkey neck and turkey gizzard.

After they break up, she meets Eric, another pompous fraud. Seeing a couple embrace in the street, he recoils in disgust: millions of years of evolution, and humans are still just animals. He himself, at prep school, went with classmates to a brothel as part of an unwritten tradition; afterwards he was dismissive: sex between a man and a woman is as boring as going to the lavatory.

He even says that if he truly loved a woman he would never sleep with her; if he had physical needs he would rather go to a prostitute than expose the woman he loved to that filth.

Eric divides women into two kinds: dirty women, with whom one has sex, and good women, whom one marries and enshrines. To him a woman is an instrument of sex or reproduction, never a whole person.

Constantin is very nearly the most gracious man Esther dates: handsome, intelligent, well brought up, decent, and a promising simultaneous interpreter. She is genuinely attracted. Then a picture appears in her head — herself as Mrs Constantin:

up at seven every morning; frying his eggs and bacon, making toast and coffee; waiting for him to leave, then, still in her pyjamas with curlers in her hair, doing the housework, the dishes, the laundry, making the beds; preparing dinner for his return; washing up again, wiping the table; collapsing exhausted into bed at the end of the day.

The picture extinguishes the attraction she has just begun to feel. Constantin has done nothing wrong; he is a decent, gentle man. The problem is that in that era, even marrying a good man meant becoming his appendage. Esther Greenwood would vanish from the world, leaving only Mrs Constantin.

This is where the real despair lies. It is not that she does not want love, or intimacy; it is that love and marriage would swallow her life whole.

Almost everyone tells her the same thing: once you are married you will not want to write poems; once you have children you will not want to write poems. In that world a woman’s talent and ambition were expected to give way to marriage and motherhood. You may write poems when you are young, dream when you are young, take a scholarship to New York; all of it is only an interlude before the wedding.

The Fig Tree: Every Choice Murders Another Self

Esther goes home in low spirits, and the real collapse begins.

New York was false, but it was lively — a feast that never stopped. Inside it you could perform along with everyone else and believe that you were a young woman with a future. At home the illusion falls away, and the questions underneath can no longer be avoided.

What is she to do? Without the New York illusion, where is her life supposed to go? She wants to write — but can writing really be a life? She does not want marriage and children — but if she does not take that road, what else can she become?

She stands under a fig tree, looking at the ripe fruit on every branch: this one is a career, this one marriage, this one writing, this one travel, love, scholarship, freedom. Every life looks good. She can have only one. Once she reaches out and picks a single fig, the rest will rot and fall to the ground.

So she cannot choose at all.

The fig tree is the novel’s most quoted image, and it names the deepest anxiety of the modern woman almost exactly: we appear to have many choices and in fact have no way out. Every choice is the murder of another self; whichever you take, you must follow it to the end.

Gradually Esther can do nothing. She cannot read, cannot write, cannot sleep at night, cannot wake by day. Reading, thinking, writing, examinations all lose their meaning. She feels hollowed out, with no future in her mind and no drive in her body.

The world is covered by a heavy, dead air, and she is shut under the transparent glass. Other people can still breathe normally; she can only suffocate slowly in her own smell.

The bell jar is not a romantic literary metaphor. It is the mental state of a woman on the edge of collapse: you can see the world, you know there is air outside, sunlight, things waiting to be done — and you are trapped, unable to breathe, to move, to escape.

Electroshock, the Hospital, and Another Kind of Discipline

Esther tries to kill herself and fails.

She is brought back, admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and given electroconvulsive treatment. It is a punishment: the doctors are cold and rough, treating her not as a person in extreme pain but as a machine that has broken down.

Even inside medical care, a woman’s pain goes ununderstood. Esther has fallen through school, family, work and love, and her mind has given way; what the medical system offers is not comfort or rescue but another form of discipline, another kind of repair.

So is her collapse a personal failure, or a wound that an entire society has inflicted on one woman?

In this male-dominated world, her family, her teachers, her boyfriend, her doctors and the male authorities of the culture industry all tell her, each in their own way, what a normal woman is and how she ought to live. You are ill because you are abnormal. Wanting to be yourself is a pathology.

Esther comes to understand that what she is really afraid of is being pushed, as a woman, into a position of utter passivity.

At the end of the novel she has not recovered, and she does not joyfully embrace life again. She has made a decision: she will go to meet the people who will determine whether she is normal again, whether she may leave the hospital, whether she may return to the world. She walks towards the door. The jar over her seems, for the moment, to have been lifted a little, and she can breathe some air.

But we know that this does not mean the problem is solved. The ending is not: it is all right now, the difficulties will pass, everything will slowly get better. The life Esther chooses is the acceptance of a painful reality, and the decision to keep walking even so.

Esther’s story tells us that a breakdown is not a sudden disaster. It is what happens to a person who has lived for a long time in a world that does not fit her, and is worn away by it. Recovery does not necessarily mean that the problem is solved and that she will be carefree from now on. Perhaps she has only learned, for the time being, to bargain for a little more air beneath the jar.

Writing: Cutting an Air Hole in the Jar

Unlike Esther, Sylvia Plath killed herself shortly after The Bell Jar was published.

It is hard for later readers not to treat the book as an uncommonly painful monologue on depression, a literary letter sent back from the edge of death.

But I do not think it is only a story that wallows in darkness and death.

What moves me is this: even at the darkest and most suffocating point of her life, Plath never lost her extraordinary clarity of observation. She did not stop feeling, and she did not stop writing. She took the pain that people are ashamed to speak of — the pressure, anger and disillusionment a woman feels in growing up, in love, in marriage and under social discipline — and set it down in exact language.

The point of The Bell Jar is not only to tell us how a young woman once broke down. It is to say that even in the most helpless moment a person can still resist silence by speaking, and win a little breathing room. Writing, in a sense, is the air hole Plath cut for herself inside the jar.

For us, the most important reminder may be this: some pain is not evidence that we are too fragile, that we have not tried hard enough, that we have not succeeded enough. It is evidence that the age we live in presses continually on the individual and demands that we play a certain ideal role.

If that is so, perhaps we can be a little less harsh with ourselves, and feel a little less shame at the question “why can’t I do better?” We can try to acknowledge our own repression, exhaustion and unhappiness, and to distinguish between the expectations that are genuinely ours and the standards that have merely been imposed on us.

The Bell Jar cannot teach us how to escape pain completely. But it reminds us of one thing: do not be in such a hurry to blame every collapse on yourself. Sometimes, admitting that the bell jar really exists — admitting that you are inside it, breathing with difficulty — may be the first step back towards your true self.