The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath · 1963

Sylvia Plath published exactly one novel, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, a few weeks before her death in the winter of 1963. That fact has hung over the book ever since, and the great temptation for readers has always been to treat it as a suicide note with chapter breaks. It is worth resisting. The Bell Jar is a made thing — controlled, funny, and frighteningly precise — and it rewards being read as literature rather than as evidence.

On the surface the premise is a familiar one. Esther Greenwood, a brilliant scholarship student, wins a month as a guest editor at a glossy magazine in a New York that opens with the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, an event that hums under the whole book like current in a wire. This is the classic ascent story: the talented provincial girl arrives in the city to be crowned. Plath turns it, quietly and completely, into a story of descent. The magazine's glamour is revealed as hollow before Esther has finished reaching for it, and the reward curdles in her hands.

The fig tree, and the arithmetic of a woman's choices

The book's most quoted passage is Esther's vision of a fig tree, in which she imagines her possible futures — wife, poet, professor, editor, traveller — as ripe figs on the branches, and finds herself paralysed, unable to choose one without watching all the others wrinkle and drop. It is the cleanest image in mid-century American fiction of the double bind handed to Plath's generation of women: told that every door was open, and told in the same breath that opening one closed the rest. Buddy Willard, the smug pre-med suitor who assumes poems are so much "dust," embodies the sexual double standard Esther is expected to swallow whole — his experience is worldliness, hers would be ruin. The novel is furious about this, but it never lets Esther simply deliver her grievance in a speech. It shows it happening to her.

The image at the centre

A bell jar is a glass dome used to seal a specimen off from the air. To sit beneath one is to be visible but unreachable, present at the world and cut off from it, slowly breathing your own stale air while everything real happens on the other side of the curve. Plath chose it because it captures something the word "sadness" cannot: not pain exactly, but distortion and suffocation, the sense of watching life through warped glass while running out of oxygen. The image is not a one-off. It belongs to a whole web of recurring obsessions — mirrors that hand Esther back a face she cannot claim as her own, the colour white, the self that will not stay a single self — and the same preoccupations drive the poems Plath was writing at the end of her life. Read the novel beside Ariel and you are clearly in one writer's imaginative world.

The bell jar magnifies and it suffocates in the same gesture.

The cure that never quite convinces

Esther's breakdown, her suicide attempt, the asylum, and the two faces of psychiatry she encounters — the punitive Dr. Gordon, whose electroshock is administered as punishment, and the humane Dr. Nolan, whose version is administered as care — are handled without a single false note of uplift. When the bell jar finally lifts, Plath is scrupulous about it: it does not shatter, it simply hangs suspended, "a few feet above my head," ready to descend again. The recovery is provisional, and that provisionality is exactly what saves the book from being either a tragedy or a triumph. Esther walks into her final interview "as into a room," and Plath refuses to tell us whether the room is the world or the ward.

A comedy, of a very dark kind

It is rarely said, but Plath is genuinely funny, and the comedy is doing serious work. The magazine section — the free hats, the sponsored luncheon that ends in a bout of ptomaine poisoning, the ceremonial gifts that turn out to be worthless, the night Esther feeds her expensive wardrobe piece by piece to the wind from a hotel roof — is written with perfect deadpan timing. The wit is not relief from the darkness; it is the darkness in another register. The funniest passages sit closest to the crawlspace, and that proximity is deliberate.

The result is close to flawless. It is an anti–artist's-novel, the story of a young writer that withholds the usual consolation of art as salvation. Five stars, without hesitation — not because it is a document of suffering, but because it is a masterpiece of controlled tone, a book whose calm surface never once cracks even as everything beneath it does. That gap, between the steadiness of the telling and the catastrophe of the told, is the whole of Plath's genius, and no one else has quite managed it.

A note: this book, and this review, touch on depression and suicide. If any of it lands close to home, it can help to talk with a doctor or someone you trust — and I'm glad to help find support resources if that would be useful.