Overall, I really enjoyed Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar. I just have a few closing points I would like to touch on:
- I thought that our class discussion on the relevance of the title of the book was quite illuminating. The metaphor of Esther's illness being a bell jar is quite apt and precise. For one, she becomes a subject of study due to her illness and unable to hide and is comparable to a specimen under observation in a bell jar. Second, like a bell jar traps what ever is underneath it, Esther's condition traps her in asylums and even inside her own head. Furthermore, she is isolated from others by circumstances that are hard to understand for her loved ones. The glass of a bell jar indisputably exists, however it's transparent so not really distinct for observers like Esther's illness. The part of this metaphor I did not think of was the effect on Esther's perception under the bell jar. The jar distorts her vision and changes the way she sees the world around her. This information is crucial for understanding Plath's narrative voice and Esther's portrayals of the people around her. It nuances so many of the topics we've discussed in class.
- I'm extremely interested to read the note at the end of book for Friday. Unfortunately, I will not be in class on Friday because of a college visit so I will not get to weigh in with the context it provides.
- There aren't that many central male characters in The Bell Jar. The most important men seem to be Buddy Willard and Doctor Gordon, both being representatives of males and medical professionals. Esther is not very nice about either. In fact, I think she says that she hates them both. Esther's intense reservations about men also tie into her reservations about marriage. However, Esther's ideas about medical professionals seem to change with her bond to Doctor Nolan. Unfortunately for guys, this probably just makes her more sure that men are generally pretty bad. It's interesting that despite Esther's concerns about men, marriage, and the expectations of heterosexual relationships, that she reacts so strongly against Joan's proposed homosexuality. Maybe this shows that some social customs still strongly influence Esther...?
- I think that expectations are very central to this novel. It seems that Esther lives for her expectations and they push her in so many directions that she eventually is driven mad by them. The first asylum setting puts a whole new set of expectations onto her. She is supposed to be crazy and badly behaved so she is. Then, she is moved to Doctor Nolan's care and things change. I would say that this is largely tied into the fact that Nolan doesn't seem to have many expectations that she is always throwing at Esther. She merely observes and lets Esther live as she likes. I think that Esther is so reluctant to move up in treatment because she is afraid of the new expectations in the new house. She will have a score of new privileges and Esther isn't eager to cope with the responsibility tied to the privileges. Maybe Esther realizes that the people in the next house are also sane enough to judge and this scares her as well. Other expectations that bother her are kind of a chain: that she will get married--> serve her husband--> give up her career and poetry--> have children--> care for the children --> continue to cook, clean, and serve for the rest of her life. She finds these expectations limiting. I guess you could say that they put her in a bell jar, just like illness, in a way.
- It's amazing how aware Esther always is about her social status. Maybe most of this lucidity can be attributed to the fact that she's writing this novel in retrospect, rather than in the moment. However, I find it intriguing that she continually asses what others think of her. Two striking examples are when she decides not to mope when she moves to the house where Joan is because she doesn't want to give the other tenants the satisfaction and when she doesn't want Irwin to drive her back to the asylum.
- I find a compelling case to argue that Esther's condition is a regressive condition rather than her just spinning wildly out of control. First, it seems to be triggered by her conversations with her boss in New York and her not getting into the summer writing course. These two events stop the forward progress of her life but her fixation on social expectations keeps her on the tracks, so to speak. She simply retreats from the failure. Egocentricity in the form of paranoia, crawling about on the floor/not being allowed out of bed, being constantly cared for, Doctor Nolan as a new mother figure, living at home, etc support a case for regression. Then, as Esther improves, she loses her virginity, the quintessential coming of age/loss of innocence moment and begins again to progress in life.
Just some necessary closing thoughts!
It's true that the male characters in the novel don't come off in a particularly good light--especially men connected in some way to the medical industry (Buddy, Dr. Gordon). Her father (in memory) might be an exception, but even with him she remembers certain discouraging moments, like him supposedly telling her mother that he can "stop pretending" now that they're married (which Esther interprets as turning her mother into a domestic slave or sorts). But she does recall running on the beach with him as her last happy memory.
ReplyDeleteIrwin is a minor character--Esther keeps him this way by design--but he comes off in a mostly good light, I suppose. He's not trying to get anything out of Esther, necessarily, and there's no pretense or phoniness. He's pretty up-front with her, and not in the same ballpark of menacing male sexuality, as we see with Marco the woman-hater.