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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Defending the aesthetics of 'The Bell Jar'

This MA thesis approaches Sylvia Plath's only published novel 'The Bell Jar' with a New Critical viewpoint. Picking up some notable images: the bell jar, the flowers and the fig tree, I was attempting to enrich the analyses on the novel with more details found in the plot instead of performing parallel citations of the writer's (auto)biography.

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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.

Journal of Narrative & Life History

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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

The Study of Alienation in Sylvia Palth's The Bell Jar

Esma Mustafa

This study argues that the male-dominated society alienates the protagonist of The Bell Jar, Esther, as she tries to develop her female identity in the patriarchal American society. The American society obligated women to be submissive to their husbands. Women were expected to satisfy their husband's sexual desires and become mothers. Secondly, the paper sheds light on other reasons behind the protagonist's alienation like being different from her society in general and mother in particular. She alienates herself from the conventional thinking among American women who believe in "idle talk," where they lack the choice to change anything concerning the world. Esther does not desire to live within the confinements of the societal gender roles; therefore, she dissociates herself from her family and environment. Thirdly, the study illustrates how the psychological trauma, inner absence, and depression alienate the protagonist. She misses her deceased father. What is more, his absence ushers her miserableness, depression and madness. Additionally, the meaninglessness in her life makes her unable to enjoy her life to the fullest. Thus, this state makes her sadder, depressed, and more alienated.

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English studies today: prospects and perspectives: selected papers from the third conference "English Language and Anglophone Literatures Today" (ELALT3)

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James Gourley

This article traces the extent of Sylvia Plath’s engagement with the Irish modernist, James Joyce. It contributes to a significant strand of Plath scholarship by increasing knowledge of the literary networks Plath and her work engages. It does so by first examining the evidence extant in her published work and archive. It establishes Plath’s long-standing interest in Joyce’s writing, and traces in her notes and marginalia a consistent focus on Joyce as artistic example. It then establishes a relationship between Plath’s reading of Joyce and the künstlerroman genealogy that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Bell Jar share. This article shows that The Bell Jar self-consciously performs Joyce’s influence, with his Finnegans Wake featuring prominently in The Bell Jar as an alienating canonical authority. Finally, in showing The Bell Jar’s departure from the linearity and self-assuredness of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it identifies Plath’s künstlerroman as superseding the modernist conventions performed by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This paper thus traces the twin imperatives of Joyce’s influence identifiable in Plath’s reading and writing; a recursive tendency, emphasizing Plath’s literary tradition, and a focus on the past, and a heuristic tendency, advocating for Plath’s own innovation, looking to the future.

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“The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath: Plot and Thesis

Introduction, the bell jar thesis.

In The Bell Jar , Sylvia Plath authors a story about herself. The life of Esther Greenwood, who aspires to be a poet, is depicted in The Bell Jar as she tries to realize her ambitions via education, using Ladies’ Day magazine as a starting point. She chose a month-long summer job at the Ladies’ Day magazine in New York, although she struggled with questions of identity and social conventions during her time there. Even though Esther qualifies for everything that a young woman desires, her life goes the opposite due to her desire to want everything to be perfect. Her life became miserable throughout the story due to her dissatisfaction and hopelessness.

She hesitates only to follow one dream and compares her life to a fig tree which symbolizes ambition, dreams, and goals. She avoids choosing either for fear of losing the rest of the twigs. Sylvia Plath makes the readers visualize a young woman under a fig tree full of figs and shows how she hesitates to pick the figs. Thus, the dreams, goals, and ambition got rotten and dropped to her fit. After realizing the world’s limitations and happiness, Esther secludes herself from the world to a place where death is tormenting.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is full of fascinating imagery and metaphors. The fig tree is the most iconic symbolic image that torments the protagonist Esther. In the story about a nun and a man who was a Jew, Esther first experiences the fig tree (55) “The particular fig tree grew amid a Jewish person’s house and a monastery on a verdant lawn…” “I could see my life thriving out before me, such as the green fig tree in the story,” she says later, as she mulls over her career opportunities and becomes concerned about her future (77). A great future motioned from the tips of every shrub, gleaming like a fat violet pig. A charming family with children was represented by one fig, a renowned poet by another, a brilliant instructor by still another, and Ee Gee, the outstanding copyreader, by yet another fig.

The alternative figure presented the Europen, African, and South American continents, as well as Constantine, Socrates, Attila, and a slew of other companions with odd names and odd occupations and an Olympian female crew winner. “I could not really tell if there were any additional figs past and above these.” “Because I couldn’t decide which figs I preferred, I imagined myself starving to death in the fig tree’s trunk. I wanted them all, but picking one would mean missing out on the others, and while as I remained there, still unable to make a choice, the figs began to twist and become black, eventually falling at my feet one by one.”

Esther is concerned about the multiple chances accessible in that section, believing that she will be unable to pursue the others if she chooses one. Because women are unable to be both career-driven and mothers, society pressures them to select one path. On the other hand, the fig tree is conflicting because it can be interpreted as an optimistic symbol of life’s endless potential. Esther, on the other hand, is daunted by the abundance of choices because she feels she should only have one (Rymarz and Starkey). The fig tree’s divided nature symbolizes Esther’s emotional conflict amid adhering to the traditional position of a young lady in New York and her wish to be an individual.

Even though the fig tree depicts the struggles of young ladies in the community, Esther’s reluctance to select a job path or a future proves her indecisive thinking. Esther is paralyzed by the fig tree, which compels her to see herself die of hunger, foreshadowing her later trying to kill herself (77). That also warns the reader of the gravity of her mental illness and her incapacity to make decisions. Esther observes her activities from a distance, meaning that her intellect is not in agreement with her actions. The disassociation could indicate that she is either unattached to or in denial about the portions of herself that are mentally ill.

‘Esther’s unwillingness to make judgments about her destiny has a connection with her unfavorable view of herself and her idea that she is incompetent to make such a choice. “The problem was, I’d always been insufficient; I just hadn’t realized it.” In comprehending how her illness negatively impacts her thinking processes, Tank’s perspective stresses Esther’s personal fight, which is more essential than society’s effect. Many women were confronted with the limits of gender, as Perloff stated, but few of them agonized with mental well-being issues (81), “I could not really take the thought of a lady having to live a single pure life when a guy might live two lives, one destitute and the other not.” This raises the likelihood that emotional disorder is a result of an individual’s thoughts and personality as it is a result of cultural forces.

The fig’s symbolism enlarges Esther’s internal anguish; she designates the fig as “plump” and “purple,” implying that it is unusual and Mediterranean. Purple is generally connected with monarchy, luxury, and money, implying that the choices are first pleasurable owing to the abundance of options. Furthermore, figs are delicious, meaning that the positive correlations suggest Esther is originally motivated by wealth. At the conclusion of the segment, the figs shrivel and turn black, diminishing their production, signifying Esther’s uncertainties and the loss of all options. Esther’s shift as she gets deeper into misery later in the story is represented by this alteration. The inside of a fig conjures up images of sensuality and is associated with reproduction and feminine genitalia. The Greek word for fig (sykon) is the synonym of the word vulva, creating a clear relationship between the two and giving the reader a sexual image.

The associations can be used with Esther, still a virgin, because she is grappling with her sexual identity. She has never had a healthy relationship with a man or had strong enough contact with a woman to discuss these issues. According to the Bible, Adam and Eve hid inside the leaves of a fig tree to hide their shame for eating the forbidden fruit. As a result, by linking these sacred connotations to Esther’s ambiguity, it is implied that Esther is ashamed of her uncertainty. Although societal forces can inspire Esther’s outlook on the future, the representation of figs shows that her inner fight and anxiety source her to have such a pessimistic picture of her life to come.

In conclusion, individuals should know that everything cannot be achieved at once; they should be patient and take it to step by step. When Esther saw the fig trees, she was unable to decide that she wanted to have all of them, keeping in mind that choosing one meant losing the rest. Being content is the source of happiness for individuals; since Esther wanted all the things that she could not get, she led a miserable and dissatisfied life. There will be limitations whenever one wants to achieve a dream or career, but it is important not to give up but fight till it is achieved.

Rymarz, Richard, and Janina Starkey. “Only She Can Teach It! Investigating Exemplary RE Teachers”. Journal Of Religious Education , vol 69, no. 2, 2021, pp. 209-218. Springer Science And Business Media LLC .

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Dying: An Introduction

By Howard Moss

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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Vikman, Jonna. "Breaking the Bell Jar? Femininity in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar." Thesis, University of Gävle, Department of Humanities, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-7393.

This essay focuses on female identity formation in patriarchal society in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar . Both authors portray female characters who struggle with the normative gender identity. As the novels represent different eras and locations, the two characters examined in this essay, Woolf’s Lily Briscoe and Plath’s Esther Greenwood, have very little in common on the surface. However, both authors deliver similar feminist social criticism concerning the negative impact of patriarchal norms on female identity formation. This study analyzes some of these external constraints, or norms, and aims to prove that the two female characters’ ideas of womanhood and identity collide in a similar manner with those norms. Schachter’s study on identity constraints in identity formation and Sanchez and Crocker’s research on gender ideals work as the theoretical background in the study. The negative influence on Lily’s and Esther’s identity formation is similar since both characters live under a symbolical bell jar, unable to form their identity according to their own preferences. Patriarchal conventions remain a constant constraint and the two women keep struggling to find a balance between their own ideas and those of their societies. Both Lily and Esther grow to understand their own traits, desires and abilities in their respective stories, but fail to reach their preferred identity. Their resistance to adapt to gender conventions helps them to form a stronger identity, but it is an identity that remains profoundly and negatively influenced by the patriarchal norms of their societies.

Vujovic, Ana. "Power play in The Bell Jar and "The Yellow Wallpaper" : How power play is manifested towards the protagonists in The Bell Jar and "The Yellow Wallpaper"." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk och litteratur, SOL, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-13939.

Erikson, Kajsa. "No Need for Penis-Envy : A Feminist Psychoanalytic Reading of The Bell Jar." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-36034.

Pinho, Davi Ferreira de. "Of angels and demons: Virginia Woolfs homicidal legacy in Sylvia Plaths: The bell jar." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2011. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=3220.

Lagunas, Sonia. "Culture-specific issues in feminist voices a comparative study of The Bell jar and Crónica del desamor /." Morgantown, W. Va. : [West Virginia University Libraries], 2000. http://etd.wvu.edu/templates/showETD.cfm?recnum=1608.

Lyons, Kristin. "THE CASE OF LIMBO: THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN SYLVIA PLATH’S SHORT FICTION AND THE BELL JAR." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2020. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/556.

Meneses, Sandra. "Cultural Critique in a Patriarchal World : Revolutionary Suicide in Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus", "Daddy" and The Bell Jar." Thesis, Södertörn University College, School of Culture and Communication, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-3196.

This work studies three texts by Sylvia Plath: “Lady Lazarus”, “Daddy” and The Bell Jar from a feminist, gender and cultural perspective. I investigate how the texts take a stand regarding the motive and meaning of the representations of suicide in these works through the theoretical framework of African-American activist Huey Newton. The Black Panther party cofounder Newton redefines the concept of suicide. First and foremost he views suicide as a reaction to social conditions, coining the terms Reactionary Suicide and Revolutionary Suicide. Revolutionary Suicide is fueled by hope, when refusing to take part in any game of slave and master in society; instead of the normative view that suicide may be fueled by powerlessness and despair, as in the case of Reactionary Suicide. A feminist and gendered perspective on representations of suicide deconstructs traditional preconceptions of femininity and masculinity in the case of suicide and a normative reading: an embodiment by women and men of madness and rationality; viewing them as objects and subjects respectively. This study proposes that the representations of suicide in the texts from a cultural reading show the refusal of women to partake in a life defined by patriarchy, limiting and oppressing women’s everyday life. Suicide is seen through this unusual approach as an emptying out, a repositioning of the self through these performative suicides. Furthermore, through Revolutionary Suicide agency is claimed, with a hope for a better reality for the oppressed, in the intersection of the dichotomies of reality and utopia, literature and history, oppression and freedom. From a feminist perspective suicide is the catalyst to express social, political and cultural critique.

Souza, Caroline Garcia de. "When All Boundaries Fall Apart : woman’s experience and trauma in the bell jar, “Tongues of stone,” and “Mothers”." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/168949.

Cedergren, Michaela. "Madness or Femininity – A Woman's Options : A Feminist Analysis of Mental Illness in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar." Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Engelska, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-35908.

Petersen, Mariana Chaves. "The loss of language in Sylvia Plath’s narrative : woman's experience and trauma in the bell jar, "Tongues of stone," and "Mothers"." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/169004.

Boileau, Nicolas Marret Sophie. "Une expérience de l'impossible l'écriture autobiographique dans Moments of Being de Virginia Woolf, The Bell Jar de Sylvia Plath, An Autobiography de Janet Frame /." Rennes : Université Rennes 2, 2008. http://theses.scdbases.uhb.fr:8000/theseBoileau.pdf.

Dunn, Jessica. "Unearthing Real Women: Reclaiming Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf from Their Suicide Narratives." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2016. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2139.

De, Villiers Stephanie. "Divinest Sense : the construction of female madness and the negotiation of female agency in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing." Diss., University of Pretoria, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/62672.

Hasenbusch, Jan [Verfasser]. "Analysis of inclusive semileptonic B meson decays with tau lepton final states at the Belle experiment / Jan Hasenbusch." Bonn : Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Bonn, 2018. http://d-nb.info/1162953101/34.

Hagberg, Victoria. ""Jag kan inte leva utan min själ" : -en jämförelse mellan Svindlande höjders Catherine och Heathcliff och Twilight-seriens Bella och Edward." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk och litteratur, SOL, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-12915.

Pease, García Yrigoyen Franklin. "JARA, Alvaro y Sonia PINTO, Fuentes para la historia del trabajo en el reino de Chile. Legislación, 1546-1810: 2 vols. Editorial Andrés Bello, Santiago de Chile, 1982." Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2014. http://repositorio.pucp.edu.pe/index/handle/123456789/122164.

Robak, Kazimierz. "Cultural response to totalitarianism in select movies produced in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland between 1956 and 1989." [Tampa, Fla.] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://digital.lib.usf.edu/?e14.2857.

Horký, Karel. "Návrh setrvačníku jednovzpěrného čelisťového drtiče." Master's thesis, Vysoké učení technické v Brně. Fakulta strojního inženýrství, 2019. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-400467.

Sigrid and 陳韋陵. "Esther’s Self in The Bell Jar." Thesis, 2008. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/ce4peq.

Meng-yi, Chen, and 陳孟佚. "Who Is in the Bell Jar?" Thesis, 1999. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/25158360675970316680.

Lin, Tsui-ling, and 林翠玲. "The Self and Suicide in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar." Thesis, 2000. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/48363562457873039212.

Chen, Lu Mei, and 陸美珍. "Graphia and Agraphia: Writing The Bell Jar and Rupture of memory." Thesis, 1993. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/62616094535711425796.

陳郁婷. "In Search of Self: Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar." Thesis, 2010. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/17380283813083930913.

Correia, Susana Filipa Ferreira. "Política(s) em The Bell Jar e poesia selecionada de Sylvia Plath." Dissertação, 2017. https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/109091.

Correia, Susana Filipa Ferreira. "Política(s) em The Bell Jar e poesia selecionada de Sylvia Plath." Master's thesis, 2017. https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/109091.

Lee, Chia-Yang, and 李佳陽. "A Study of Images in Sylvia Plath''s The Bell Jar." Thesis, 2007. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/94124653340910976843.

Boivin-Moffet, Jacinthe. "L'expression de la révolte chez Sylvia Plath dans son Journal et The bell jar." Mémoire, 2010. http://www.archipel.uqam.ca/3563/1/M11597.pdf.

Chou, Dwin Ming Mindy, and 周惇敏. "Dead Language: A study of Depression an Abjection in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar." Thesis, 2017. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/kac42h.

Schmidtova, Alexandra. "Pramenna a Stylova Kritika Shicikovych Kvartet Jana Levoslava Bellu [The criticism of the sources and style of Jan Levoslava Belia's string quartets], series musicologicae actualis, Bratislava 1998, 125 S. [Zusammenfassung]." 2000. https://ul.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A15765.

Lamprecht, Andries Albertus. "International law in the post-1994 South African constitutions : terminology and application." Diss., 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/832.

The Bell Jar

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