The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is a semiautobiographical novel by author Sylvia Plath, originally published under her pen name Victoria Lucas. Plath was best known for her contribution to the confessional poetry genre with the collections Ariel and The Colossus and Other Poems. After her death by suicide in 1963, she received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. The Bell Jar is Plath’s only novel, inspired by her experience battling depression. It explores themes of identity, feminism, and transformation through the story of 19-year-old Esther Greenwood. In the novel, she experiences a mental breakdown and eventual recovery.

Plot Summary

In summer 1953, college student Esther Greenwood is working as a writing intern at the prestigious Ladies’ Day magazine in New York City. Despite the exciting chance to escape her small-town upbringing, Esther feels listless and depressed. She struggles to define her identity and decide what she wants to do with her life after graduation, feeling stifled by pressure to conform to society’s stereotype of womanhood. During her internship, Esther experiences a series of jarring events, including an intense bout of food poisoning and a narrow escape from a would-be rapist.

Esther reflects on her unsatisfying relationship with her boyfriend, Buddy Willard. Buddy is a practical, conservative medical student who thinks Esther’s artistic ambitions are a passing whim. Esther resents him after discovering that he slept with another woman while they were dating but expects her to be a virgin until she marries him. Buddy is currently in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis. He asked Esther to marry him, but Esther turned him down. She is waiting for him to recover so that she can break up with him.

Esther’s mental state continues to decline. After her internship ends and she is rejected from a prestigious summer writing course, she returns home to the suburbs of Boston, where she lives with her widowed mother. Esther and her mother have a strained relationship, as Mrs. Greenwood doesn’t understand her daughter’s unconventional ambitions or her mental illness. At home, Esther falls deeper into depression and begins to plan her suicide, making several unsuccessful attempts. She visits a psychiatrist named Dr. Gordon, who prescribes her a course of electroshock therapy. The treatment is botched, leaving Esther traumatized. Shortly afterward she makes a serious suicide attempt by overdosing on her mother’s sleeping pills but survives and is admitted to an inpatient psychiatric facility.

At the mental hospital, Esther is treated by Dr. Nolan, a female psychiatrist who is much more understanding and receptive than Dr. Gordon. Esther describes her depression as a suffocating “bell jar” which descends on her and cuts her off from the rest of the world. Dr. Nolan prescribes Esther electroshock therapy and insulin treatments as well as talk therapy, which helps her start down the road to recovery. Esther also makes emotional breakthroughs with Dr. Nolan and begins to see her as a mother figure.

Esther meets a fellow patient named Joan Gilling, a girl who attended college with her and also dated Buddy Willard. Esther dislikes Joan but is fascinated by her, seeing Joan as a mirror of herself.

Dr. Nolan writes Esther a prescription for birth control. Esther embarks on a quest to lose her virginity, hoping that the experience will free her from societal expectations and help her gain a sense of identity. After having sex with a man named Irwin, she hemorrhages and goes to the emergency room. Still, she feels satisfied to have freed herself from the misogynistic double standard surrounding casual sex.

Shortly after Esther loses her virginity, Joan hangs herself. Esther attends Joan’s funeral and speculates on her own future, wondering whether her depression will return someday to shut her back inside the bell jar. Buddy visits Esther at the hospital. His sickness has matured him, and they both recognize their incompatibility and end their relationship. The novel concludes with Esther waiting for a release interview with a panel of her doctors, who will decide whether she can be released from the hospital and go back to college.