The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

4 ideas

1. Esther Greenwood's summer, collapse, and uncertain recovery

   In 1953 Esther Greenwood, a scholarship student, wins a guest-editor internship at a New York women's magazine but feels numb and alienated amid the parties and prizes. Back in suburban Massachusetts she is rejected from a summer writing course, stops sleeping, reading and washing, and after a painful, unexplained electroshock session with the dismissive Dr. Gordon she makes a suicide attempt. She is later treated at a private hospital by Dr. Nolan, a woman psychiatrist, and the novel ends as she walks in to face the board that will decide her discharge, still unsure the illness will not return.

2. Depression as a sealed glass enclosure

   The bell jar is a glass dome that seals the sufferer inside her own stale air. It cuts her off from other people and distorts everything she sees, whatever her outward circumstances: Esther says she would be under it whether in Paris or on a ship. When it lifts, recovery is experienced as a suspension rather than a cure, because the sufferer knows it could descend again at any time.

3. The fig tree of unchosen lives

   Each possible future is pictured as a fig on a branching tree: poet, professor, editor, traveller, wife and mother. For a woman in a culture that allows her only one, choosing any fig means losing all the others. The paralysis this produces is its own trap: unable to choose, she starves while every fig wrinkles and falls.

4. Same treatment, opposite effect, depending on trust

   The same procedure, electroconvulsive therapy, is traumatic when Dr. Gordon gives it without explanation, rapport or proper care. It becomes relieving when Dr. Nolan warns Esther beforehand, stays with her, and keeps her word. The outcome of psychiatric treatment depends heavily on consent, preparation and the patient's trust in the clinician, not only on the intervention itself.

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