Musings of an Educator, Writer, & Lifelong Learner

Nota Bene: This post is littered with spoilers. Do NOT proceed if you wish to preserve the discussed text as terra incognita.

The Bell Jar, first published in 1963, is Sylvia Plath’s only novel. It is the first novel to make depression its central theme, a choice of subject matter made more tragically resounding by the fact that the author would go on to take her own life a mere month after her novel’s publication.

Plath was primarily a poet, and her poetry is that rare compound of qualities: unsparingly acerbic and intricately beautiful. Take her poem on marriage for instance.

The Applicant
BY SYLVIA PLATH

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit——

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

This poem makes the incisive argument that, too often, people marry because they’re trying to fix something about themselves. They feel less than whole and need someone to caulk those gaps, and, in this mode of partnership, wives, far more often than husbands, end up playing the reparative role. In this sense of making up for their husband’s defects, women are comparable to “[a] glass eye, false teeth or a crutch”. Plath is not just addressing how husbands treat their wives but dissecting how society, with barely veiled coercion, instructs husbands to think about them and what they can be used for.

The last stanza viciously sums up the functions, physical and spiritual, a wife should perform for the run-of-the-mill broken man, the person applying for marriage, the husband-to-be. The tone of the speaker in the poem—who is society figuratively depicted as someone working at an agency processing marriage applications—turns more strident and insistent: marry her because you are good for nothing else, you who are have been let down and have come up to being of little worth; she will be your comfort, your eternal consolation prize.

Such was, I believe, how Plath genuinely felt about the institution of marriage in her time: demeaning, absurd, and stifling. The wife is just a “thing” to be given by society to broken men. These broken men need help and support, but giving them a wife as a cure-all is hardly the answer.

This sentiment about gender roles is one she echoes in a different register in her novel through her author surrogate Esther Greenwood, the scholarship student. About becoming a secretary on top of being an English major to make herself more employable, she says, “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.” (p. 87). Wishing to bask in her own shine, she is loathe to adopt the restrictive conventions society has set for women.

This is where the trouble begins, how her spiral into depression starts. Esther does not fit in, though she has tried to find ways to want the things society wants her to want, and restrictive gender roles contribute to this struggle.

Depression is a mental health issue that is etiologically complex as this article by Harvard Health expertly explains. However, what articles by medical and psychological professionals are not positioned to say—and what the author of a novel is—is how society creates expectations that can be suffocating because they are too narrowly conceived. Not everyone will find fulfilment within conventional definitions of success, not especially if even getting on a path to success itself is a daunting feat.

Working hard for something you can’t be sure you want: this is Esther’s life until things don’t go her way; then, she no longer even feels the urge to try. Anhedonia sets in.

First, it’s her all-expenses-paid internship at a fashion magazine in New York, a position she clinched by winning a writing contest that the magazine held. The internship experience in the big city does not go her way; she discovers fashion, and maybe even the big city, isn’t for her. Then, she finds out that she did not get into a summer writing course: a big blow because, without it, she has to spend the summer in her home in the suburbs of outer Boston, a setting she finds dreary. She reflects:

All through June the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap.

p. 132

Then, she tries to write a novel, but there is writer’s block, and it only makes her more aware of the dreariness of her setting, of her present situation, of her life in general. So she puts that off for when she has acquired more life experience. Her attempt to write her thesis on Finnegan’s Wake for her English major with honors is a non-starter, too. And when she decides to forget the honors requirement and to complete a regular English major, she realizes she doesn’t meet the requirements because, as an honors student, she could make, and did make, the choice to skip requisite survey coursework, like Beowulf. One roadblock leads to the next. It is a flood of impossibilities.

Yet, even during her internship in New York, before her spiral of negative thoughts began, a sense of perceived inadequacy was already eating away at her.

For the first time in my life, sitting there in the soundproof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

p. 88

The overachieving student who has no idea what is it they truly want to achieve; this is who Esther is. To put an image to her situation, Esther draws from a short story she recently read involving a fig tree, and visualizes her inability to choose what she truly wants, as so:

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

pp. 88-89

She is paralyzed by a wealth of choices. It’s critical to emphasize that these choices all require commitment or the success they promise will not be achieved (even the choice of having many interesting lovers). This is the struggle. It’s not just a matter of choosing but a matter of choosing something and sticking with it. And the fear is that halfway through, the person might realize the choice is mistaken, but they’re locked in and can’t really switch tracks. Esther’s paralysis makes sense then; she doesn’t want to make a lasting wrong choice.

But there’s something else at work here. Are these choices truly Esther’s own or pathways to fulfilment society has prescribed? With figurative compression, we may ask, does Esther even want figs? What if Esther never had a chance to figure out what would make her happy because of the way achievement culture is set up? What if the pressure to achieve has been slowly building up from a long time back?

[…]I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

After that—in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and black bottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day—I had never been really happy again.

[…]I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.

p. 86

Esther, the scholarship girl, the overachiever, can never be enough to meet the expectations society has set for her. Her self-image is a perverse reflection of how society expects someone like her to turn out. If she falls short in any respect, she will feel inadequate and alienated from her own sense of self. If she meets those expectations, she still can’t be sure those accomplishments are things she really wants.

It is a double-bind that most of us are only too familiar with, in this no-internship-without-job-experience day and age. Ours is a society that fetishisizes aspirations and achievements.

There is nothing wrong with deriving great fulfilment from aspirations achieved. Well-deserved! Yet, to fixate on such narrow notions of success and fulfilment can be a recipe for disaster where a person’s mental health is concerned, especially if it’s a young person.

In my time as an undergrad at Columbia University, in one particular academic year, the school had a spate of nine suicides, breaking a macabre record. This was news dizzying and gravely upsetting to hear. The great pity of it all is this: even if these students had flunked all their courses, one has to ask, what’s the big deal? It can seem like a big deal at the time—I do not wish to minimize this type of setback—but in the grand scheme of things? The tragedy here is one of being blinkered by expectations and stress; these young adults, unfortunately, were unable to see past the bell jar of the college environment.

In Esther’s case, she, thankfully, gets the psychiatric help she needs and takes a leave of absence from college. But, outside that environment, she is still unsure who she is, now that her streak of success seems to have run dry. She desperately toys with a whole new identity for herself.

I thought if I ever did get to Chicago, I might change my name to Elly Higginbottom for good. Then nobody would know I had thrown up a scholarship at a big eastern women’s college and mucked up a month in New York and refused a perfectly solid medical student for a husband who would one day be a member of the AMA and earn pots of money. In Chicago, people would take me for what I was.

I would be simple Elly Higginbottom, the orphan. People would love me for my sweet, quiet nature. They wouldn’t be after me to read books and write long papers on the twins in James Joyce. And one day I might just marry a virile, but tender, garage mechanic and have a big cowy family, like Dodo Conway.

p. 154

There is clear derision in the way she thinks about the good life outside of the white-collar worldview; it is clear that she, personally, would never be happy to have a mechanic husband, however loving, and mother many children. Yet, what would make her happy? To have her success back? Not exactly. Now that the streak has been snapped, the illusion of fulfilment, let alone happiness, cannot be recovered.

When Philomena Guinea, the woman funding Esther’s scholarship, performs the boon of removing Esther from a public hospital to a private one for her in-patient psychiatric treatment, Esther is made aware of her own anhedonia and general numbness.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

p. 217

Nothing can be the way it was because the way things were was never something Esther truly wanted. She had simply gone along with the program. It turned out adequately well—until it didn’t. She searches herself, with apprehension for her future plans, and wonders:

How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

p. 282

Yet, is it a distortion if the bell jar merely shows the person under it that they never truly wanted the life they thought they wanted? When her psychiatrist tells to treat her stay at the asylum as “a bad dream”, she seizes upon the bitter irony of the statement.

A bad dream.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

A bad dream.

p. 278

A bad dream of inauthenticity, false desires, stifling expectations, stress, alienation, disappointment, brittle aspirations, and hollow achievements. A dream gone bad because that was all Esther’s hoped-for life was: a dream society fed her, the overachieving student.

While Plath’s poem “The Applicant” unsparingly castigates the harmful absurdities that are the social conventions embedded in the traditional idea of marriage, her novel The Bell Jar presents a subtler criticism: modern society glorifies aspirational identities founded on middle-class, white-collar notions of fulfilment and respectability, and this adulatory form of tunnel vision can present serious consequences for the aspirant who falls short.

What Esther wants, at bottom, is an identity that she can already call her own. It can be incredibly alienating to have to achieve your own sense of self, to have selfhood denied unless you succeed in your chosen ventures. What Esther resorts to, in a maladaptive way, is sealing herself off in a bell jar of apathy and anhedonia (much like what we observe today with the alarming surge in numbers of hikikomori.) The solace is this: if she no longer wants anything from the world, the world cannot hurt her anymore with its indifference to her tenuous dreams of becoming someone.

Though social conventions regarding gender roles have since undergone many changes, The Bell Jar remains starkly relevant as a literary work for its exploration of how achievement culture affects a young person’s self-image and mental health.

Works Cited

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1963.