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Sylvia Plath: Escaping the Bell Jar

© Pamela St. Clair

The night before she is to leave New York to return home, Esther's personality begins to unravel. The first "skin" she sheds is her wardrobe, which she flings from her hotel room. When her mother picks her up from the train station, Esther learns that she has not been chosen for a summer writing program she had applied to, and the bell jar begins its descent. After her first electro-shock session, at the hands of the callous Dr. Gordon, Esther finds herself in the car ride home wedged between her mother and Dodo Conway, a young mother from Esther's neighborhood. Between these two symbols of maternity and suburbia, Esther bleakly envisions a limited future of servile domesticity, and the bell jar clanks down for good. Esther attempts suicide, trying to overdose on sleeping pills. Her wealthy college benefactress, Philomenea Guinea, volunteers to pick up the tab at a pricey private hospital, as long as there is no "boy in the case." At the hospital, Esther slowly re-emerges under the supervision of a female doctor, who permits Esther to hate her mother, to refuse visitors and to buy birth control. She permits Esther freedom and air to breathe, air not soured from stewing within the bell jar.

The novel is told from Esther's point of view, and it is her sarcastic tone that gives the novel an edgy sharpness and a dark humor that keeps it from dissolving into a self-pitying mantra. For example, after awaking at the hospital from her suicide attempt, Esther cajoles a nurse into giving her a mirror. Upon realizing that the bruised and swollen face with the shorn head is her own, Esther drops the mirror, which crashes to the ground. Esther is not nice. She delights in overhearing the young nurse being castigated and then she comments, "I listened with mild interest. Anybody could drop a mirror. I didn't see why they should get so stirred up."

With a poet's attention to details and metaphors, evident from the very beginning with the Rosenbergs' electrocution mirroring Esther's shock therapy, Plath weaves a smart story of survival. Or does she? In her famous poem "Lady Lazarus," written near the end of her life, Plath alludes to her suicide attempt:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

The poem ends on a note of triumph: "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." In The Bell Jar, Esther is not so confident. In the novel's closing scene, she walks to her exit interview at the private hospital, not so much an active agent as a puppet guided "by a magical thread." The heart that brags "I am, I am, I am" is not bragging very loudly. Before this interview, Esther voices her uncertainties: "How did I know that someday-at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere-the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" And hauntingly, in real life, it does. The Bell Jar was published in January 1963. A month later, on February 11th, Plath gassed herself in London.