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Sylvia Plath: Escaping the Bell Jar

© Pamela St. Clair

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.

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."