Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I dedicated much of my time to devouring American young-adult books, studiously dissecting the mechanics of American teenage life. These books, while not always masterpieces of literature, held a special place in my heart. They fascinated me with their foreignness – their depictions of proms, parking lots, and malls; their insights into the diets and lifestyles of American girls. Even though these narratives had nothing to do with my own experiences, I unexpectedly found myself relating to Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, who was a thinly veiled representation of Plath herself. Plath’s striking prose left me envious and mesmerized, revealing a sorrowful and passionate side to a language that I had only viewed as functional and rigid.
With an insatiable thirst for knowledge, I delved into understanding Plath’s status as an archetypal mid-century American girl. Plath’s legend became intertwined with the visual myths of postwar prosperity, such as white picket fences and images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing, which developed alongside the baby boom. The Bell Jar, with its disdainful depictions of ski trips to the Adirondacks and boys participating in cross-country, granted me permission to write in a certain way: intensely, incisively, in English. It also provided an emotional context for the allure of East Coast culture that captivated me and that I had been trying to decipher. However, as a teenager, I failed to fully grasp the novel’s objective: to strip away the façade of complacent satisfaction enveloping the American suburban lifestyle.
Sixty years ago, The Bell Jar made its debut in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, just a month before the author’s suicide. After a copyright dispute, it was finally published in the United States in 1971 with Plath’s name gracing the cover. The narrative begins with Esther leaving her small town in Massachusetts for New York City after securing a coveted summer job at Ladies’ Day magazine (a fictionalized version of Mademoiselle). The glitz and artifice of the fashion world shock and repulse her, leading to her unraveling upon her return to the sheltered suburbs. The plot reaches its climax with Esther’s suicide attempt and her subsequent stay at a mental institution, mirroring Plath’s own experiences at McLean Hospital.
Today, The Bell Jar is regarded as a poignant portrayal of the suffocating oppression experienced by young women during the Eisenhower era. In the introduction to her recent biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark states that The Bell Jar “exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even ‘the best minds’ of a generation crazy.” Plath struggled to reconcile her identity as an ambitious writer with society’s expectations for a woman like her – early marriage and childbearing. The power of her poetry derived from this dissonance. Quotations from her poem “Edge” illustrate this theme: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.” Clark analyzes this image and notes, “Only a dead woman is ‘perfected.’ Not perfect, perfected –– like … something controlled, without agency.”
In turn, The Bell Jar effectively paints a portrait of an America rife with contradictions. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life,” declares Esther in the opening pages. She embodies the mid-century ideal of an accomplished, educated girl, described as “drinking martinis … in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures” – but only to a certain extent. At Ladies’ Day, Esther, an aspiring poet, hopes to engage in literary discussions with her editor, only to be met with condescension. On campus, her sense of achievement is confined to four years of pseudo-freedom that culminate in marrying a respectable Yale medical student, where she is expected to subdue her ambitions and flatten out like a kitchen mat. This prospect of a secure suburban life poses an imminent threat to one who craves the chaos of experience, leaving Esther feeling “very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
The novel vividly highlights the dark side of the polished Northeast as it clashes with Esther’s disintegrating sense of self. Tight prose captures this sentiment – while swimming far from shore, Esther contemplates drowning, eventually recognizing her instinct for self-preservation (“I knew when I was beaten”). Lengthier, more meandering sentences describe the unorthodox beauty of the landscape and its correlation to Esther’s emotions. On the drive to the Adirondacks, she remarks, “the countryside, already deep under old falls of snow, turned us a bleaker shoulder, and as the fir trees crowded down from the gray hills to the road edge, so darkly green they looked black, I grew gloomier and gloomier.”
Elizabeth Hardwick, a literary critic, remarked on the novel’s exploration of the conflicting realities of youth – the desires to be invited to the Yale prom and to lose one’s virginity juxtaposed with disintegration, anger, and a perverse attraction to the macabre. As a teenager eager to unravel the mysteries of American adolescence, I was drawn to this sense of unreality and resonated with Esther’s frustrations towards her constrained environment. Through Plath’s writing, I comprehended that the seemingly joyous milestones of maturing were imbued with suppressed rage, exposing the culture that begot these rituals in the first place.
The title itself symbolizes Esther’s suffocating confinement – trapped by her surroundings and her depression, she perpetually feels as if she is “sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [her] own sour air.” According to Clark’s biography, Plath considered an alternate ending where Esther escapes to Europe, fleeing the brutality of the Northeast. It mirrors Plath’s own experiences; she produced her best works, such as The Bell Jar and the poetry collection Ariel, during her time in England. In this regard, The Bell Jar’s skepticism towards suburban prosperity foreshadows future works that delve into the dark underbelly of small-town America, profoundly influencing Jeffrey Eugenides’ portrayal of the Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides. Additionally, Esther’s description of the grimy hole in her mother’s basement, where she attempts suicide, brings to mind the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where the camera unveils the rot lurking beneath an immaculate suburban lawn.
Plath’s writing and life reflect her yearning for freedom – the freedom to be herself and to embrace her contradictions openly. However, this aspiration is intertwined with an obsession to accentuate the distance between herself and others, often leading to stereotypes and a disregard for those she differentiates herself from. As writer Janet Malcolm observes in her book The Silent Woman, which explores Plath’s legacy and biographies, critics such as Leon Wieseltier and Irving Howe have criticized Plath’s appropriation of Jewish people’s sufferings in her poetry. Through her use of Holocaust imagery in “Daddy,” she equates her individual pain with the generational trauma inflicted by Nazism. Similarly, in The Bell Jar and poems like “Lady Lazarus,” her fetishization of difference may serve as a narrow way to assert her distinction from those she views as inferior.
Consequently, the novel occasionally embodies the suffocating homogeneity Plath purportedly disdained in America. Racist imagery permeates the text, exemplified by her depiction of a Black worker in the hospital where Esther is institutionalized, which elicits discomfort. In the early pages, Esther compares her paleness to that of a “Chinaman,” and my own country is used as a symbol of distant exoticism: On a humid day, the rain “wasn’t the nice kind … that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they have in Brazil.” Plath’s focus on the bell jar that engulfs the suburbs seems limited to her own entrapment rather than a broader examination of the sociocultural confines. She struggled to look beyond herself and comprehend how that bell jar enveloped and restricted others.
In conclusion, The Bell Jar remains a powerful and complex narrative of America, brimming with contradictions. Sylvia Plath manages to expose the oppressive realities of mid-century suburban life, particularly for young women, while simultaneously embodying some of the conformities she critiques. The novel’s influence extends to contemporary works that explore the darker aspects of small-town America. Plath’s writing and biography reveal her quest for freedom and her inclination to assert her uniqueness, sometimes at the expense of others. Despite certain shortcomings and problematic elements, The Bell Jar remains a profoundly resonant and thought-provoking piece of literature that continues to captivate readers.
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