The Bell Jar

English Literature AS A level Wider Reading

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (1963) Analysis

A strange fascination with Sylvia Plath hung over me all the time I was reading this novel. Her suicide a constant reminder of the actual and final descent of her Bell Jar over her life. Whether it was morbidity or curiousness that led me to become interested in her life I am not quite sure. Many critics have said that Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and her consequent suicide has taken on an almost "anecdotal" quality in the literary world and that one can't help but be influenced and haunted by Plath's own fate when reading "The Bell Jar". 

The novel is about a girl, on the brink of success and her decline into depression. It tackles many issues of "coming of age"; virginity, marriage and future in Esther's struggle for identity. And Plath, writing at a time when female intellectuals were just beginning to erupt from eras of suppression, captures the dilemmas between love, marriage, children and education and career. Although it was written over fifty years ago, its subject matter is as alive to today as to the sixties. 

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

Gender Quotes

"I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems anymore"

"When you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state."

"I was surprised to have a woman. I didn't think they had woman psychiatrists."

Alienation Quotes

"How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair  or a baby or seen anybody die?"

"Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar."

"How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again."

Sexual Quotes

"I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him."

"My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck."

Family Quotes

"My Mother said I should be grateful. If it wasn't for Mrs. Ginea I'd have used up all her money and she didn't know where I'd be."

"We'll take from where we left off, Esther," she said, with her sweet, martyr's smile. "We'll act as if this were a bad dream".