The Bell Jar Research Paper

Sylvia Plath as Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath was a well known poet who published only one novel before her tragic death in 1963. The Bell Jar is a first person account from a young woman named Esther Greenwood who suffers a psychological meltdown. Throughout the novel, she moves back and forth through time as she remembers the events that lead to her being released from a psychiatric hospital. Through research, one may infer that the novel is written from events in Plath’s past. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar coveys Plath’s last attempt to reconcile with her demons.

“Esther Greenwood, the narrator of The Bell Jar, encounters many of the problems Plath examined in her verse: her attempts to establish her identity are undermined, she projects an ambivalent attitude toward men, society remains indifferent to her sensitivity, vulnerability, and artistic ambitions, and she is haunted by events from her past, particularly the death of her father” (Explanation of The Bell Jar). Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts to parents Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober. Plath’s father died in 1940, when she was eight years old, from complications with diabetes. The death of Esther’s father in The Bell Jar is mentioned to have happened when she was about nine or ten years old. “...and I felt

happier than I had since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died” (Plath 75).

Throughout the novel, Esther is constantly questioning the role of women in society and the home.

Should a woman work or should be at stay at home mother? Should she be single or the perfect wife? At one point she reads an article called “In Defense of Chastity” that talks about women practicing chastity in order to please their future husband. Esther feels that the article doesn’t consider a woman’s point of view on sex and marriage (Plath 81). It is said “...she (Plath) became increasingly conscious of herself as a woman, the conflict between the lifestyle of a poet/intellectual and that of a wife and mother…” (Plath, About the Book

5)

Sylvia Plath went through a deep depression while going to school at Smith College and tried to commit suicide in 1953. During one of her summers at Smith College, she served as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine when she won the magazine’s fiction contest with a short story. Esther Greenwood has a similar experience in The Bell Jar that could easily be inferred as Plath recounting her own. “We had all won a fashion magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs, and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York for a month, expenses paid…” (Plath 3) Soon after her summer in New York, Plath drank several sleeping pills in an attempt to end her life. This attempt is journalized in The Bell Jar as one of Esther’s several attempts at ending her life. “...Then I unlocked the strongbox and took out the new bottle of pills. There were more than I had hoped. There were at least fifty… Then I went downstairs and into the kitchen. I turned on the tap and poured myself a tall glass of water… Then I set the glass of water and bottle of pills side by side on the flat surface of one of the logs and started to heave myself up… I reached for the glass and the bottle, and carefully, on my knees, with bent head, crawled to the furthest wall… I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one” (Plath 168-9).
Sylvia Plath originally wrote The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She adopted the name for fear that she would insult the people in her life she had written about in the novel. The novel was published in London in 1963, just weeks before Plath ultimately ended her life. There’s evidence throughout the novel that it was written about her life. Some believe that she used this novel as diary of sorts before she committed suicide. She wrote “... it’s quite amazing how I’ve gone around for most of my life as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell jar...” (Plath, About the Book 5). This novel outlines her struggles with her perception of herself and those around her. Plath’s death is the ending chapter to the novel that was her life.