The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
Why read it
A brilliant college student wins a coveted magazine internship in New York and finds, at the exact moment she is supposed to be having the time of her life, that the world has gone flat and airless, as if she were trapped under a glass bell. Then she goes home, and it gets worse.
Plath's only novel follows Esther Greenwood's descent into depression and a suicide attempt, and her halting treatment in 1950s America. Semi-autobiographical, it captures the suffocating expectations placed on a gifted young woman, marriage, motherhood, purity, and the terror of a mind turning against itself, with a clarity and dark wit that keep it from ever becoming a case study.
Published in London in January 1963 under the pen name Victoria Lucas, just weeks before Plath died by suicide at thirty. It draws directly on her own 1953 breakdown and hospitalization. Her mother resisted its US publication for years; it finally appeared in America in 1971 and became a landmark of confessional literature.
- 01
The bell jar
The image of a stifling glass dome names the airless, distorting experience of depression better than any clinical term.
- 02
The fig tree
Esther imagines her possible futures as figs on a branch, each ripening and rotting because she cannot choose, a famous emblem of paralysis.
- 03
Doubling
Other women around Esther embody the paths, wife, career girl, mother, that both tempt and terrify her.
- 04
Treatment
Her experiences of psychiatry, including electroshock, expose the era's crude and frightening care.
The opening set-piece in New York, capped by the entire internship group getting food poisoning from crabmeat, sets the tone of glamour curdling into sickness.
Esther's meticulous, chilling contemplation of methods of suicide is rendered in the same flat, precise voice she uses for everything, which is what makes it so disturbing.
