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The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Themes: self, mental health, women, success, place, cityscapes, sentiment vs cynical, societal
expectations, Postwar/Cold War era, advertising/media, narrative voice, money/economics
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She and Buddy couldn’t understand why I’d chosen to go
to New York City instead
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Buddy had an affair with a waitress at the
Cape
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Willard, the perfect 1950s housewife, why Esther might choose career and opportunity over a
man
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‘My face in [the mirror] looked like a ball of dentist’s mercury’- later links to the mercury in the
institution, the cracking-up of Esther
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She has
cleansed herself of all of the expectations upon her
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Submerging self- almost like hiding
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‘I made a decision about Doreen that night
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[…] It was Betsy I resembled at heart
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She is trying to conform to societal expectations after being associated with drunken Doreen by
the cleaning lady, who reminds her of her grandmother, another feminine role model in Esther’s
life
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I don’t count Howard
Johnson’s, where I only had French Fries and cheeseburgers and vanilla frappés with people like
Buddy Willard
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Eating out is a sign, perhaps, of her
being a career woman, a sign of independence
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That it doesn’t count for Esther shows how
little a role as a housewife would nourish her
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She would have murmured some fine, scalding remark about Hilda’s miraculous
fur piece to cheer me up
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And it’s Doreen who gives her the avocados
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‘After Doreen left, I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more’- she
comes to New York and sees examples of modern women, strong and career-oriented women, she
si told contradictory things about femininity and led in contradictory directions by Doreen and
Besty, and so she can’t do what she should because she doesn’t know what she should do
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‘All the time she talked to me, I saw Mr Manzi standing on thin air in back of Jay Cee’s head, like
something conjured up out of a hat, holding his little wooden ball and the test-tube that billowed a
great cloud of yellow smoke the day before Easter vacation and smelt of rotten eggs and made all
te girls and Mr Manzi laugh’- eggs, the other girls are doing chemistry as they should, feminine
expectation
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‘It starred a nice blonde girl […] and a sexy black haired girl’- you can’t be sexy and nice,
dichotomy with women- virgin whore, career and family
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mags
like Ladies Day teaching them how
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When someone cares for her and brings her nourishment she
automatically assumes it is Betsy because Betsy is a nice girl and Doreen is promiscuous- virgin
whore dichotomy- Esther cannot affiliate the two
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I thought it was a lovely story, especially the part abut the fig-tree in winter under the snow and
then the fig tree in spring with all the green fruit’ - fig tree goes through seasons, can have multiple
appearances, do multiple things, varying states of fertility- Esther likes this perhaps because she
envies this and wants to be as versatile as the tree
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’ And he looked so proud of having
thought of this that I just stared at his blond hair and his blue eyes and his white teeth […] and said
‘I guess so
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’ - weak, submissive woman, agreeing with what he says even though it
goes against her entirely, a subjugation of the self
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Thinks everything Buddy tells her is true- he’s perfect all American male in so many ways, she
idolises him
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He’s a nice, clean boy,
a ‘model person’ and even his name is quintessentially American
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In a way, Buddy also represents an
opportunity for Esther, much as New York does, only a very different kind- the chance to marry well
etc
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’ - Esther thinks of Buddy as impure
now, much as a man might a woman, only later learns fo the double standard that exist for men
and women- at hr heart she believes in equality and isn’t prejudiced but society makes her so- she
proves things shouldn’t be gendered, she can do what a man can
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‘I thought the TB must be a punishment for living the kind of double life Buddy lived […] I simply
told everyone that Buddy had TB and we were practically engaged, and when I stayed in on
Saturday nights they were extremely kind to me because they thought I was so brave, working the
way I did just to hide a broken heart’- very ironic- she thinks Buddy is being punished for lying, yet
lies herself, despite thinking that he’s so awful
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‘I was only purely happy until I was nine years old’ - when she had a complete sense of self, before
feminine expectations fell upon her
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‘My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major
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[…] She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming
young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter
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I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters
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‘I didn’t know shorthand […] I was a terrible dancer
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[…] I couldn’t ride a
horse or ski […] I couldn’t speak German or read Hebrew or write Chinese
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‘I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story
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One fig was a husband and a
happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant
professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa
and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other
lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew
champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out
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I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one
meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go
black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet
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- her problem, perhaps, is not that she is
incapable but that she is too capable, she has the potential to go in all different directions and thus
experiences a divided sense of self
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She is a not, as she believes, ‘a racehorse in a world without
race tracks’, but rather a race horse in a world with many, attractive race tracks
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Figs- virility, fertility, her future obviously
promising and full
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/
protagonist herself, Esther wants to outdo everyone else
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Eric’s whore […] was a fat, middle-aged woman with dyed red
hair and suspiciously thick lips and rat coloured skin […] he had her under a fly-spotted twenty-five
watt bulb
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‘In Defence of Chastity’ article - women cant handle sex emotionally, men might but women must
not have sex before marriage, men want to be the ones to teach women about sex, cant respect
an unmarried woman they have sex with- unmarried sex = no respect for women
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‘I never wanted to get married
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I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like
the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket
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http://www
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org/stable/40267609
Kate A
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S
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’
‘Esther’s solipsism’ (solipsism = the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist)
Anything outside of one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known
and might not exist outside the mind)
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‘its narrative has […] much to say about American women’s relationship to national narratives that
place, displace, and replace women in an international, geo-political world order’
‘if Esther is, as she constantly reminds us, a master of deception, might it not be important to read
against her word?’
‘Understanding the context of both the political and the sexual is crucial and deserving of
recapitulation
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’
‘Esther’s search for selfhood through the dramatically opposed lives of poetry and motherhood
offers us a character who throws herself against the limited options available to her like a furious
pinball, aiming for and then bouncing away form the discrete targets of female identity
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’
‘Readers are left to wonder about that space between the novel’s end and the writing of there
narrative from that location of health and recovery
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S
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‘Like the offhand comment that names it, “the baby” is brought in like a potted plant and then left
unattended’
‘dubious maternal fulfilment’- do we feel disappointed?
Esther’s electric shock treatment can be compared with Ethel Rosenberg’s death by electrocution
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S
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’
Russian UN girl ‘defies American femininity, rebuking makeup and wearing a dull, outré double
breasted suit
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Double-breasted suit a link to ‘the “double burden” of domestic and workplace demands’
‘the book is clear about Esther’s choice in the Cold War asylum: either you choose a million selves
or one whole self’ Baldwin identifies a ‘fake dichotomy between the fractured and the whole’ in the book
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jstor
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Smith
‘Consistently, in The Bell Jar, Plath expresses Esther’s anxiety through food moments
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’
Plath was awarded a position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine- the real life Ladies’ Day
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‘1950s consumer culture […] is not conducive to Esther’s being properly nurtured’
Laura Shapiro addresses the changes of women’s relationships with their kitchens and cooking
and the effect of development of pre-packaged and semi-retpapred foods had on women’s homes
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They
encourage women to venture outside the home but then also encourage their domesticity
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Smith argues that the good/bad girl dichotomy is, for Ester ‘often distinctly related to the way in
which women in the novel relate to or interact with their food’
Both Esther and Buddy Willard’s mother ‘are characterised by this ability [to cook]’
Esther awakened by the sound of her mother making breakfast- ‘Esther is awakened by the
sounds of proper domesticity’
‘Esther sees herself as a deviant for not being able to cook’
‘Esther believes that marriage would imprison her in the kitchen’
‘upon Esther’s arrival in New York, she not only meets women […] who defy the roles to which she
has grown accustomed, but she also sees women eating differently’- so this can be what confuses
her, her relationship to and understanding of femininity is confused and thus her relation to herself
in confused, and so a personal crisis is sparked
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Compliments Jay Cee’s intelligence but calls her ‘plugugly’, flattered by Doreen’s attentions but seeks dissociation- wants cleaning lady to know she has
‘nothing to do with Doreen’ and ‘It was Betsy [she] resembled at heart’
‘Though Esther may be attracted by a version of the feminine that differs from Betsy’s goodhearted, honest, and pure nature, ultimately she finds herself conflicted, wishing to conform to
society’s expectations of her
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‘She delights in the food […] because the female labor associated with food is absent in these
meals
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’
Esther worries about the way people perceive her eating her chicken and caviar, and when she
becomes sick her main worry is ‘Is everybody else sick, too?’- she also feels bonded to Betsy after
they have both thrown up, perhaps because they are interacting with food in the same way, and

thus exhibiting same feminine behaviour, in doing the same thing as good-hearted, acceptable
Betsy she finds comfort
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’- telling that she is given them by Doreen- ‘Everything she said
was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones’
‘Not even in the metal institution, a place of recovery, can she leave Vogue and its versions of
normalcy behind’
In mental institution for Esther receiving food means she is recovering and not different to other
girls of her age- only those not having shock therapy receive breakfast
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Focuses on her clothing in exit exam from mental institution
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Nancy Walker asserted that post-war America was never ‘prescribed and stable’
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buddy high energy not lazy
makes her an ashtray though he knows she doesn’t smolke- trying to make her into
someone she's not doesn't know her at all expects her to be pleased anyway
buddy does try to change for esther but she wont have it- sees it as phony
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‘It doesn’t take two to dance, it only takes one’- only matters about the man, she was to pretend
she’s ‘drowning’
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Esther would have an easier time if she- and she
could- just let men do this in life, but would be unhappy
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I want to go home’- like a child, she looks to others to tell her what to do, needs
another model of femininity even though she has such potential herself
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Yet Buddy is met with
generally more understanding, perhaps
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Claims she wants
to do it, that her case is ‘incurable’ but doesn’t really want to, she is divided on this also
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Who she truly is and shows herself to eb
‘‘I can’t eat
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’- food, nutrition, she
is starting to get better and give herself what she needs
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Cares less about other people’s names etc- Mrs Tomolillo, Dr Syphillis, Dr Pancreas- she cares
less about identifying other people and more about herself
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[…] I dished myself out a helping of green
string beans and turned to pass the tureen to the enormous red-headed woman at my right
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‘smiled at the silver globe cupped in my palm
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I smiled and smiled at the small silver ball
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‘It is Esther’s writing
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’ - this is the centre of her crisis
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‘This woman was a cross between my mother and Myrna Loy’- dr
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pebbles- always in conjunction with esther’s contemplation of the self
‘I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against
what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded’ other people confused by Esther’s defiance now, other people confused by their expectations
‘The magazine photograph showed a girl in a strapless evening dress of fuzzy white stuff, grinning
fit to split, with a whole lot of boys bending in around her
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Joan’s quite
mistaken, it’s somebody else’’ - photo taken earlier in the novel, we know it is Esther
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‘The nurse would be mistaking me for somebody else
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Somebody in
Belsize must be having shock treatments, unknown to me, and the nurse had, quite
understandably, confused me with her
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‘Dr Nolan took out a white handkerchief and wiped my face
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My blanket tangled around my
feet, so I let it drop, but Dr Nolan didn’t seem to notice’- blanket = security, wraps it round her when
talking to snobbish nurse and when she is hiding from shock treatments, her letting it fall is a
statement of trust, she is letting Dr Nolan guide her
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‘it seemed to be it would be a step, placing him, renouncing him, in spite of the fact that I had
nobody’- coming to terms with the fact that she is okay and doesn’t need anyone else, she is
strong enough to handle Buddy on her own
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- frees her, as threat of a baby, she says,
keeps her ‘in line’- form of control
‘Why was I so unmaternal and apart?’- this si why kids featured on the fig tree, because Esther
doesn’t wan to have children but this lack of will to have kids makes her feel ‘apart’, it makes her
feel inadequate
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- big difference from the
Elly Higgenbottom of Chicago disguise in New York
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‘I am climbing to freedom […] freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just
because of sex’ - notions of purity ultimately trap women
‘Doctor Quinn was Joan’s psychiatrist, a bright, shrewd, single lady, and I often thought that if I had
been assigned to Doctor Quinn I would still be in Caplan, or more probably, Wymark’ - thinks she
will be in Wymark because Doctor Quinn isn't that kind of woman she is too stereotypical she can’t
lead Esther she is wrong for her, she is too stereotypical a Doctor, whereas Doctor Nolan shows
Esther than a woman can be multiple things at once, without trying to be a role model to her and
mould her into her
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Constantly societal reinforcement of women’s lack of control causes Esther to lose control entirely
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‘Buddy’s khaki-jacketed shape seemed small and unrelated to me’ freed herself from Buddy, who
used to dominate her thoughts, first for good and then for bad reasons
‘You had nothing to do with us, Buddy’- Buddy’s self-absorption that this is what he should worry
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Doctor Nolan has ideas about autonomy and people being responsible for their own fates
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Soviet totalitarianism and American capitalism and
liberalism
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Often, U
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citizens developed a sense of
self and identity in relation to a Soviet other
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Frumpy and scary- unfeminine and
harsh, nothing pleasant or attractive about her- she is being constructed as an other, unfeeling,
almost villainous
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Also Russian doubleness in that they are both European and non-European
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Esther’s things she cannot do in the novel ‘I began with cooking’
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Esther on married life ‘It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and
toast and coffee […] then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big
dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up’- food and sense of obligation
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The most important thing to console her, rather than getting better or having friends or a career, is
marriage
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jstor
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Perloff
Irving Howe: ‘what illumination- moral, psychological, social- can be provided of […] the general
human condition by a writer so deeply rooted in the extremity of her plight?’ - basically accuses
Plath of being too self-absorbed
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‘The Bell Jar has become for the young of the early seventies what Catcher in the Rye was to their
counterparts of the fifties: the archetypal novel that mirrors, in however distorted a form, their own
personal experience, their sense of what Irving Howe calls “the general human condition”
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Listens to the words of Elly Higgenbottom, sees her face as the face of an Asian, often
doesn’t recognise herself or doesn’t wish to, imagining herself as someone else
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Sweet and submissive and agrees with the views of Buddy
verbally even if she doesn’t genuinely
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‘the old Esther must die before she can be reborn as a human being’- she must shed her masks
and personas, be honest and true to herself
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‘Sylvia Plath knows that the novelist’s job is not to solve problems but to diagnose them correctly’
‘Esther quickly discovers that each of these women is, despite her particular gift or talent,
essentially a flawed human being
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And there is pressure upon women to be perfect, a woman’s flaws are pointed out
and seen in a way that men’s are not- with men, it is accepted
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There are so many guidelines, so many
things that women are encouraged to be, that it is impossible not to fall short somewhere along the
line
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‘Sylvia Plath forces us to get all the usual clichés about incipient motherhood and to take a good
hard look at the birth process itself’

Prior to New York Esther has been ‘running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and
another’- it is then New York women, the new kinds of femininity she encounters, which confuse
her
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Esther is not steering herself because she does not know what she wants, and in order to steer
one must know where one is going
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‘The arrangement of incidents implies that all illness is to be viewed as part of the same spectrum:
disease, whether mental or physical, is an index to the human inability to cope with an unlovable
situation’
‘At the end of The Bell Jar, her external situation has not appreciably changed […] but now she can
view that situation differently’
‘Dr
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[…] Dr
...
’
Or is it just that she’s everything and she doesn’t want to be her, proving that to be all things is not
actually that desirable? Who wants to pick all the figs?
If figs are phallic perhaps that is a patriarchal symbol of control over women, for patriarchal society
is forcing them to make this choice
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Esther “I hated the idea of serving men in any way
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’
Does Esther send Irwin the bill?
http://www
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org/stable/42772124
Yöko Sakane detects ‘a hatred of femininity’ in Plath’s writing
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Esther has a ‘sense of alienation as she holds herself against society and her possible future
goals’
Esther always finds flaws in the women
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Personal/gender containment within the containment of the cold war
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clas
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edu/ssmith/separativeself
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S
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If she chooses not to have sex again, she is still not virginal
however if she chooses to have sex again there is no concern over losing her virginal status
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‘It is easier to live through someone else than to become completely yourself’ (Betty Friedan)
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Explore
the ways any American fiction AND/OR life-writing addresses and engages with such qeustions

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