The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath sets itself during a 6 month period in the life of the main character that is Esther Greenwood. The beginning of the novel begins during the summer in which the Rosenbergs were executed in New York, which the year was 1953. Eisenhower was president at the time. The story is first set in New York in a hotel for women with the fictional title of Amazon, and in the offices of a womens fashion magazine. Later, the main character returns to her home in the suburbs of Boston. She receives outpatient shock treatment in Walton, Massachusetts.
Then she spends a short time in a city psychiatric hospital, which was probably in Boston, and then was moved to a private hospital in New England. It had three main houses and it was ranked according to the health of its patients. Esther Greenwood was a talented and sensitive young woman who is living in a world in which talented and sensitive women are urged to be wives, mothers, fashion hounds, and experts at taking short hand. Esther attempts to commit suicide, but is discovered and put in a psychiatric hospital where she must work on resolving her issues in order to heal herself. To overcome suicide, Esther finds a way to exist as a writer in her society. She writes her autobiography.
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Esther Greenwood is one of twelve young women who have won a prize to live in New York and write for a womens fashion magazine. Esther does not fit into the world of high fashion. She is from a small town in the suburbs of Boston and her family has been relatively poor. She becomes friends with another outcast sort named Doreen. She and Doreen exist on the fringes of the fashion magazine activities. One night, Esther and Doreen go to a bar with a man who is attracted to Doreen. Esther ends up getting drunk and walking home alone. When Doreen comes home, Esther realizes she does not want to be her friend any more.
Esthers supervisor, who is the fiction editor of the magazine, tries to encourage Esther to apply more energy to her career, but she finds it impossible to do. She begins to feel as if she does not have a direction in her life. What she has always wanted to do was to go to graduate school and then become a professor who also writes poetry. Now that dream is no longer attractive to her. She knows she wants to be a writer, but she can see no way to do it in her society. Esther starts to have problems over her relations to men. She has been dating one man from her hometown, Buddy Willard, but no longer even likes him.
She feels the need to be with men, but gets little pleasure out of their company and feels as if no one really sees her for who she is. On the last night of her New York stay, Esther goes on another of a series of blind dates. Her date attempts to rape her. She gets away from him and gets back to the hotel. She takes all the clothes that have been given to her as promotional advertisements for the magazine and throws them off the roof of the Amazon hotel. The next morning, she takes an overdose of sleeping pills and hides herself in a hole in her mothers basement.
She wakes up in a hospital. She is severely physically damaged in a number of ways from the overdose and the days spent in the hole in the basement. She feels completely paranoid about the doctors in the hospital. Her mother manages to get her to a private hospital. Her benefactor is the same woman who sponsored her scholarship in college, a writer of romance fiction. In the private psychiatric hospital, she is treated by a competent woman doctor and gradually recovers.
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She undergoes insulin shock treatment and then electroshocks treatment, this time, done properly and effectively. She learns how to deal with her issues around her mother and her issues around being a woman in a patriarchal society. When the new term for college begins, Esther is released from the hospital. The main theme of The Bell Jar is a feminist one. Its protagonist suffers under the constricted roles available for the women of her time and the subordination of women to men. The novel is a protest of the expectations that women must fulfill to be considered normal and successful in the society. One of the minor themes of the novel is the treatment of the experience of being insane while being surrounded by people who are sane.
Esther begins to have her breakdown months before she begins to make her attempts at suicide. People who seem to be conducting their lives in very odd ways while she is in the hospital surround her. The mood is often thoughtful. Esther is a very reflective character. But, she does have a strongly sarcastic humor. This novel gives very little of the pain of struggling through emotional troubles about mental illness. In a way, I did enjoy this book because of most movies and other books that I read, something like sick people being stuck in mental hospitals and finding hope of healing themselves and making it out in life makes me keep reading with suspense..
