Required Reading: “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath

By Justin Wymer
St. Albans High School

“Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye,” Emily Dickinson once said. In her largely autobiographical novel, “The Bell Jar,” Sylvia Plath proves that this eye is hers, making insanity seem beautifully rational by painting despair with poetry.

A lowly daughter of a shorthand teacher, Esther Greenwood earns a guest editorship in New York at a ritzy glamour magazine. Because of her impeccable academic record, she attends the program on full scholarship despite her family’s meager income.

Alone and unaccustomed to the city, she slowly falls into herself, finding a pained sort of comfort in diving into books instead of attending sponsored galas with the other girls. She feels estranged from the very world around her because of apprehensions, cemented in a personally-crafted hell.

Slowly, Esther’s world begins to unravel.

In addition to free trinkets and gifts, Esther also receives from her sponsors food-poisoned avocados and a cold shoulder. Her college boyfriend, Buddy, only adds salt to her wounds by telling her that he slept with a busty waitress.

Her self-consciousness and self-hatred heightened, Esther makes it her prerogative to lose her virginity. And, after almost being raped by a UN interpreter, she does — with a math professor — but soon hemorrhages and is rushed to the hospital.

Blankly, she moves along in a chipper-seeming world. She makes several attempts to kill herself — unsuccessful hangings because of low ceilings, tries at slitting her wrists that result in mere scrapes.

Finally, Esther takes a bottle of sleeping pills and is found days later in a ventilation hole in her basement. Thus starts her route into the world of accepted madness — mental hospitals.

Here, Esther undergoes ill-administered electroshock therapy and decides that bathing is overrated. Nothing seems to matter. To her, breath is a hindrance, and any sort of emotion is too excruciating to feel.

After a series of ups and downs, defeats and triumphs, the book ends on an optimistic note — a promising evaluation with doctors that hints that Esther will soon be released from the hospital.

Although it has a vividly disturbing plot, that’s not what’s so spectacular about the book. The interesting aspect lies in the style of writing. There are no twists of circumstance. There is no compelling external conflict that makes one eager to turn the page.

When I first opened “The Bell Jar,” I was hit by the depth of Plath’s words — pithy and poetic — that seemed to imply deeper meaning as well as a carefully-constructed plot. She has a bold, frank, personal style of writing that makes one want to relish in Esther’s victories and weep in the face of her failures.

An interesting fact about “The Bell Jar” is that it’s mainly a fictionalized account of Plath’s own life. She was the type of woman who made her pain into literary fruit, making sadness seem almost desirable through the impact of her words.

“The Bell Jar” is a psychological novel, and it takes an introspective reader to truly appreciate it. It is one of my favorite books and has its reasons for being a classic, but it’s not the type of book that’s for everyone.