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Sylvia Plath: Escaping the Bell Jar

© Pamela St. Clair

Long before Elizabeth Wurtzel made depression a hip 90's affliction, Sylvia Plath drew upon personal history to develop the character of Esther Greenwood, a talented young woman who suffers a nervous breakdown and struggles to climb out of the dark abyss. The novel opens with the electrocution of the Rosenbergs, which foreshadows Esther's electro-shock therapy:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers-goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

And indeed, it will be the worse thing in the world. After her first disastrous shock session, she wonders "what terrible thing it was that I had done." With electro-shock therapy, Esther's first attempt to escape her dark abyss is as hellish as is her tumble in.

First published in England in 1963, The Bell Jar traces Esther's dark inner journey. Her years of academic success culminate in her winning a coveted position as a guest editor at a fashion magazine in New York, as Plath herself did. In the city, small-town Esther feels out of her element and quite alone, as she realizes that all of the prizes she accumulated at college are meaningless outside of the ivy-covered walls. She feels as if she is now on the outside looking in at the "slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue." Problem is, her vision is doubly clouded, first by the glare from those colossal windows, mocking her with warped reflections of dreams she is convinced elude her, and second, by the surrounding glass walls of the bell jar closing in around her.

As a bright, unmarried woman of the 1950's, Esther is a) expected to be a virgin; b) destined for a marriage where husband is first, wife second; c) if destined for a career at all, destined for one as secretary; d) all of the above. These pressures, and others, overwhelm Esther. At college, she feels the stigma of being a "scholarship girl." She is angry at an ex-boyfriend whom she unmasks as a virgin imposter. Culture sanctions his sexual experience, whereas it would damn Esther's were she to have any. She is angry at her mother for insisting that Esther learn shorthand, for that secretarial career Esther disdains. These personal resentments are also cultural ones.

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