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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Introduction

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Otto Plath, a college professor who had immigrated from Germany, and Aurelia Schober, who taught secretarial studies at Boston University. Since her 1963 suicide at age 30, Sylvia Plath's already fine reputation has burgeoned. It rests on her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), the extraordinary poetry in Colossus (1960), and her posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. Her poems are a blend of brilliant, imaginative, sometimes violent metaphor and image combined with passion, anger, a concern with feminism, and a compelling need to be understood (Juhasz, pp. 112-114).

Thesis Statement

The Bell Jar recounts a young woman's search for identity, her rebellion against convention, mental collapse, and recovery.

Book Analysis

Chapters 1 - 9

The Bell Jar, first published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, is a thinly veiled autobiographical account of the inner conflict, mental breakdown, and later recovery of a female college student in the 1950s. The novel covers approximately eight months in the life of Esther Greenwood, the 19-year-old narrator, and the plot is divided into three parts. In the first part, Esther embarks on a one-month residence in New York City as a guest editor for the college issue of a fashion magazine. Once in the city, she recalls key incidents from the past, exhibiting her emotional and mental disintegration as the recollections becomes more real and meaning-filled to her than incidents in her daily life. Her unsatisfactory relationships with men dominate her thoughts, and the reader learns of her disappointing date with Constantin, who makes no attempt to seduce her; the brutal and woman-hating Marco, who beats her up; and her conventional and ordinary college boyfriend Buddy Willard, who wants marriage and a traditional life. At the end of the first part, her last night in New York, Esther throws all her clothes off the hotel roof in a mock ceremony that reveals her disorientation (Plath, pp. 214-217).

Esther's college, Jay Cee, and Ladies' Day all represent female environments that ought to have provided Esther with the language and identity she seeks. But each has abnegated authority, either by allowing male language to infect and dominate female expression or by giving up on expression altogether. Each, therefore, contributes to the ultimately self-annihilating distortion of Esther's basic instincts, rendering them voiceless cries of help.

Jay Cee's culpability is instructive. As a woman, Jay Cee represents the potential for female discourse. Her office is filled with "potted plants, shelf after shelf of them, springing up at her back like a tropical garden". Jay Cee might well speak the botanical language. But Jay Cee abbreviates her identity, her initials substituting for a name. With her "brutal promptitude" and shrunken eclipse of language ("Jay Cee Here"), she speaks a man's language and represents a man's aesthetic. Jay Cee represents the path that many women, including women writers, have chosen. Writes Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own, "The ...