Analyzing Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar'

Catalina Bustamante
9-5
The Bell Jar Essay
868 words

Sylvia Plath’s first and only novel, The Bell Jar is an allegory of how deep and damaged a character can transform and feel trapped in their own surroundings. This is the story of Esther Greenwood a young girl, who wins a scholarship which is envied by many, every day, through every day actions that scar her emotionally and psychologically. Throughout the novel, Plath illustrates that every single action that may seem very insignificant to one person, can mean the integrity and mental health to other, making the reader reflect on its every-day actions. This can be evidenced trough the interaction between the settings and because the reader gets to know the interiority of the protagonist,
the audience can experience the paranoia that Greenwood is feeling. Either way, the story revolves on how the surrounding and outside characters have different effects on the psychology, ideology and way of acting of the main character and how coping with the inner dilemmas may have an even worse effect in the battle against depression.
The audience knows what the character is feeling; the reader witnesses the transformation from a sweet girl to a very melancholic character questioning her own existence.
The role that the setting plays in such transformation is vital because along the novel as the character grows darker, the descriptions of her surroundings as well, leading to a relationship with the setting to have a psychological impact making the protagonist paranoid and eventually driving her to insanity. For instance: “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullaballoo” (pg. 2) is an evidence that she felt very disoriented in terms of who she was in the middle of Ney York city which is when her depression started. There is a parallelism between settings and character that evolves as well as she does and as the novel evolves it is evident that she is no longer a person capable of critical decisions. Throughout the novel, the narrator describes how the she is thinking and perceiving, and because the
audience
Another aspect to analyze is the co-relation between the character and her surrounding, meaning how she affects the setting and how the setting affects her.
In terms of how the setting affects the character it is important to highlight that not once in the story she felt comfortable in where she was and whenever she felt hostile in any environment she escaped to a “happy” place in her memory to distract her from her reality, deducing that her lack of sentiment of belonging to a place was one of the main reasons that drove her to insanity and made her mentally unstable. Regarding how the character affect her surrounding, is evidenced along the novel that she felt very melancholic even in her own house, making every environment she is in, giving it a sense of emptiness and making other characters uncomfortable with her presence. “:“I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days” (pg 90) this is evidence on how the protagonist does not care is she is making other people bitter and what once was a girl who kept everything to herself is now careless on what people may say about her. The aftermath of a complete disconnection with ones environment is the evolution of a character and may lead to create a completely different
persona.
The surrounding of Miss Greenwood not only includes places, but people too. For instance one of the scenes that it is obvious that she is reflecting about herself is when she experiences an elegant dinner with her co-workers. Basically it is when she reflects and makes a comparison between herself and other characters and notices that she is very different from the imagery of a proper women living in new York, making her feel undervalued and wishing she was somebody else. “The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.” (pg. 37) it is demonstrated that she does not possess etiquette and does not fit in the high elite of New York. This feeling stays with her through the novel and is one of the main causes that drove her to insanity.
In conclusion the bell jar is a book that addresses a topic of transformation through the different effects of the surroundings in the character and as the character sinks into depression and mental instability, the perception of the spaces are also described as dark as the character feels. Also the surroundings affect the protagonist and vice versa. Nevertheless it is important to highlight the purpose of the author with this book, which is basically to acknowledge that every person hides their true thoughts and feelings which are not always visible to the naked eye and eventually manifest as a mental disorder.