the bell jar extended essay

The Bell Jar

51 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-18

Chapters 19-20

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Esther’s father features in The Bell Jar only in his absence—he died when she was a child. What role does his death, and Mrs. Greenwood’s reaction to it, play in Esther’s search for her own identity?

At what point does Esther go from spiraling to recovery? What factors play a role in her recovery?

Compare the characters of Doctor Gordon and Doctor Nolan. How do they approach Esther’s illness differently, and how do their different strategies affect her recovery?

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• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 1-2
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 3-4
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 5-6
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 7-8
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 9-10
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 11-12
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 13-14
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 15-16
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 17-18
• The Bell Jar: Novel Summary: Chapters 19-20
• The Bell Jar: Character Profiles
• The Bell Jar: Metaphor Analysis
• The Bell Jar: Theme Analysis
• The Bell Jar: Top Ten Quotes
• The Bell Jar: Biography: Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar: Essay Q&A

Essay Q&A

1. What use does Plath make of the literary motif of the doppelgnger or double in The Bell Jar? The doppelganger is a well-known motif in myth, folklore and literature. The word comes from doppel ("double") and ganger (usually translated as "goer"). The term refers to any double of a person; sometimes the doppelgnger is a ghostly second self that haunts the first self. Plath had a scholarly interest in the motif of the double, and she uses it in two different ways in The Bell Jar. The character Joan Gilling is Esther's double. Joan's life parallels Esther's. She excels at college; she dates Buddy Willard; she tries to commit suicide when she reads of Esther's own suicide attempt; and she is admitted to the same psychiatric hospital as Esther. Esther wonders at one point whether Joan really exists or whether she invented her. She wonders if Joan "would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose." When Joan commits suicide, it is as if the depressive side of Esther's own self has been destroyed. When Esther attends Joan's funeral and thinks of the hole in the ground where Joan will be laid, she hears her own heart beating with the "I am I am I am"-an affirmation of life rather than a desire for death. The other use of the double is in the character Esther does indeed invent-Elly Higginbottom, who is a kind of second self or alternative identity, a refuge from Esther's sense of oppression and failure. Elly is everything Esther is not and yet in some ways would like to be, just for her peace of mind. Elly comes from Chicago, the sort of place, she thinks, "where unconventional, mixed-up people would come from," rather than Boston, where Esther is hemmed in by conventional expectations. Elly is an orphan and has a sweet quiet nature. She has conventional desires for marriage and many children. Elly is thus an expression of Esther's desire to find a way of fitting comfortably in her world, of breaking free of her own conflicts and uncertainties. But Elly is a fantasy creation. When Esther recovers her mental equilibrium, Elly is no more present in her mind than is Joan. 2. What is the significance in The Bell Jar of the execution of the Rosenbergs? Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing-Sing prison in New York on June 19, 1953. They had been convicted of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. However, many people at the time believed the Rosenbergs were innocent, and there was a vigorous campaign to save them from the death penalty. The case against Ethel Rosenberg was especially weak. The opening paragraph of The Bell Jar contains an extended reference to the famous case: "It was . . . the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs." Esther comments that the case was all there was to read about in the newspapers. She adds, "It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves." She thinks "it must be the worst thing in the world." There is another somewhat chilling reference to the execution later in the novel, at the beginning of chapter 9. It is the day of the execution, and Esther's fellow intern Hilda says, "I'm so glad they're going to die." Esther repeats the thought in her own mind. Hilda also says, "It's awful such people should be alive." This is in response to Esther's comment, "Isn't it awful about the Rosenbergs?" She means it is awful that they are to be executed. She is obviously sympathetic to the condemned couple, but Hilda misunderstands her point. Esther may think that the Rosenberg case is "nothing to do with me," and wonder what it is like "being burned alive all along your nerves," but she will later find out at first hand. This happens when she is given electric shock therapy. Her horrific description of her first experience of it is suggestive of what the Rosenbergs may have felt in the electric chair: "Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant." Esther feels the treatment is in fact a punishment, and wonders "what terrible thing it was that I had done," a comment that puts in mind the Rosenberg executions. There is more than a faint parallel here between fatal electrocution, which is reserved in theory for those who transgress society's most sacred rules (even though the Rosenbergs themselves may, according to many at the time, have been innocent) and milder electrocutions for those who like Esther refuse to conform to the norms of society and must be "shocked" back into becoming acceptable members of it. 3. What critique does The Bell Jar offer of American consumer culture? At the beginning of the novel, Esther comments that any outside observer would think that she must be having the time of her life in New York. She must be living the American Dream, in which anyone, no matter what their background and circumstances, can rise to the top if they have talent and work hard: "Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car." But rather than having the time of her life, Esther is becoming more and more disillusioned. Working at a top fashion magazine, she is at the heart of American consumer culture, but she begins to see how hollow it is. The reality is very different from the glamorous image. This is cleverly brought out in the food poisoning episode. Esther attends the lavish banquet put on by the magazine, and she relishes the sight and the taste of all the rich foods. She eats as much caviar as she can, and mentions that the magazine regularly features "lush double-page spreads of Technicolor meals, with a different theme and locale each month." But the real meal, as opposed to the glamorous pictures of it, makes her and the other girls severely ill. Plath thus makes the point that the image of life presented in the magazine is an artificial one. Real life does not conform to the glamorous image, and is far more dangerous. Significantly also, Esther starts to feel ill when she is in the movie theater, watching a typical Hollywood romance which has a similarly artificial view of reality. It limps toward a predictable conclusion in which "the nice girl was going to end up with the nice football hero." As Esther looks around at the audience who are lapping up this slice of popular culture that reinforces romantic and gender stereotypes, she thinks they look like "nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains." For Esther, there is a huge gap between the popular image of relations between men and women, and any reality that she can envision for herself. 4. What role does Esther's mother play in the novel? Esther's mother never really understands her daughter's plight. Although she does everything she can to help Esther, Esther resents her. This is because her mother is the voice of convention; her horizons do not extend beyond the norm for women of that era. Like a good mother, she tries to teacher her daughter to cook (since all good wives must be able to cook for their husbands), but Esther proves a poor learner. When Esther is depressed, her mother tries to get her to learn shorthand, another skill commonly acquired by women at the time. But Esther has no desire to train as a secretary. She cannot be molded into a conventional pattern. Esther also resents her mother's practical advice, which generally consists of trite sentiments such as the "cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you." It is this idea that leads to Esther volunteering at the hospital, which does no her no good at all. It is clear that Mrs. Greenwood has no understanding of Esther's illness. She agrees to try to get her out of the hospital only if Esther will "promise to be good," and she appears to believe that Esther could recover if she simply made a mental decision to do so. When Esther is in the hospital, her feelings of resentment toward her mother bubble over, and she even says that she hates her. Although she appears to soften her view as she recovers, she sharply disagrees with her mother about how to reestablish her life. Her mother says that they will just pick up where they left off, treating her illness as if it were a bad dream. Esther knows better, however. She is prepared to face up to reality, knowing that her mental breakdown will always be part of who she is. She cannot simply pretend it never happened. In this respect she shows a more mature attitude than her mother. 5. What role does Esther's memory of her father play in the novel? Esther's father died when she was nine or ten. It is no coincidence when she mentions that the last time she was happy was when she was nine. She remembers running along the beach with her father, the summer before he died. Esther's mother did not allow herself to mourn her husband, and it appears that Esther, following her mother's example, did not either. She did not cry at the time, and she has never visited her father's grave. When she is depressed she decides to go to the graveyard. She feels she should make it up to her father for not having been before, and do the mourning that her mother had not done. She thinks of all the things she could have learned from her father had he not died so young. As a young woman, she lacks any man in her life who could fill the gap. When Esther sits down at the tombstone she cries for the first time, remembering her loss. She also remembers a significant thing her mother said at the time of her father's death, that it was better that he had died than spend his life crippled, which he would have hated. This in a way gives Esther a justification for her own desire to commit suicide, since she feels that otherwise she will be condemned to a life of madness. Significantly, she decides to put her carefully laid suicide plan into action the day after her visit to her father's grave. The Bell Jar is an autobiographical novel, and Plath's father died when Plath was the same age as Esther. Plath's poem "Daddy," contains the following lines: I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you I thought even the bones would do. These lines provides a gloss on the same incident in The Bell Jar. Feeling her grief at the loss of her father she wants to join him in death.

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Critical Insights: The Bell Jar

Tags: Best Seller 3 Introductory Essays 5 Critical Context Essays 10 Critical Readings Essays Introductory Essay by the Editor Chronology of Author's Life Publication Dates of Works Detailed Bio of the Editor General Bibliography General Subject Index

The Bell Jar is a highly distinctive and unusual book, and although the 1950s have faded, the power of this novel has not. The essays in this volume each adopt a specific perspective from which to examine the work.

The Bell Jar   has always been troubling reading, because its main character Esther Greenwood is so fully identified with Sylvia Plath herself. Attempts to separate them critically have not been successful. The novel is often thought of as somewhere between autobiography and fiction. But however it is labeled,   The Bell Jar   gets inside the mind of a brilliant young woman who cannot accept the constraints placed on her by her time. Whether or not we superimpose Sylvia Plath's own biographical ending on the optimistic ending of the novel, the interior landscape she describes remains startling, precise, and unforgettable—as does the world outside her.

This volume consists of essays about  The Bell Jar , older ones and new ones. Some present a smorgasbord of perspectives and also show how the novel has been viewed over time , from its first publication in 1963 until the second decade of the new millennium. Other selections include  essays college students and their instructors could share, and which might also be helpful to those reading  The Bell Jar  on their own, not for an assignment .

Other essay topics include:

• How the time period affected Plath
• How the novel reflected the time in which it was written
• The novels body criticism and sexual ambivalence
• Mental health within the novel
• and many more

Each essay is 2,500 to 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of " Works Cited ," along with endnotes .

All of the essays written specifically for this volume are by women who are poets as well as scholars; they look at this work through a different lens. The new essays each take a specific angle from which to examine  The Bell Jar . 

Overall, this volume shows how Sylvia Plath as a person and as a writer continues to get into our heads in the new century, and how the novel that was originally hailed as the female counterpart to  The Catcher in the Rye   continues to hold its place among recent and current representations of adolescent upheaval and anxiety.

Additional Resources:

• Chronology of Sylvia Plath's Life
• Works by Sylvia Plath
• Bibliography
• About the Editor
• About The  Paris Review
• Contributors

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December 2014

Introduction to Literary Context: American Poetry of the 20th Century

This collection of poetry criticism will give students and researchers a comprehensive synopsis and understanding of not only the piece provided, but on the context and author who wrote it. This volume is a helpful aid for students to learn critical analysis and discussion skills necessary for dissecting literature.

Critical Insights: Sylvia Plath

This volume presents a variety of new essays on the unconventional American poet, a unique, rare, rebellious and unexpected voice in American literature. Outstanding, in-depth scholarship by renowned literary critics; great starting point for students seeking an introduction to Plath and the critical discussions surrounding her work.

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• Criterion A, B, C: Assessment of Research
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Essays on The Bell Jar

Brief description of the bell jar.

The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath, depicting the mental breakdown of a young woman named Esther Greenwood. It explores themes of mental illness, gender roles, and societal expectations. The novel is considered a classic of feminist literature and has been widely acclaimed for its candid portrayal of mental health struggles.

Importance of Writing Essays on This Topic

Essays on The Bell Jar provide an opportunity for critical analysis of the novel's themes and characters. They also encourage discussions on mental health, feminism, and the societal pressures faced by women. Writing about The Bell Jar allows for personal reflection and exploration of important social and psychological issues.

Tips on Choosing a Good Topic

• Consider themes such as mental illness, gender, and identity for an engaging essay topic.
• Look for specific scenes or characters that provoke strong emotions or present complex issues.
• Explore the historical and cultural context of the novel to find a unique and meaningful topic.

Essay Topics

• The portrayal of mental illness in The Bell Jar.
• The impact of societal expectations on Esther Greenwood's mental health.
• Feminist themes in The Bell Jar.
• My personal connection to the character of Esther Greenwood.
• The relevance of The Bell Jar to contemporary discussions on mental health.
• How reading The Bell Jar changed my perspective on gender roles.

Concluding Thought

Exploring The Bell Jar through essay writing offers an opportunity for in-depth analysis and personal reflection. By delving into the novel's themes and characters, readers can gain a deeper understanding of mental health, feminism, and societal pressures. Get started on your essay and engage critically with this influential work.

Social Issues Identification in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

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Analysis of Esther's Identity in The Bell Jar

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A Theme Mental Illness in The Bell Jar and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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The Past and The Present in Kingston's and Plath's Works

A look at the character of lady lazarus in the bell jar.

January 14, 1963

Sylvia Plath

Novel, Autobiography, Autobiographical Novel, Psychological Fiction, Roman à clef, Fictional Autobiography

Esther Greenwood, Doreen, Joan, Doctor Nolan, Doctor Gordon, Mrs. Greenwood, Buddy Willard, Mrs. Willard, Mr. Willard, Constantin, Irwin, Jay Cee, Lenny Shepherd, Philomena Guinea, Marco, Betsy, Hilda

January 1963, by Sylvia Plath

Roman à clef (novel with a key)

The work, a thinly veiled autobiography, chronicles a young woman’s mental breakdown and eventual recovery, while also exploring societal expectations of women in the 1950s.

The Bell Jar offers an in-depth meditation on womanhood and presents a complex, frequently disturbing portrait of what it meant to be female in 1950s America. The themes include women and femininity, family, sex, society and class, madness, identity, transformation, literature and writing.

Esther Greenwood, Doreen, Joan, Doctor Nolan, Doctor Gordon, Mrs. Greenwood, Buddy Willard, Mrs. Willard, Mr. Willard, Constantin, Irwin, Jay Cee, Lenny Shepherd, Philomena Guinea, Marco

The book contains many references to real people and events in Plath's life. Plath's magazine scholarship was at Mademoiselle magazine beginning in 1953. Philomena Guinea is based on author Olive Higgins Prouty, Plath's own patron, who funded Plath's scholarship to study at Smith College. Plath was rejected from a Harvard course taught by Frank O'Connor. Dr. Nolan is thought to be based on Ruth Beuscher, Plath's therapist, whom she continued seeing after her release from the hospital.

Sylvia Plath committed suicide one month after the publication of The Bell Jar, her only novel.

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” “The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”

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The Bell Jar

By sylvia plath.

• The Bell Jar Summary

The Bell Jar takes place during the early fifties and begins in New York City, during a sultry summer in which the narrator, Esther Greenwood , is an intern at a fashion magazine after winning a scholarship. She soon befriends Doreen , a fellow scholarship winner who is perpetually cynical and bemused. Doreen takes Esther out for drinks, where they meet several men, including Lenny Shepherd , a disc jockey. Esther and Doreen go back to Lenny's apartment, where Doreen and Lenny progressively become more intimate and even somewhat violent with each other. Esther flees the apartment to return to her hotel, where she only wishes to forget the experience that night. Later that night, Lenny brings the inebriated Doreen back to the hotel, where Esther cares for her despite a conviction that she will no longer associate with Doreen.

The next day, Esther attends a banquet for Ladies Day, the magazine where she works, and afterward her editor, Jay Cee , asks Esther what she plans to do after graduating from college. Esther is unsure, and Jay Cee reprimands her for such an indecisive attitude. Still, Jay Cee reassures Esther and tells her "don't let the wicked city get you down." After going to a movie with the other interns, all of them begin to feel sick and fall ill from food poisoning from the morning banquet. Only Doreen remains healthy, because she did not attend the banquet.

Mrs. Willard, the mother of Buddy Willard , a Yale student whom Esther had been seeing, arranges for Esther to meet with Constantin , an interpreter at the United Nations. Esther now hates Buddy for his hypocrisy and condescending attitude, particularly since he expects Esther to be pure despite his affair with a waitress during a previous summer. Buddy, who is now a student in medical schools, is currently in the Adirondacks recovering from TB, which Esther deems punishment for Buddy's Œdouble life.' While watching Constantin at work, Esther panics about her future, thinking that she knows nothing except how to win scholarships. She decides that she will let Constantin seduce her, but back at his apartment Esther and Constantin merely fall asleep beside one another. Esther reminisces about visiting Buddy at the sanatorium where he is recovering from TB, and how he proposed to her there. She refuses his proposal because she does not wish to be married, and admits that she is a neurotic.

During a photography session for the interns at Ladies Day, each of the interns must be photographed with props showing what they want to be, but Esther cannot choose. Jay Cee claims that Esther wants to be everything, and Esther finally decides to be a poet, but during the shoot Esther breaks down into tears. During Esther's final days in New York, Doreen sets up Esther with Marco , a Peruvian man who Esther decides is a Œwoman-hater.' He attempts to rape her, but she fights him off.

Esther returns home to the suburbs of Boston, where her mother tells her that she did not make the writing course for which she applied and that she would be spending the rest of the summer there. She considers staying with friends at Harvard despite not getting into the writing course there, but then vows to read Finnegans Wake instead and to work on her thesis. Soon, however, she decides to not write a thesis and quit the honors program. Esther finds herself unable to sleep and goes to see her family doctor to get sleeping pills, but her doctor instead tells her to see a psychiatrist instead.

Esther tells the psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon , how she is neither sleeping nor eating, but Dr. Gordon only asks where Esther goes to college before telling her that he will see her next week. During the next session, Esther shows Dr. Gordon her handwriting (Esther has been unable to write), and he merely asks her if she minds if he spoke to her mother. Dr. Gordon advises shock treatments for Esther, who begins to think more and more often about suicide.

The hospital where Esther receives shock treatments is an alien place for Esther; the people there seem counterfeit and inanimate. Esther loathes the shock treatment, and tells her mother that she will not see Dr. Gordon and will not go back for treatment. Her mother merely responds that she knew that her baby wasn't like the awful people in the hospital. Soon after, Esther prepares a hot bath so that she can commit suicide through slitting her wrists, but she can only bear to make a Œpractice' cut on her knee.

Esther considers killing herself by hanging, but her house has the wrong type of ceiling to do so, and attempts to drown herself while swimming with friends but cannot. Finally, Esther writes a note to her mother that she is going for a walk, but instead hides herself and takes a bottle of sleeping pills. She awakes in complete darkness and believes that she has gone blind. When she regains full consciousness, a doctor reassures her that her sight is perfectly intact. Esther receives numerous visitors as she recovers, but dislikes the attention she receives from them. She behaves truculently toward several of these visitors and the nurses, who tell her that she'll be taken care of at "you-know-where."

Nevertheless, Esther does not go to the state mental institution, but instead to a private facility thanks to the intervention of Philomena Guinea , the philanthropist who provides for Esther's scholarship and who learned over her suicide attempt through media coverage. At this facility, Esther stays at the Caplan wing and is treated by Dr. Nolan , a female psychiatrist who reminds Esther of a cross between her mother and Myrna Loy. Dr. Nolan promises not to administer shock treatment to Esther, but if she does to tell her in advance. Esther gets a surprise visitor at Caplan from Joan Giling , another old girlfriend of Buddy Willard who has checked into the hospital after attempting suicide herself.

After Esther has a reaction to the medicine Dr. Nolan has prescribed for her, Dr. Nolan becomes concerned that Esther is not making progress and prohibits her from having visitors. Esther reacts to this news by exclaiming that it's wonderful, for she hates the visits from Philomena Guinea, former acquaintances and in particular her mother. When Esther tells Dr. Nolan that she hates her mother, Dr. Nolan smiles as if Esther has said something pleasing.

Dr. Nolan moves Esther to Belsize, a different hospital ward that entails greater privileges. Joan is now in Belsize as well, where the patients are fashionably dressed and made-up. However, Esther finds one morning that Dr. Nolan has scheduled her for shock treatments and not told her (she believed that if she told Esther the night before, she would not sleep). Esther endures the shock treatment, and Dr. Nolan attempts to reassure Esther that it was not like it was before. After Joan and Esther both receive letters from Buddy Willard, Joan wonders whether he will visit the asylum. Joan tells Esther that she likes her more than she likes Buddy, but Esther, suspecting lesbianism, tells Joan that she makes her puke. Esther gets birth control pills, which she finds will be freedom from marrying the wrong person like Buddy Willard, but then vows to find a proper man.

Joan is released from the institution, and while Esther visits her in Cambridge, she meets a Harvard mathematics professor named Irwin . Esther decides to seduce him, but after she has sex she begins to bleed heavily. Joan takes Esther to the hospital, for she is hemorrhaging. Esther returns to the institution, and Joan even moves back there herself, but soon afterward a doctor awakes Esther to tell her that Joan is missing, and later that Joan has been found in the woods. She has hanged herself.

Esther prepares to leave the asylum that January when the next semester begins, but remains there until it is time to move back to the dormitory. She realizes that people will treat her differently, and her mother thinks about her time at the institution as a "bad dream." Buddy Willard visits Esther at the institution, and because of Joan and Esther wonders if there is something in him that drives women crazy. Esther responds to this by laughing. Esther wonders whether she will suffer the same depression again, but feels that she is now perfectly free. She leaves the hospital "patched, retreaded and approved for the road."

The Bell Jar Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Bell Jar is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

to what extent has her attitudes and eventual breakdown been shaped by her society's expectations regarding men and women, sexuality, and relationships? Do you think those expectations have changed since that time?

Sorry, this is only a short answer space.

What early tensions are revealed about Esther through the contrast between Betty and Doreen?

The narrator of the novel, Esther Greenwood is a scholarship student at a prestigious women's college entering her senior year as the novel begins, and working at an internship for Ladies Day magazine in New York City. However, she faces an...

who is the author of this text

I would list it as GradeSaver.

Study Guide for The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar study guide contains a biography of Sylvia Plath, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Bell Jar
• The Bell Jar Video
• Character List

Essays for The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Bell Jar.

• Identity in The Bell Jar
• "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
• The Bell Jar and the Sexual Politics in the American 1950s
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The Bell Jar

Sylvia plath.

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The Bell Jar offers an in-depth meditation on womanhood and presents a complex, frequently disturbing portrait of what it meant to be female in 1950s America. Esther reflects often on the differences between men and women as well as on the different social roles they are expected to perform. Most of her reflections circulate around sex and career. Esther’s interactions with other female characters in the novel further complicate these reflections by presenting different stances towards the idea of womanhood.

As noted in the theme Purity vs. Impurity, Esther is upset by society’s insistence that young women stay virgins until after marriage while allowing boys sexual freedom. Female characters like Esther’s mother , Mrs. Willard , and Betsy embrace these social expectations and try to push them on Esther by sending her pro-chastity pamphlets and dispensing sexist maxims. Female characters like Doreen , Dr. Nolan , and Joan Gilling reject these expectations and introduce Esther to alternative ways of thinking. Doreen models an unmarried sexual relationship with Lenny Shepherd while Dr. Nolan assures Esther there is nothing wrong with pre-marital sex and encourages her to get fitted for a diaphragm. Through Joan’s affair with DeeDee , Esther glimpses a lesbian relationship that bucks society’s heterosexual norms.

In addition to enforcing a double standard for women and men’s sexual lives, Esther’s society also imposes different expectations for male and female careers. In general, women are expected to be homemakers, wives, and mothers and to devote their energies to caring for men and children rather than pursuing their own dreams. Esther’s mother, Mrs. Willard, Betsy, Dodo Conway , and many others demonstrate this conventional path and intimate that Esther should follow it too. Her mother’s insistence that she learn shorthand implies her faith in a low-level, traditionally female secretarial career. At the other end of the spectrum, Jay Cee , Philomena Guinea , Dr. Nolan , and Dr. Quinn demonstrate an alternative path pursuing careers outside the domestic sphere, and encourage Esther to do so as well.

Though some of the men in the novel are kind or at least harmless, many of the novel’s male characters reinforce the gross gender inequality in Esther’s society and treat Esther and the women around them with pronounced sexism. Buddy automatically assumes Esther is inferior-minded because she is a woman and also assumes that she will want to marry, have children, and discard all her personal ambition to become a housewife. Marco (and, to a lesser extent, Irwin ) objectify Esther for their own sexual gratification. Esther refers to Marco as “a woman-hater.” Indeed, he proclaims all women are alike and attempts to rape Esther.

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Women and Social Expectations Quotes in The Bell Jar

…I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

I wished I had a mother like Jay Cee. Then I’d know what to do. My own mother wasn’t much help. My mother taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died…She was always on me to learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a college degree.

I remember the day [Buddy] smiled at me and said, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’ ‘No, what?’ I said. ‘A piece of dust.’ And he looked so proud of having thought of this that I just stared at his blond hair and his blue eyes and his white teeth—he had very long, strong white teeth—and said ‘I guess so’.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

All I’d heard about, really, was how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: ‘I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless...’

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Review: ‘The Bell Jar,’ by Sylvia Plath

To our reviewer, the poet’s novel was “the kind of book Salinger’s Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell.”

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THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath | Review first published April 11, 1971

“The Bell Jar” is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath’s 20th year: about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue. It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems — the kind of book Salinger’s Franny might have written about herself 10 years later, if she had spent those 10 years in Hell. It is very much a story of the ’50s, but written in the early ’60s, and now, after being effectively suppressed in this country for eight years, published in the ’70s.

“Lady Lazarus,” Sylvia Plath called herself in a poem. And she added,

DyingIs an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell,I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I’ve a call.

And in another poem, “Daddy,” she wrote,

At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.

F. Scott Fitzgerald used to claim that he wrote with “the authority of failure,” and he did. It was a source of power in his later work. But the authority of failure is but a pale shadow of the authority of suicide, as we feel it in “Ariel” and in “The Bell Jar.” This is not so much because Sylvia Plath, in taking her own life, gave her readers a certain ghoulish interest they could not bring to most poems and novels, though this is no doubt partly true. It is because she knew that she was “Lady Lazarus.” Her works do not only come to us posthumously. They were written posthumously. Between suicides. She wrote her novel and her “Ariel” poems feverishly, like a person “stuck together with glue” and aware that the glue was melting. Should we be grateful for such things? Can we accept the price she paid for what she has given us? Is dying really an art?

There are no easy answers for such questions, maybe no answers at all. We are all dying, of course, banker and bum alike, spending our limited allotment of days, hours and minutes at the same rate. But we don’t like to think about it. And those men and women who take the matter into their own hands, and spend all at once with prodigal disdain, seem frighteningly different from you and me. Sylvia Plath is one of those others, and to them our gratitude and our dismay are equally impertinent. When an oracle speaks it is not for us to say thanks but to attend to the message.

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• 2022 EE Category 2 (The Bell Jar and The Vegetarian)
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This Category 2 Extended Essay is excellent. The student takes a well-known, classic piece of literature and compares and contrasts it to a contemporary award-winning novel from South Korea. In her essay, the student asks this question: How do Sylvia Plath and Han Kang critique the social construction of female mental illness in The Bell Jar and The Vegetarian?This is a great model example to give to students who are...

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