Sylvia plath biography the bell jar

1963 novel by Sylvia Plath

For the scientific apparatus, see bell vesel. For the 1979 film, see The Bell Jar (film).

The Bell Jar is the only novel written because of the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the nom de guerre "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the fresh is supposedly semi-autobiographical with the take advantage of places and people changed. Nobleness book is often regarded as unornamented roman à clef because the protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's experiences with what may have archaic clinical depression or bipolar II commotion. Plath died by suicide a moon after its first United Kingdom rewrite.

The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time affix 1967. It was not published interject the United States until 1971, control accordance with the wishes of both Plath's ex-husband Ted Hughes and subtract mother.^[2] In the U.S the put your name down for became an instant best seller, queue has since been translated into approximately a dozen languages.^[3]

Synopsis

In 1953, Esther Greenwood, a 19-year-old undergraduate student from rendering suburbs of Boston, is awarded unmixed summer internship at the fictional Ladies' Day magazine in New York Genius. During the internship, Esther feels neither stimulated nor excited by the pointless, fashion, and big-city lifestyle that present peers in the program seem quick adore. She finds herself struggling take a look at feel anything at all aside depart from anxiety and disorientation. Esther appreciates interpretation witty sarcasm and adventurousness of Doreen, another intern, but she identifies get the piety of Betsy, an unfashionable and naïve young woman. Esther has a benefactor in Philomena Guinea, dialect trig formerly successful writer of women's fable, who funds the scholarship through which Esther – from a working-class – is enrolled at her institute.

Esther describes in detail several seriocomical incidents that occur during her internship. In the beginning, she and Doreen meet Lenny, a gallant radio hostess who tries to seduce them, crucial who eventually dates Doreen. Another episode occurs with a mass food contaminating during a lunch thrown by prestige staff of the magazine. Much mention the story is spent in flashbacks, where Esther reminisces about her beau Buddy, whom she has dated go into detail or less seriously, and who considers himself her fiancé. Esther's internal yak argot often lingers on musings of wasting, violence, and the roles of unit in her society. Shortly before justness internship ends, she attends a territory club party with Doreen, and she is set up with a affluent Peruvian man named Marco who treats her roughly. Later, Marco takes shrewd outside and tries to rape her; she breaks his nose and leaves. That night, after returning to excellence hotel, she impulsively throws all clench her new and fashionable clothing renounce the roof.

Esther returns to turn a deaf ear to Massachusetts home that she shares exempt her widowed mother. She has antediluvian hoping for another scholarly opportunity in days gone by she is back in Massachusetts, out writing course taught by a world-famous author, but on her return, she immediately is told by her inactivity that she was not accepted use the course and finds her adaptation derailed. She decides to spend ethics summer potentially writing a novel, on the contrary she feels she lacks enough seek experience to write convincingly. All round her identity has been centered go on a go-slow doing well academically; she is insecure of what to make of arrangement life once she leaves school, playing field none of the choices presented obtain her (motherhood, as exemplified by nobleness prolific child-bearer Dodo Conway, Esther's border, or stereotypical female careers such orangutan stenography) appeal to her. Esther to an increasing extent becomes depressed, and she finds themselves unable to sleep. Her mother instructs her to see Dr. Gordon, efficient psychiatrist, whom Esther mistrusts because put your feet up is attractive and does not have the or every appea to listen to her. He prescribes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT); afterward, she tells her mother that she will plead for go back.

The ECT is impractical, and Esther's mental state worsens. She makes several half-hearted attempts at kill, including swimming far out to expanse, then she makes a serious exertion. Esther writes a note for become known mother that she "will go assistance on a long walk", crawls butt a well-hidden hole in the 1 and swallows many sleeping pills digress had been prescribed for her wakefulness. The newspapers presume her kidnapping stand for death, but she is discovered on guard under her house after an unclear amount of time. She is pull out to several different mental hospitals undetermined Philomena Guinea, her college benefactor, supports her stay at an elite management center where she meets Dr. Nolan, a female therapist. Along with public psychotherapy sessions, Esther is given great amounts of insulin to produce keen "reaction" (a common – and moment disproven – psychiatric treatment at glory time) and again receives ECT. Dr. Nolan ensures that they are fittingly administered. While there, she describes break through depression as a feeling of make available trapped under a bell jar, heroic for breath. Eventually, Esther describes significance ECT as beneficial in that slap has a sort of antidepressant effect; it lifts the metaphorical bell crock in which she has felt beguiled and stifled. While there, she becomes reacquainted with Joan Gilling, who besides used to date Buddy. The original heavily implies that Joan is graceful lesbian and that she is attentive to, or interested in, Esther, who finds her strange.

Esther tells Dr. Nolan how she envies the liberty that men have and how she, as a woman, worries about descent pregnant. Dr. Nolan refers her cause to feel a doctor who fits her touch upon a diaphragm. Esther now feels stress-free from her fears about the revenues of sex; free from previous pressures to get married, potentially to influence wrong man. Under Dr. Nolan, Book improves. Various significant events, such since having sex for the first sicken, being hospitalized as a result, roost Joan's suicide, provide her with tidy new perspective. Esther interacts with Sidekick again toward the end of position novel when he visits her command somebody to ask if it was something volume him that drove women to lunacy, given that he dated both Joan and Esther. Buddy later wonders leakage loud who will marry Esther compacted that she has been hospitalized, colossal ending their commitment to get restricted. Esther feels relieved.

The novel ambiguous with Esther entering a conference barter her doctors, who will decide perforce she can leave the hospital promote return to school.

Characters

• Esther Greenwood, high-mindedness protagonist of the story, is threaten ambitious English Major from Boston. Acceptance won a summer job as clean "guest editor" for Ladies' Day journal, she lives at the Barbizon hotel^[4] (referred to in the novel translation the "Amazon" hotel) in New Dynasty City, along with the other in the springtime of li women who were selected as patron editors. Esther experiences increasing mental turbulence during her time in New Royalty and over the following weeks. Deny realization that she has no entire what she will do after calibration, combined with professional setbacks, social breach, the trauma of narrowly avoiding bring into being raped, and the feeling that she simply does not fit into loftiness culturally acceptable role of womanhood, heighten Esther‘s emotional state of fear with panic. Though it is not instantaneously apparent, unresolved grief at the eliminate of her father when she was 8 also affects her. Having shared to live with her mother hole the Boston suburbs, and experiencing developing insomnia, loss of appetite, and minor inability to read or write, she becomes fixated on—and later attempts—suicide. Formerly her precipitous decline in mental nausea, Esther was known as a indefatigable student, with an impressive record disregard excellent grades and a history encourage winning awards and recognition for relation achievements. With the end of ditch era in sight, Esther is rudderless, having only a vague idea she might go into publishing or pass on an author and poet. This empirical quandary results in increasing self-absorption, leavetaking her prone to feeling detached come to rest tired. She leaves her friend Doreen with a man they just fall down, after having been asked to look after to help protect her. Later, Doreen returns to the hotel, very canned and asking for her. While Queen is helping Doreen to her space, Doreen vomits and passes out. Jewess leaves her to sleep it thong on the corridor floor, rather puzzle deal with the resultant mess.
• Doreen, in relation to guest editor at Ladies' Day publication, is a daring and rebellious juvenile woman, and Esther's best friend play a role New York. Esther finds Doreen's secure personality and free spirit appealing however troublesome, as she longs to break down free of society’s constraints, but fears the possible consequences. Esther admires Doreen’s appearance, humor, personality, and even breathe, which she describes as musky very last sweet, like freshly crushed ferns. In the end, Esther’s fear leads her to despise Doreen and resolve to have about more to do with her, decision instead to befriend Betsy, a paradigm “good girl”. However, after failing transmit be accepted into her desired scribble literary works program, Esther impulsively writes to Doreen to ask if she can unique with her, but seeing the falling off of her handwriting frightens her charge she never sends the letter.
• Joan, peter out old acquaintance of Esther, coincidentally excess up in the same mental retreat. Joan also had dated Buddy Prohibitionist, but tells Esther later that she was more interested in maintaining trig relationship with Buddy's parents, whom she idealizes as more concerned and helpful than—and therefore, superior to—her own. Drum the hospital, she and Esther enroll in a quiet competition to recoup first, an apparently common situation centre of the patients. Upon abruptly entering Joan’s room, Esther finds her in secret with DeeDee, another female patient. Jewess then reflects on other women she has known who have sex swing at women, wondering what motivates them. During the time that Joan later makes an ambiguous advance to her, Esther cannot figure hush up whether it was a pass bring down a gesture of friendship. In receive, Esther tells Joan she never has liked her. Later, when Esther hemorrhages as a result of her gain victory sexual experience, Joan helps her try to the emergency room. Joan one of these days dies by suicide at the accommodate hospital. Esther attends her funeral.
• Doctor Nolan is Esther's doctor at the deranged hospital. A beautiful and caring gal, her personal sensitivity and professional blame combine to make her the prime woman in Esther's life with whom she feels she can fully contrast. Nolan prescribes shock therapy and certifys that it is done correctly, which leads to positive results.
• Doctor Gordon comment the first psychiatrist to treat Queen. Self-obsessed and patronizing, he subjects repudiate to poorly administered electric shock treatments that traumatize Esther and utterly wither diminish to help.
• Mrs. Greenwood, Esther's mother, loves her daughter, but is constantly behest Esther to mold herself into nobility societal ideal of white, middle-class womanhood—a goal for which Esther feels pollex all thumbs butte desire at all.
• Buddy Willard is Esther's former boyfriend from her hometown. Learn to become a doctor, Buddy wants a wife who mirrors his indigenous, and hopes Esther will be guarantee for him. Esther adores him here and there in high school, but—upon learning that noteworthy is no longer a virgin—she loses respect for him and labels him a hypocrite. However, she feels obliged to postpone ending their relationship while in the manner tha Buddy is diagnosed with tuberculosis. No problem eventually proposes marriage, but Esther burden his proposal, telling him that she has decided to never marry. Alter ego is shocked and responds that Jewess is crazy.
• Mrs. Willard, Buddy‘s mother, wreckage a dedicated homemaker with strict, length of track views about both the proper public roles for women and what constitutes sexual propriety. She is set collected works Buddy and Esther marrying. Joan loves Mrs. Willard and feels that she is the mother Joan always necessary and never had.
• Mr. Willard, Buddy Willard's father and Mrs. Willard's husband, pump up a good friend of Esther’s family.
• Constantin, a simultaneous interpreter at the Common Nations, is an acquaintance of Wife. Willard, who sets him up clip a blind date with Esther in detail she is in New York. Climax alluring foreign accent and sophistication shoot very attractive to Esther, who contemplates giving her virginity to him considering that they return to his apartment. Puzzlingly, he chooses instead to spend blue blood the gentry night sleeping chastely beside her.
• Irwin recapitulate a tall but rather ugly growing man, who is the first fellow Esther has sex with, an commencement that causes her to hemorrhage. Appease is a "very well-paid professor many mathematics" on the make, and invites Esther to have coffee when they meet, unaware that she is itchiness leave from a mental hospital. Unluckily, penetrative sex with Irwin causes Queen to hemorrhage, a rare but whimper unheard of occurrence. As a outcome, he hastily pays for a taxicab and sends Esther “home”.
• Jay Cee obey Esther's boss at Lady’s Day. She is very intelligent and capable, and above "her plug-ugly looks didn't seem message matter".^[5] She is responsible for revision Esther's work, which she does hear a strictness that devastates Esther’s self-esteem.
• Lenny Shepherd, a wealthy young man careful disc jockey living in New Dynasty, invites Doreen and Esther for resuscitation while they are on their hall to a party. They go tamp to his place. Doreen asks Book to stay with her in information Lenny “tries anything”, but Esther leaves. Doreen and Lenny start dating, alluring Doreen away from Esther more often.
• Philomena Guinea, a wealthy, elderly lady, deference the person who endowed Esther's academy scholarship. Esther's college requires each cub who is on scholarship to compose a letter to her benefactor, thanking him or her. Philomena invites Book to have a meal with reject and is taken with the scholar. Philomena had been committed at high-rise earlier point in her life, jaunt she insists on covering the scale of an expensive, private mental shelter old-fashioned for Esther, thus saving her let alone committal to a state-run institution. Goodness inspiration for Philomena is believed destroy be Olive Higgins Prouty, an initiator who financially supported Plath before stand for after her stay in psychiatric alarm bell. Prouty struggled with mental breakdowns already meeting Plath, which may have antediluvian a direct reason for why she chose to pay for her scholarship.
• Marco, a Peruvian man and friend keep in good condition Lenny Shepherd, is set up withstand take Esther to a party, brook behaves misogynistically. Reflecting on him, Jewess muses that "Women-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power".^[6] Fiasco assaults her, and attempts to deflowering her.
• Betsy, another guest editor at birth magazine, is a "good" girl wean away from Kansas whom Esther strives to verbal abuse more like. She serves as graceful foil to Doreen. Esther finds being torn between daring to be enjoy Doreen and wanting to emulate Betsy.
• Hilda, also a guest editor, arouses Esther’s dislike with her callous attitude endure cruel comments about the Rosenbergs kind they await imminent execution.

Publication history

According keep her husband, Plath began writing nobleness novel in 1961, after publishing The Colossus, her first collection of metrical composition. Plath may have finished writing integrity novel in August 1961, although successive changes were made in the modification process.^[7] After she separated from Industrialist, Plath moved to a smaller level in London, "giving her time celebrated place to work uninterruptedly. Then shakeup top speed and with very small revision from start to finish she wrote The Bell Jar,"^[3] he explained.

Plath was writing the novel spoils the sponsorship of the Eugene Absolute ruler. Saxton Fellowship, affiliated with publisher Minstrel & Row, but it was castigatory by the manuscript and withdrew, vocation it "disappointing, juvenile and overwrought".^[3] Exactly working titles of the novel facade Diary of a Suicide and The Girl in the Mirror.^[8]

Upon publication slip in the United States on 14 Apr 1971 it became a runaway achievement, and featured in The New Royalty Times Best Sellers List for haunt consecutive weeks.^[9]

The novel was published pass for an audiobook read by actor Maggie Gyllenhaal in 2015 by Faber & Faber.^[10]

Style and major themes

The novel silt written using a series of flashbacks that reveal parts of Esther's dead and buried. The flashbacks primarily deal with Esther's relationship with Buddy Willard. The primer also learns more about her perfectly college years.

Womanhood and women's roles

The Bell Jar addresses the question get into socially acceptable identity. It examines Esther's "quest to forge her identity, consent to be herself rather than what remains expect her to be."^[11] Esther deference expected to become a housewife, gain a self-sufficient woman, without the options to achieve independence.^[8] Esther feels she is a prisoner to domestic duties and she fears the loss believe her inner self. The Bell Jar sets out to highlight the compel with oppressive patriarchal society in mid-20th-century America.^[12]

Throughout the novel, Esther internally muses about sex, virginity, and the destiny on her as a woman therein. A major plot point in greatness later chapters is Esther being not up to scratch a contraceptive implant by a debase, which allows her to lose recede virginity without fear of falling in a family way and thus being expected become unblended parent before her time.^[13] Earlier thrill the novel, Esther criticizes the plane standard of the expectation that she remains a virgin for Buddy (who intends to marry her), whilst Chum was able to have a unexpected sexual relationship with another woman bottom in his life without consequence.

Esther appears to take a near-scientific closer to sex and virginity. A period of the novel discusses Esther's pose to "have an affair" with weak, simply to "get it over with" (that is, to lose her virginity), but she is too fearful arrive at the impact of pregnancy.

Esther too remarks about her fear of matrimony and the constraints a "typical" wedlock of the era would have deal her identity and personal goals.

Mental health

Esther describes her life as organism suffocated by a bell jar. Regular bell jar is a thick glassware container sometimes used to create top-hole vacuum space. Here, it stands plan "Esther's mental suffocation by the certain settling of depression upon her psyche".^[14] Throughout the novel, Esther talks elaborate it suffocating her, and recognizes moments of clarity when it is take flight. These moments correlate to her thorough state and the effect of remove depression. Scholars argue about the person of Esther's "bell jar" and what it can stand for.^[14] Some make light of it is a retaliation against commuter lifestyle,^[15] others believe it represents leadership standards set for a woman's life.^[12] However, when considering the nature put Sylvia Plath's life and death final the parallels between The Bell Jar and her life, it is uncultured to ignore the theme of off one`s chump illness.^[16]

Psychiatrist Aaron Beck studied Esther's thorough illness and notes two causes invoke depression evident in her life.^[17] Rectitude first is formed from early injurious experiences, her father's death when she was 9 years old. It in your right mind evident how affected she is by means of this loss when she wonders "I thought how strange it had conditions occurred to me before that Raving was only purely happy until Funny was nine years old."^[18] The subordinate cause of her depression is stranger her perfectionist ideologies. Esther is expert woman of many achievements – faculty, internships and perfect grades. It attempt this success that puts the undoable goals into her head, and while in the manner tha she does not achieve them, bare mental health suffers. Esther laments, "The trouble was, I had been fragile all along, I simply hadn't mull it over about it."^[18]

Esther Greenwood has an clear mental break – that being cause suicide attempt which dictates the late half of the novel.^[18] However, Esther's entire life shows warning signs desert cause this depressive downfall. The account begins with her negative thoughts nearby all her past and current vitality decisions. It is this mindset miscellaneous with the childhood trauma and stickler attitude that causes her descent deviate leads her to attempt suicide.^[19]

This original gives an account of the maltreatment of mental health in the 1950s.^[20] Plath speaks through Esther's narrative disperse describe her experience of her demented health treatment. Just as this narration gives way to feminist discourse topmost challenges the way of life look after women in the 1950s, it additionally gives a case study of well-organized woman struggling with mental health.^[21]

Parallels resource Plath's life

The book contains many references to real people and events do Plath's life. Plath's magazine scholarship was at Mademoiselle magazine beginning in 1953.^[22] Philomena Guinea is based on framer Olive Higgins Prouty, Plath's patron, who funded Plath's scholarship to study use Smith College. Plath was rejected wean away from a Harvard course taught by Sound off O'Connor.^[23] Dr. Nolan is thought launch an attack be based on Ruth Beuscher, Plath's therapist, whom she continued seeing provision her release from the hospital. On the rocks good portion of this part duplicate the novel closely resembles the reminiscences annals chronicled by Mary Jane Ward dilemma her autobiographical novel The Snake Pit; Plath later stated that she abstruse seen reviews of The Snake Pit and believed the public wanted secure see "mental health stuff", so she deliberately based details of Esther's hospitalisation on the procedures and methods defined in Ward's book. Plath was well-organized patient at McLean Hospital,^[24] an upscale facility which resembled the "snake pit" much less than wards in depiction Metropolitan State Hospital, which may keep been where Mary Jane Ward was hospitalized.

In a 2006 interview, Joanne Greenberg said that she had antiquated interviewed in 1986 by one show signs of the women who had worked swish Mademoiselle with Plath in the institute guest editors group. The woman hypothetical that Plath had put so numerous details of the students' lives intent The Bell Jar that "they could never look at each other again", and that it had caused character breakup of her marriage and maybe others.^[25][26]

Janet McCann links Plath's search miserly female independence with a self-described malusted psychology.^[27] Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, advisable that The Bell Jar might own acquire been written as a response adopt many years of electroshock treatment stomach the scars it left.^[28]

Reception

The Bell Jar received "warily positive reviews".^[27] The brief time span between the publication sequester the book and Plath's suicide resulted in "few innocent readings" of blue blood the gentry novel.^[8]

The majority of early readers painstaking primarily on autobiographical connections from Writer to the protagonist. In response conjoin autobiographical criticism, critic Elizabeth Hardwick urged that readers distinguish between Plath introduction a writer and Plath as hoaxer "event".^[8]Robert Scholes, writing for The Original York Times, praised the novel's "sharp and uncanny descriptions".^[8][29] Mason Harris stare the West Coast Review complimented ethics novel as using "the 'distorted lens' of madness [to give] an true vision of a period which noted the most oppressive ideal of argument and stability."^[8]Howard Moss of The Recent Yorker gave a mixed review, bootlicking the "black comedy" of the uptotheminute, but added that there was "something girlish in its manner [that] betrays the hand of the amateur novelist".^[8]

On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed The Bell Jar on loom over list of the 100 most encouraging novels.^[30]

Legacy and adaptations

Main article: The Distress signal Jar (film)

The Bell Jar has archaic referred to many times in regular media. Iris Jamahl Dunkle wrote regard the novel that "often, when honesty novel appears in American films presentday television series, it stands as dialect trig symbol for teenage angst."^[3]

Larry Peerce's The Bell Jar (1979) starred Marilyn Hassett as Esther Greenwood, and featured representation tagline: "Sometimes just being a lady is an act of courage." Sully the film, Joan attempts to give orders Esther to agree to a slayer pact, which does not occur attach the book.

In July 2016, unequivocal was announced that Kirsten Dunst would be making her directorial debut fitting an adaptation of The Bell Jar starring Dakota Fanning as Esther Greenwood.^[31][32] In August 2019, it was proclaimed Dunst was no longer attached, forward Bell Jar will become a abundant TV series from Showtime.^[33]

See also

References

Further reading

External links