the bell jar thesis

The Literary Insights of Sylvia Plath’s College Thesis

How the author’s undergraduate writings on doppelgängers shaped her most famous work, The Bell Jar, sometimes in troubling ways

In June 1953, Sylvia Plath was a 20-year-old summer intern at Mademoiselle , living in New York between her junior and senior years of college. She had won the magazine’s annual contest and was offered a guest editorship, along with 19 other young women. The summer was disillusioning for Plath. On one hand, she faced the expectations for professional excellence typically associated with the New York publishing world, as highlighted in works like The Devil Wears Prada and Younger. But she also navigated the complicated codes of 1950s America, the demand for a Betty Draper–esque perfection articulated in Mad Men and The Feminine Mystique. It was in New York that Plath strengthened her tendency to hide emotions other than servile happiness. Two months later, in August, an exhausted Plath attempted suicide for the first time, taking sleeping pills and crawling underneath her family’s house. These are the events upon which The Bell Jar , her only published novel, is based.

Fifty-five years after its publication, The Bell Jar continues to have a cultural hold. A second film adaptation of the story, this one directed by Kirsten Dunst and starring Dakota Fanning, is currently in preproduction. A new book of letters is coming out this fall , capturing the years when Plath wrote her novel. Early drafts of The Bell Jar were also recently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., as part of an exhibit titled “ One Life: Sylvia Plath .” Along with photos of Plath and covers of The Bell Jar , “One Life” included drafts of her poetry and prose, letters she wrote to her family and editors, and a lively collection of self-portraits. The exhibit offered a candid look at Plath in her rich and, at times, contradictory complexity. It also, through artifacts like her childhood ponytail and a letter from her therapist, satisfied the voyeurism that Plath often inspires.

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Amid such buzz, it can be tempting to get lost in the intensity of her short life, and to lapse into autobiographical analyses of The Bell Jar without also considering the literary traditions Plath sought to engage in her work. Fortunately, Plath’s undergraduate thesis, a draft of which was on display in “One Life,” provides a clear outline of these influences on her novel—and helps to illuminate how the author used cultural anxieties surrounding race and sexuality to convey her protagonist’s deeply fractured sense of self.

As a senior at Smith College, in 1955, Plath submitted her thesis on the doppelgänger—the concept of finding a mirror image, or a look-alike, in another human. The notion carries sinister connotations: In a 2014 piece on doppelgängers for The Atlantic , Alissa Wilkinson noted that “encountering your match has long been considered a harbinger of death.” Novels that participate in the doppelgänger tradition tend to illustrate the deadly struggle between protagonist and double. Just think of the creature who becomes a threat to Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, or the fluctuation between Robert Louis Stevenson’s refined Dr. Jekyll and the violent Mr. Hyde.

On a trip to Plath’s archives at Smith, I was able to read her thesis, in which Plath described the double as being made up of “the evil or repressed characteristics of its master.” As the double grows, it comes to endanger the novel’s protagonist. Plath focused her paper on two of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s works in particular: The Double and The Brothers Karamazov. In her thesis, Plath explored Dostoyevsky’s illustration of characters’ internal states through the landscapes they inhabit, a strategy she takes up in her novel.

Writing of The Double ’s protagonist, Golyadkin, Plath quoted Dostoyevsky, arguing that Golyadkin’s later mental split is foreshadowed in the first scene of the novel, as he wakes up and is unable to separate the “real and actual” from his “confused dreams.” The backdrop of the scene indicates the character’s inner turmoil: Golyadkin’s bedroom is “dirty,” “smoke-stained,” and “dust-covered.” In Plath’s view, Golyadkin’s outer setting points to his muddled psyche.

Plath’s thesis begins its influence on The Bell Jar ’s first page, an opening that revises Dostoyevsky’s. Esther Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist, recalls New York City in the morning. By nine o’clock, the dew “evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.” Remembering the “mirage-grey” streets that “wavered in the sun,” Esther describes “the dry, cindery dust” that clouded her senses. Like Dostoyevsky, Plath recalls the act of dreaming, presenting her protagonist’s surroundings as a hallucination. The Bell Jar ’s inaugural scene, like The Double’ s, questions its own veracity, reflecting the hazy state of both character and landscape. For the two authors, this uncertainty prefaces their protagonists’ mental breakdowns.

Later in her thesis, Plath moved to The Brothers Karamazov . She noted that, “In physical appearance, there is no outward resemblance between” Ivan, the protagonist, and his double, Smerdyakov. “Where Ivan is attractive to the ladies,” Plath observed, Smerdyakov is, in Dostoyevsky’s words, “yellow” and “strangely emasculate.” As if lifting from The Brothers Karamazov , in the opening chapter of The Bell Jar, Plath describes Esther as gender-fluid and having yellow skin. First, Plath affirms Esther’s disorientation, much like Golyadkin’s: “I was supposed to be having the time of my life,” Esther says. “I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America.” Then comes a passage that suggests Esther’s happiness is a veneer:

And when my picture came out in the magazine the 12 of us were working on—drinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lamé bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion—everybody would think I must be having a real whirl.

Plath’s imagery—of the men that she describes as if they are extras on a movie set, of Esther’s snow-colored costume—constructs a whitewashed and artificial mask of American sophistication, one that heightens the novel’s sense of imminent doom. It is, after all, already clear that Esther is not having a “whirl.” Here, Plath implies that Esther’s façade, like her bodice, is faltering, and The Bell Jar promises to reveal what’s underneath.

A few paragraphs down, Plath appears to apply her older insights on Smerdyakov to Esther. It is as if, in her altered complexion and gender-nonconforming figure, Esther sees herself as one of Dostoyevsky’s doubles. Contrasting the white tulle and feminine bodice of the earlier scene, Esther now wears a “black shantung sheath,” one “cut so queerly [she] couldn’t wear any sort of bra under it,” but that doesn’t matter, because she’s “skinny as a boy.” Then Plath alludes to the Chinese origins of the fabric of Esther’s dress: “The city had faded my tan,” Esther recalls. “I looked yellow as a Chinaman.”

Plath’s use of gender queerness and race to construct the double is extremely disturbing, and overt racism pervades The Bell Jar . The boyish frame and yellow skin of Esther’s double work to highlight Esther’s own femininity and whiteness. Earlier, Stevenson and Shelley emphasized the whiteness of their protagonists by using nonwhite doubles: Stevenson’s Hyde has dark skin and hair, whereas Shelley’s nameless creature has yellow skin, black hair, and black lips. Plath likewise uses the double to snap Esther’s race into sharp clarity. Indeed, authors who mobilize the doppelgänger typically construct it with traits that are culturally undesirable or threatening to the status quo.

For that reason, illustrations of the double, like the description of Esther’s complexion and physical frame, are telling insofar as they show what qualities Plath sees as necessary to hide away in mid-20th century America. That Esther sees herself as embodying these characteristics suggests a private recognition or connection that needs to stay contained. On that same night, Esther is mischievous—she drinks and flirts and lies—and her return home is filled with allusions to hell: The telephone “sat, dumb as a death’s head,” and when she discovers smoke in her room, she thought it “had materialized … as a sort of judgment.” The devilish behavior Plath attributes to Esther’s double—her less-white, queerer self—is a lucid demonstration of The Bell Jar ’s reactionary, mid-century orientation toward gender and race.

And as the novel continues, the sought-after image of white female perfection so often associated with 1950s culture rips at the seams, much like Esther’s ersatz bodice. Her ability to project cheerful deference—to hide her anger, confusion, and desire—falls apart. Esther is unable to maintain her mask of docile femininity, and she views the electroshock therapy she eventually receives as a punishment for this failure. Plath aligns Esther’s electroshock with the execution of the convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by electric chair in June 1953, in part to illustrate Esther’s fear of her own duplicitous identity being unveiled.

When considering the expectations that Esther encountered in New York, and the inevitable toll of these demands that Plath sought to expose in The Bell Jar , it pains me to read the novel’s rejection letters, which I also found while at Smith. One, in particular, stands out. On December 28, 1962, less than two months before her death, the author was living in England when she received a missive from Judith Jones, an editor at Knopf who oversaw the U.S. publication of The Colossus and Other Poems , Plath’s first book of poetry. Jones wrote to her: “Up to the point of her breakdown the attitude of the young girl had seemed a perfectly normal combination of brashness and disgust with the world, but I was not at all prepared as a reader to accept the extent of her illness and the suicide attempt.” For Jones, the problem of the novel is not its beginning, when Esther is a beautiful, brilliant intern with a supposedly normal amount of angst. The problem comes when Plath reveals the truth of what goes on under that surface, and what it takes to uphold the façade.

These very issues—the masks often worn to maintain stifling American codes, the sense of self-betrayal they can foster in their wearer, the condemnation that ensues when the mask falls away—are in part why The Bell Jar garnered such critical and popular attention. Perhaps less understood, although “One Life” helped bring this to the fore, is how Plath’s fascination with doubles figured into her work. Her novel, crucially, drew from an artistic tradition that historically relied on fraught language about race and gender. But Plath also departed from the doppelgänger myth in at least one meaningful way: She refused to give her double a different name, or a different body. It’s a decision that not only accepts, but also embraces Esther’s depth, even her bleak and troubling emotions. At the novel’s end, Esther recognizes that her experiences—both painful and joyous—will always live inside her. “They were part of me,” she explains. “They were my landscape.”

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How Sylvia Plath’s Rare Honors Thesis Helped Me Understand My Divided Self

On the poet's understanding of dostoevsky—and herself.

Sylvia Plath is so ingrained in popular literary culture that her mythical status can often cast a wide shadow over the details of her actual writing.

The revered American writer, sometimes known more for her suicide in 1963 than her searing confessional poetry and “pot-boiler” novel,  The Bell Jar , has a vast catalogue of published writing, ranging from children’s books to diaries to letters to her mother. Few recent writers have enjoyed this kind of publication history, as only two works were published during Plath’s lifetime: a collection of poetry and a novel released under a pseudonym.

Since her death, Plath has become a symbolic touchstone for many young writers—this writer included—many who continue to identify with the themes that frame Plath’s image, including that of the tortured artist. Whether it was endless ambition for success in the literary world, or her struggles to reconcile the expectations placed on her as a woman wanting to be a poet, Plath offers a multitude of themes for young artists to identify with.

I have long worshipped Sylvia Plath. This is sometimes an unusual confession to make, as Plath is usually associated with girls and young women and not 17-year-old boys. But as a queer young boy growing up in the oppressive and uneventful suburbs, it was my first reading of Plath’s The Bell Jar that began the love affair. At age 15, I buried myself deep inside the bell jar world of Esther Greenwood, whose summer breakdown felt eerily similar to my growing alienation with the world as a closeted gay boy who was prescribed copies of The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies and bullied for his effeminacy.

One summer at age 18, I pored over her diaries, borrowing them over the weeks from my local library, much to the suspicion of my mother who didn’t understand why I would want to read someone else’s diaries so much, let alone an American poet who killed herself. (She had similar reservations about my borrowing of Anne Sexton’s letters.) I eventually made similar attempts to Plath at regular diary-writing, using a meticulously cursive writing style (a la Plath) to record my own unrequited high school romances, my furtive online habits looking at everything from Gore Vidal to bisexual porn, and, finally, the transcendental pleasure I found in reading another young writer’s diary, feeding off her alienation and self-loathing as it was filtered through beautiful, lucid prose.

After working my way through most of Plath’s oeuvre—including her letters and children’s books—that summer I began to read about her honors thesis, “The Magic Mirror.” Plath completed her college dissertation in 1955, a project that looked at the motif of the double in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s two works,  The Double (1846) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). As I read more about the thesis, which is mostly skimmed over in journals, it was hard not to see some psychological or reparative motivation behind it.

It was only the year before that Plath attempted suicide and was hospitalized for depression, her nervous breakdown seeing her installed at MacLean Hospital, taking time away from her undergraduate studies. Given that her academic project was interested in looking at doubles—more implicitly, the divided self—in Dostoevsky’s writing, I found it hard not to see the parallels: Plath unpacking double selves in literature, having only experienced a similar struggle in her own life the year before.

I put aside the thought of Plath’s thesis for a little while, only coming back to it in my third year at college, majoring in English literature. (Strangely enough, Plath was never on the syllabi for courses I took.) I was motivated because I was toying with the idea of doing my own dissertation, encouraged to spend the year like Plath did married to an esoteric subject that had little currency beyond the sandstone pillars of my university library.

I began to remember the elusive manuscript, one that had already few listings on the Internet and seemed to only exist by a limited number of copies kept in a scattering of Plath archives. But after some more thorough searches I discovered an obscure British printing house that had a few copies listed online. As I navigated their antiquated website—all Times New Roman and black text boxes—I discovered they had copies of the thesis for sale.

With what small funds I had at the time as an undergraduate student, I decided to “invest” in an unbound, printed manuscript printed in the late 1980s. Since I bought my copy of the Plath thesis, the publisher has folded and is no longer listed online, apparently selling off what they had left of the obscure material they published in the 1980s and 1990s. And for some inexplicable reason, the publisher was given the rights to publish Plath’s honors thesis. Whether or not the college gave the publisher, Ted Hughes, or Aurelia Plath (Plath’s mother), permission is unclear.

And so when the slim thread-bound manuscript arrived, I did what I had done years before and locked myself in my room, devouring the rare Plath work. The thesis—surprisingly small compared to the 15,000-word dissertations of today—is a slim, terse work meticulously and logically unpacking the double motifs in Dostoevsky’s books, the writing similar to the curt, sometimes ironic voice of  The Bell Jar .

The thesis is explained by its subhed—“a study of the double”—and has rather more metaphorical value to readers of Plath, given her life story. It seems ironic that Plath used this phrase given that so much of her life since her suicide has been characterized by this double: before and after her breakdown; before and after her marriage to Hughes; before and after her suicide. Sylvia Plath is a mythic figure that exists in-between, in purgatory. She has an exactness in time. Even her biographies are marked by strategy: Andrew Wilson’s Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted (2013); Elizabeth Winder’s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (2013); and Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, A Marriage (2004).

I found the thesis that summer an enticing read, enriched by the fact that I was holding one of the rarer artifacts of her deep body of work.

As a devotee of Sylvia Plath the writer, the intellectual, and the myth, I explored the thesis to see if she tried to reconcile her psychosocial breakdown by channelling it through her own academic work. If it was true, I too wanted to emulate this, using my own thesis on the pleasures of gay icons—women I sought comfort and solace in during my own breakdown—as a strategy to  understand my own psychology.

Plath was as much an icon to me as gay diva icons Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor—but there was a deeper level to my appreciation of Plath: it was how she was oppressed by the heterosexual world and the societal expectations placed on her as a woman that I most identified with. But even more so, it was the fact she tried to destabilize these expectations, voicing her frustration and alienation and self-knowledge through blistering poetry and a confessional novel. And so I read the thesis and learned about how Dostoevsky, a titan of Russian letters, was an access-point for Plath to meditate on her psychological torment, creating a vehicle of sorts for her to channel questions about the divided self. Ultimately, the thesis seemed more interested in whether literature could provide an outlet for her investigations into her own psychology than whether Dostoevsky was writing about the divided self with mirrors or shadows or a character as foil.

Plath’s preoccupation with the double was to such an extent that she sought out other books around the subject, including James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). Plath was annoyed, however, that famed Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s paper “The Double as Immortal Self” had yet to be translated into English and attempted to navigate it despite her poor German skills. Although she wasn’t able to access the original, she still cites some Rank in her preface, foregrounding that despite referencing him, her thesis is not a psychological exegesis and more of a literary undertaking. Still, this obsession with doubles during her honors year attracted attention from those around her, including her mother, a boyfriend, and benefactress Olive Higgins Prouty, who asked in a letter, “Don’t Dostoevsky’s doubles depress you a little bit?”

In the introduction, Plath is quick to add that her analysis is not a “clinical analysis of the Double” in Dostoevsky, as it would be “precarious” to take this approach. Instead it is apparent that Plath wants to unfurl the metaphorical value these symbols—shadows, brothers, foils, mirrors, portraits—have in demonstrating the divided personae in Dostoevsky’s writing.

In his biography Mad Girl’s Love Song , Andrew Wilson suggests that the idea of The Bell Jar novel was already percolating in Plath’s mind as she worked on “The Magic Mirror.” She asked some of her love interests at the time, including a man named Gordon Lameyer, about writing “an adolescent story about doubles” (334). Wilson goes on to write that Sylvia was deeply interested in mediating her life through these “mirror images.” Already, Plath’s study of doubles began laying the groundwork for The Bell Jar .

For me, Plath’s dissertation acted as a template for my own thesis. I too was interested in understanding some of my own psychological history and cultural leaning, analyzing them through literary and theoretical frameworks to better understand my depression, and myself. For my thesis I took up the subject of Elizabeth Taylor, exploring her dual screen- and celebrity-image and my worship of them both as a gay man. I wanted to study Taylor to try and understand why so many gay men worship Hollywood movie and music stars, idolizing these divas to assuage the angst and pain of being a queer outsider in a homophobic world.

Plath evidently used her honors thesis to try and understand her own darker psychological self. By choosing a subject like the “double” in the gloomy and existential writing of Dostoevsky, Plath was motivated to unpack her psychological torment by proxy.

By analyzing something at a distance—in much the same way I chose Elizabeth Taylor, a star I did not entirely worship, but appreciated more from a distance—we both used a proxy cultural text to understand our respective disillusionment. Plath’s thesis, which came the year after her repatriation to Smith following her breakdown, is undercut by a need to psychologically understand the doubles in these novels—her desire for an English language version of Otto Rank’s work; her obsession with writing about mirrors in these novels, which later appeared in her own novel; her terse if slightly wry language suggesting she will avoid psychoanalysis in her dissertation—demonstrate a need to understand and reconcile her own problematic psychological history.

I kept Plath’s “Magic Mirror” close by as I wrote my own thesis. This knowledge that someone else—a literary titan who had seen me through my own breakdown—had attempted a similar project, using a proxy form to interrogate a personal psychological past, helped me.

I don’t know if others would identify with “The Magic Mirror” in the same way I did. But as a young queer boy who spent a lonesome adolescent summer reading The Bell Jar over and over—and then those queer sultry nights watching Bette Davis movies—I felt more assured, more confident, and more capable in unpacking diva worship in my own life after reading Plath’s efforts to understand her complex identity.

These days, my copy of the “The Magic Mirror”—along with The Bell Jar —is safely packed away, buried alongside high school ephemera and exercise books. Along with my own thesis, these relics are emblematic of my time living in a hot stifling jar, long before the lid was lifted.

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Poems & Poets

Strategies From Sylvia Plath's Undergrad Thesis Were Employed in The Bell Jar

Kelly Coyne relates early drafts of Sylvia Plath 's The Bell Jar to her undergraduate thesis work, both of which were recently on view at the National Portrait Gallery show  One Life: Sylvia Plath . Plath's thesis, writes Coyne, "provides a clear outline of these influences on her novel—and helps to illuminate how the author used cultural anxieties surrounding race and sexuality to convey her protagonist’s deeply fractured sense of self." More, from The Atlantic :

On a trip to Plath’s archives at Smith, I was able to read her thesis, in which Plath described the double as being made up of “the evil or repressed characteristics of its master.” As the double grows, it comes to endanger the novel’s protagonist. Plath focused her paper on two of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s works in particular:  The Double  and  The Brothers Karamazov.  In her thesis, Plath explored Dostoyevsky’s illustration of characters’ internal states through the landscapes they inhabit, a strategy she takes up in her novel. Writing of  The Double ’s protagonist, Golyadkin, Plath quoted Dostoyevsky, arguing that Golyadkin’s later mental split is foreshadowed in the first scene of the novel, as he wakes up and is unable to separate the “real and actual” from his “confused dreams.” The backdrop of the scene indicates the character’s inner turmoil: Golyadkin’s bedroom is “dirty,” “smoke-stained,” and “dust-covered.” In Plath’s view, Golyadkin’s outer setting points to his muddled psyche. Plath’s thesis begins its influence on  The Bell Jar ’s first page, an opening that revises Dostoyevsky’s. Esther Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist, recalls New York City in the morning. By nine o’clock, the dew “evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.” Remembering the “mirage-grey” streets that “wavered in the sun,” Esther describes “the dry, cindery dust” that clouded her senses. Like Dostoyevsky, Plath recalls the act of dreaming, presenting her protagonist’s surroundings as a hallucination.  The Bell Jar ’s inaugural scene, like  The Double’ s, questions its own veracity, reflecting the hazy state of both character and landscape. For the two authors, this uncertainty prefaces their protagonists’ mental breakdowns.

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Using affect theory for studying literature : Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar

This thesis examines how affect theory can be used for analysing literature on the example of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. The purpose of the thesis is to create a toolkit of affective themes and employ it on analysing The Bell Jar in order to show that affect theory might be a useful tool for analysing fiction as it potentially furthers our understanding of real-life affective problems. The toolkit is created by synthesising various scholarly accounts on affect theory. A secondary purpose of the thesis is to give an analytical overview of how affect has been theorised in the humanities and synthesise a definition of affect suitable for analysing literature. The thesis consists of an introduction, two core chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction provides background information that frames the thesis. It also identifies the research gap and states the aims and research questions of the thesis. The first core chapter comprises two parts. The first part is dedicated to an an...

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Sophie Toscan

The purpose of this Mémoire is to examine the way in which female authors who were young women in the 1950's have presented their own views of a gender restrictive era through semi-autobiographical novels. The choice to focus on semi-autobiographies is crucial, because those texts have an inherent power that historical accounts cannot convey: they carry the voice of a female individual who underwent the anxiety triggered by the restrictiveness of the era's expectations, and had to find a way around it. Moreover, by adding fictional elements to their stories, the authors can strengthen or reduce some facets of their stories so as to point to a particular moment of their lives, and the repercussions it had on their present self, offering the reader alternative versions for their life-stories Both primary texts, The Millstone and The Bell Jar, have been chosen because they reflect on double standards and unfair treatments of women during the fifties. They unveil the difficulty to reconcile one's apparently contradictory desires, whether a husband, a family or a career. Both texts also enhance the idea that women have a superior role to play, but that they are deprived of their own possibilities: not by their husbands or men in general, but by the socially enforced cultural values, norms and morals that reduce them to their role as housewife or mother. This Mémoire will also reflect on contemporary media and political movements which contributed to the widely gender-centered organization of society: feminine magazines such as Mademoiselle or Seventeen and their ambiguous advice for young women, and political debates such as the Kitchen Debate of 1959. Then, with the help of Ian McEwan's novel On Chesil Beach, written in 2007 and looking back on the first years of the 1960's, it becomes obvious that constrictive gender roles were not specific to the Cold War era in America. They were indeed constitutive of Western cultural norms based on a patriarchal conception of society.

Revista de Filología Románica

Laura de la Parra Fernández

AbstrAct Sylvia Plath's roman à clef The Bell Jar has largely been read as an autobiographical novel and as the key to understanding her suicide. The novel, however, presents an important political complexity—the contradictions Esther faces in post-WWII, 1950s American society, the unattainable and conflicting ideals of womanhood, and the political treason that betraying them implies, dealt with as madness. Esther Greenwood's descent into madness is no more than the reflection of the sick, hypocritical society she lives in, and an attempt to escape from her obligations as an American woman. However, the institution of psychiatry was closely related to the politics of the time, and acted as a means of control over the population, especially women, through the use of treatments such as ECT and lobotomy. I would like to look at how Cold War politics, gender, and psychiatry interact in The Bell Jar in order to submit American society to the conformism and consumerism that dominated the 1950s.

Airlie Maria Heung

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Marija Đurđević, PhD

Giorgia Damiani

Ferenc Zsélyi

This is a narrative analysis of Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar (1963). We set up the time line of events (the story) and then map the plot or plots that may explain “what may have happened”. The detailed listings of characters, their emblematic activities (masterplots), emblems and enigmas help us learn what has been going on. The list of traumas Esther Greenwood, the heroine and narrator of the novel has gone through mark how Esther’s recollection of her past gains significance. Story, plot, character, symbolism and the network of symbolic oppositions unveil how death and life, father and mother figures generate an interface that ruins Esther’s life so as to rebuild it again. This descent into personal hell and into archaic terrors of the human psyche is completed by an ascent into Lacan’s Symbolic Order where the horror of the flesh and that of the archaic is converted into a(n electro) shocking narrative that carries both character and reader beyond good and evil, to the uncanny realm that looks so strange yet feels so familiar to all of us. This paper attempts to provide a “narrative morphology” with the help of which readers of Sylvia Plath’s novel can walk and/or struggle through this narrative rites of passage the reading of which feels like attending a late twentieth century ritual dense with fashion, media, sexuality, mediocrity and psychiatry.

Azra Ghandeharion

With its portrayal of a talented yet frustrated young American woman in the 1950s, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963) depicts the experiences of a nineteen-year-old girl before her mental breakdown. Benefitting from a Friedanian second wave feminism, this paper aims to trace the root of disappointment and identity crisis in Plath's heroine, Esther Greenwood. It is understood that besides being a personal issue, her frustration is the outcome of sociocultural factors. The lack of role models and the contradictory messages sent by the media lead to her anxiety, disillusionment, and uncertainty. The Bell Jar proposes a solution: it is indeed possible for a woman to hold a fulfilling career and at the same time be a caring wife and a loving mother. And this is the answer Esther tries to figure out at a time when the boundaries between the domestic sphere and the outside world are clearly defined for women. Keywords Sylvia Plath; The Bell Jar; Betty Freidan; the America of the fifties

Donovan Schaefer

Revista Da Graduacao

Suelen Sandrin

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Dying: An Introduction

The story of a poet who tries to end her life written by a poet who did, Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” (Harper & Row) was first published under a pseudonym in England in 1963, one month before she committed suicide. We have had to wait almost a decade for its publication in the United States, but it was reissued in England in 1966 under its author’s real name. A biographical note in the present edition makes it plain that the events in the novel closely parallel Sylvia Plath’s twentieth year. For reasons for which we are not wholly to blame, our approach to the novel is impure; “The Bell Jar” is fiction that cannot escape being read in part as autobiography. It begins in New York with an ominous lightness, grows darker as it moves to Massachusetts, then slips slowly into madness. Esther Greenwood, one of a dozen girls in and on the town for a month as guest editors of a teen-age fashion magazine, is the product of a German immigrant family and a New England suburb. With “fifteen years of straight A’s” behind her, a depressing attachment to a dreary but handsome medical student, Buddy Willard, still unresolved, and a yearning to be a poet, she is the kind of girl who doesn’t know what drink to order or how much to tip a taxi driver but is doing her thesis on the “twin images” in “Finnegans Wake,” a book she has never managed to finish. Her imagination is at war with the small-town tenets of New England and the big-time sham of New York. She finds it impossible to be one of the army of college girls whose education is a forced stop on the short march to marriage. The crises of identity, sexuality, and survival are grim, and often funny. Wit, irony, and intelligence as well as an inexplicable, withdrawn sadness separate Esther from her companions. Being an involuntary truth-seeker, she uses irony as a weapon of judgment, and she is its chief victim. Unable to experience or mime emotions, she feels defective as a person. The gap between her and the world widens: “I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty.” . . . “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” . . . “That morning I had tried to hang myself.”

Camouflage and illness go together in “The Bell Jar;” moreover, illness is often used to lift or tear down a façade. Doreen, a golden girl of certainty admired by Esther, begins the process by getting drunk. The glimpse of her lying with her head in a pool of her own vomit in a hotel hallway is repellent but crucial. Her illness is followed by a mass ptomaine poisoning at a “fashion” lunch. Buddy gets tuberculosis and goes off to a sanatorium. Esther, visiting him, breaks her leg skiing. When she had her first sexual experience, with a young math professor she has picked up, she hemorrhages. Taken in by a lesbian friend, she winds up in a hospital. Later, she learns that the friend has hanged herself. A plain recital of the events in “The Bell Jar” would be ludicrous if they were not balanced by genuine desperation at one side of the scale and a sure sense of black comedy at the other. Sickness and disclosure are the keys to “The Bell Jar.” On her last night in New York, Esther climbs to the roof of her hotel and throws her city wardrobe over the parapet, piece by piece. By the end of the novel, she has tried to get rid of her very life, which is given back to her by another process of divestment—psychiatry. Pain and gore are endemic to “The Bell Jar,” and they are described objectively, self-mockingly, almost humorously to begin with. Taken in by the tone (the first third of “The Bell Jar” might be a mordant, sick-joke version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), the reader is being lured into the lion’s den—that sterile cement room in the basement of a mental hospital where the electric-shock-therapy machine waits for its frightened clients.

The casualness with which physical suffering is treated suggests that Esther is cut off from the instinct for sympathy right from the beginning—for herself as well as for others. Though she is enormously aware of the impingements of sensation, her sensations remain impingements. She lives close to the nerve, but the nerve has become detached from the general network. A thin layer of glass separates her from everyone, and the novel’s title, itself made of glass, is evolved from her notion of disconnection: the head of each mentally ill person is enclosed in a bell jar, choking on his own foul air.

Torn between conflicting roles—the sweetheart- Hausfrau -mother and “the life of the poet,” neither very real to her—Esther finds life itself inimical. Afraid of distorting the person she is yet to become, she becomes the ultimate distortion—nothing. As she descends into the pit of depression, the world is a series of wrong reverberations: her mother’s face is a perpetual accusation, the wheeling of a baby carriage underneath her window a grinding irritation. She becomes obsessed by the idea of suicide, and one of the great achievements of “The Bell Jar” is that it makes real the subtle distinctions between a distorted viewpoint and the distortions inherent in what it sees. Convention may contribute to Esther’s insanity, but she never loses her awareness of the irrationality of convention. Moved to Belsize, a part of the mental hospital reserved for patients about to go back to the world, she makes the connection explicit:

What was there about us, in Belsize, so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.

Terms like “mad” and “sane” grow increasingly inadequate as the action develops. Esther is “psychotic” by definition, but the definition is merely a descriptive tag: by the time we learn how she got to be “psychotic” the word has ceased to be relevant. (As a work of fiction, “The Bell Jar” seems to complement the clinical theories of the Scottish analyst R. D. Laing.) Because it is written from the distraught observer’s point of view rather than from the viewpoint of someone observing her, there is continuity to her madness; it is not one state suddenly supplanting another but the most gradual of processes.

Suicide, a grimly compulsive game of fear and guilt, as addictive as alcohol or drugs, is experimental at first—a little blood here, a bit of choking there, just to see what it will be like. It quickly grows into an overwhelming desire for annihilation. By the time Esther climbs into the crawl space of a cellar and swallows a bottle of sleeping pills—by the time we are faced by the real thing—the event, instead of seeming grotesque, seems like a natural consequence. When she is about to leave the hospital, after a long series of treatments, her psychiatrist tells her to consider her breakdown “a bad dream.” Esther, “patched, retreaded, and approved for the road,” thinks, “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

That baby is only one of many in “The Bell Jar.” They smile up from the pages of magazines, they sit like little freaks pickled in glass jars on display in the pediatric ward of Buddy’s hospital. A “sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly” seems to wait for Esther at the end of the ski run when she has her accident. And in the course of the novel she witnesses a birth. In place of her never-to-be-finished thesis on the “twin images” in “Finnegans Wake,” one might be written on the number and kinds of babies that crop up in “The Bell Jar.” In a gynecologist’s office, watching a mother fondling her baby, Esther wonders why she is so separated from this easy happiness, this carrying out of the prescribed biological and social roles. She does not want a baby; she is a baby herself. But she is also a potential writer. She wants to fulfill herself, not to be fulfilled. To her, babies are The Trap, and sex is the bait. But she is too intelligent not to realize that babies don’t represent life, they are life, though not necessarily the kind Esther wants to live; that is, if she wants to live at all. She is caught between the monstrous fetuses on display in Buddy’s ward and the monstrous slavery of the seemingly permanent pregnancy of her neighbor Dodo Conway, who constantly wheels a baby carriage under Esther’s window, like a demented figure in a Greek chorus. Babies lure Esther toward suicide by luring her toward a life she cannot literally bear. There seem to be only two solutions, and both involve the invisible: to pledge faith to the unborn or fealty to the dead. Life, so painfully visible and present, defeats her, and she takes it, finally, into her own hands. With the exception of the psychiatrist’s disinterested affection for her, love is either missing or unrecognized in “The Bell Jar.” Its overwhelming emotion is disgust—disgust that has not yet become contempt and is therefore more damaging.

Between the original and the second publications of “The Bell Jar” in England, Sylvia Plath’s second, and posthumous, volume of poems, “Ariel,” was printed. Some of the poems had appeared in magazines, but no one was prepared for their cumulative effect. Murderous experiences of the mind and the body, stripped of all protection, they were total exposures, and chilling. They made clear almost instantly that someone who had been taken for a gifted writer might well be one of genius, whose work—intense, luxurious, barbarous, and worldly—was unlike anything ever seen before. Although the extraordinary quality of the poems made her death the more lamentable, that death gave her work certain immediate values it might not otherwise have had. Death cannot change a single word written down on paper, but in this case who the poet was and what had been lost became apparent almost at the same time: as if the poems had been given and the poet taken away in one breath. An instantaneous immortality followed. Sylvia Plath also became an extra-literary figure to many people, a heroine of contradictions—someone who had faced horror and made something of it as well as someone who had been destroyed by it. I don’t think morbid fascination accounts for her special position. The energy and violence of the late poems were acted out. What their author threatened she performed, and her work gained an extra status of truth. The connection between art and life, so often merely rhetorical, became too visible. The tragic irony is that in a world of public-relations liars Sylvia Plath seemed a truth-dealer in life by the very act of taking it.

“The Bell Jar” lacks the coruscating magnificence of the late poems. Something girlish in its manner betrays the hand of the amateur novelist. Its material, after all, is what has been transcended. It is a frightening book, and if it ends on too optimistic a note as both fiction and postdated fact, its real terror lies elsewhere. Though we share every shade of feeling that leads to Esther’s attempts at suicide, there is not the slightest insight in “The Bell Jar” into suicide itself. That may be why it bears the stamp of authority. Reading it, we are up against the raw experience of nightmare, not the analysis or understanding of it. ♦

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