The bell jar is a 1963 novel written by an American poet Sylvia Plath. This is the only novel that she ever wrote. But she has a number of amazing poetry. I feel like she’s my spirit animal. I don’t know what it was about her that made me love her so much. I never met her but I feel like I have this weird connection with her , maybe it is because of her poetry and novel or that being an artist myself I can totally relate to her work and to her art.
Sylvia Path is often regarded as a depressed person because of her dark writings and also because of the fact that she committed suicide later in her life. Although I find her super brave and strong, as someone who could bring out the dark side of humans so gracefully and beautifully.
From her writing we can also figure out the state of mind she was in all the time. Plath was mentally ill and disturbed , she was suffering from depression in the last years of her life. As there is a reason behind every disease, the same goes with mental illness, it is not something a person is born with, it gradually develops over a period and has many social, psychological, and environmental factors.
So the reason behind Plath’s disturbing mind can be traced from her childhood trauma. She lost her father at a very young age which left her disheartened. She stopped believing in god ever since. Later her husband cheated on her. So here we can see how her mental health was affected over years. She committed suicide when she just 30 years old. She will never grow old, she will never age, she will always stay young.
The bell jar is a conspicuous autobiography. The names of the characters are fictional but the story line and whatever happens with the protagonist ESTHER GREENWOOD is similar to Plath’s own life.
The book roams around the life of Esther Greenwood. She was a straight A grade student. She was selected for an internship in New York. She was a very bright student. She got all the scholarship that everybody only dreams of getting .Yet she was not contented .Everybody wanted to have what she has , but she couldn’t get the point . She wanted to feel happy but she was unable to.
At last she started questioning her existence.
Esther has the same view on life as Plath. She thought the same way about men as Plath. Like Plath Esther was suffering through depression and anxiety also the trauma of her father’s death was with her. From these things I can say that she was actually talking about herself through Esther. When I first start reading the bell jar I felt so relieved that finally someone understood how I feel. I felt like Plath was writing this novel just for me, I felt this weird connection with the book. And I think so many people would have felt this way. Sylvia Plath has the ability to write about even the slightest details.
Even Esther seemed like my own reflection, always observing things and questioning things in a man’s world.
“I saw my life branching out before me like a green fig tree. From the tip of every branch like a fat purple fig a wonderful future beckoned and winked one fig was a husband and a happy home and children and another was a famous poet and another was a brilliant professor an another was E G an editor and another was Africa and Europe and Asia and another was Constantine and Socrates and a pack of other lovers with queer names and another was an Olympic lady crew and beyond all these figs were more figs that I couldn’t quite make out , I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree starving to death just because I couldn’t make up my mind which fig I wanted to choose I wanted each one of them but choosing one meant losing all the rest as I sit there unable to decide the figs began to wrinkle and go black and one by one they plopped to the ground at my feet’’ .
This quote by Esther can perfectly describe her state of mind and her insecurities throughout her life. She is always unable to decide what she really wants. She is a young girl and at a very vulnerable stage of her life. Here she is on the verge of adulthood and she is unsure of her place in the society. Being a young girl myself, I think this problem of self-discovery or self-identity is really Important and serious. A lot of young people suffer from this crisis. Esther wanted to be everything, but the fig tree paragraph describes how an ideal woman is supposed to be.
An ideal woman can’t be everything she has to make choices. She can either choose motherhood or a career tired, she becomes mad about all the choices that she has to make or the choices that the society wants her to make. She grows tired because she is loosing all the control and power that she once had over herself and her choices.
Plath describes the effect that these things have on Esther’s mind as “Neurotic, ha! If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at the same time than I’m neurotic as hell I’ll be flying back and forth between two mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days’’.
“And I knew in spite of all those roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath her feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat”. Now another important topic that The Bell Jar discusses is the double standards of the society. Esther verifies the ill concept of submission to male and the expectations that the society has from an ideal women. When Esther looks at MRS Willard(the once self-aware woman)she thinks about all the different ways in which Mrs. Willard has molded herself in order to submit to her husband and to be an ideal woman and wife. She thinks about her mother the same way.
Then she realizes that someday probably the same thing will happen with her. She was afraid that maybe someday even she will have to let a man rule her life. Buddy Willard once told her that after she had children she would feel differently and she wouldn’t want to write poems anymore. These things made her blood boil and she felt nauseous.
Sometimes she thought about having kids and a husband but then she didn’t want this to stop her from writing and doing things that she liked. And this is exactly what the society wants from women. So that’s when Esther decided of never getting married or have children. Plath’s own marriage was suffering, her husband cheated on her. This made this whole thing more real and significant. Esther considered men as dishonest. She also envied men because of the freedom that they had.
Another quote by Plath that makes her so special for me is “death must be so beautiful to lie in the soft brown earth with the grasses waving above once head listen to silence to have no yesterdays and no tomorrows to forget time to forget life to be at peace”. Here I think Esther has already given up on life, she does not want to continue. Her mental health is at a super sensitive stage.
She has started to find beauty in death and not in the living world.
But then she realizes that no matter what she goes through, life at the end of the day continues despite all the fails all the low points all the disappointments in a person’s life. Our heart keeps on beating we can’t stop it, until DEATH.
At the end Esther says “To the person in the bell jar blank and stopped as a dead baby the world itself seems like a bad dream”.
She feels like she’s been trapped in a jar and is struggling to breathe. According to her mother her madness is like a bad dream, a bad dream from which she cannot wake up. She wants to get up, to fight to breathe again but eventually she losses hope and the desire to stay sane. Hence she commits suicide and dies.
Authored By
Hiba Sohail Khan
