Who Is The Antagonist In The Bell Jar

Application Paper: The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar, a novel by Sylvia Plath, gives a detailed story of Esther Greenwood, a young, bright, and extremely talented young woman. The novel begins with Esther’s life in New York where she works for a magazine as an editor. Her time there is filled with stress from the other college girls in her dorm, a dwindling love life, and constant deliberation over the direction of her life. The novel chronicles how these stressors take an insidious form in her life, leading her to a psychiatrist, electric shock therapy, and thoughts/attempts at suicide. Though she tries many different ways to end her life, Esther continues on her journey, leading her to a new mental hospital, new treatments, and new interactions.
In the end, though the road was tough, and quite uncertain, Esther is released from the hospital in hopes of returning to some form of her life that she once knew. Though Esther’s diagnosis is never fully stated, but simply referred to as madness and insanity, the underlying illness that seems to be at play is depression. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the similarities in Esther’s life to research done on depression.

Esther’s Early Life and Her Depression In the early stages of the novel, Esther is constantly focusing on her life’s goals and direction.
In one scene, she compares her life to a fig tree, paralleling the branches to each direction her life could take, but ultimately choosing nothing:
One fig was a husband and a happy home and children…and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America…and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion…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. (Plath, 1971, Chapter 7, p. 77)
She is constantly looking for the “branch” that will lead her to happiness and finds something wrong with each one. In an interesting article titled Desperately Seeking Happiness: Valuing Happiness is Associated With Symptoms and Diagnosis of Depression by Ford, Shallcross, Mauss, Floerke, and Gruber (2014), they discuss how desperately seeking happiness can be detrimental to one’s well-being and increase depressive symptoms. In one study, they found that valuing happiness correlated significantly with depressive symptoms. Though that only discusses relationship and not causation, it is an interesting thing to consider. Esther, though talented, top in her class, and a head scholar, could only focus on what she needed to be happy. That amount of stress and worry, coupled with other unknown possible biological and environmental factors could have had some relationship to her later depressive
state.

Depression and Suicidal Ideation One of the major topics covered by Plath (1971) in The Bell Jar, was Esther’s suicidal ideation and attempts. In a very distressing scene, the main character tries to hang herself, but is unable to do so, and tries to choke herself instead. “But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again” (Chapter 13, p. 159). Fortunately, the character never kills herself in the novel, but an acquaintance of hers does. Plath shows the dark places people can go when battling depression. Davidson, Wingate, Grant, Judah, and Mills discuss in their article Interpersonal Suicide Risk and Ideation: The Influence of Depression and Social Anxiety, how these two concepts often go hand-in-hand. They note that major depressive disorder has high co-morbidity rates with anxiety, something Esther also displays more towards the middle of the novel in her time spent in a mental hospital. They also mention that not only can these disorders be comorbid, but they also have extremely high risks of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and suicide plans. This is shown throughout the middle of the novel with her attempts at suicide and the character Joan’s own self-inflicted death.

The Use of ECT Therapy In the novel electroconvulsive therapy (or electroshock therapy) is used as treatment for Esther’s depression. Though the first attempt at shock therapy is a failure, and reflects the negative sentiments on the procedure for that time period, it shows to give her some improvement later in the book. Once placed in the care of a new psychiatrist, Esther is given electric shock therapy in a less painful way and goes on to describe her experience. “All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head” (Plath, 1971, Chapter 18, p. 215). Using the bell jar as her metaphor for her depression, she feels that progress was made in that moment. Though this scene is fictional and represents a different time period, electroconvulsive therapy is still used today and has shown to make improvements in people’s lives. In an article titled The Use of ECT and MST in Treating Depression, Allen and Ebmeier (2011) discuss the pros of its use and how effective it can be for patients that don’t respond to pharmacological and psychological treatments. Their results show that ECT can be effective and often leads to improvements in mood, less anxiety, and an increase in overall functioning. These findings reflect what Plath describes Esther’s experience to be, one of improvement even after the first treatment, and continued improvement over time.

The Struggle of Relapse and Recurrence At the very end of Esther’s journey, right before she is released from the hospital, she is caught with the fear of relapse.
“…I was scared to death. I had hoped…I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead. Instead, all I could see were question marks” (Plath, 1971, Chapter 20, p. 243). This sentiment that Plath describes is something that many patients and physicians worry about at the end of treatment, especially for depression, the chance of relapse or reoccurrence. In the article Acute and Chronic Stress Exposure Predicts 1-Year Recurrence in Adult Outpatients with Residual Depression Symptoms Following Response to Treatment, authors Harkness, Theriault, Stewart, and Bagby (2014) begin by discussing the how depressive disorder is an extremely recurrent condition. Up to 50% of patients who respond to treatment have recurrent symptoms within two years. Just like the character, Esther has shown much improvement through her electroconvulsive therapy treatments, but based on this article, could have a high chance of her symptoms returning. This justifies her fears for the future, because though she has improved, she could easily slip back down to where she was
before.

Conclusion This intensely emotional, thrilling, and at times disturbing novel takes the reader on a mental ride through a character mind. It shows the reader the grip and depth of depression, all the way from the lost point, back up with treatment, and the plateau of moving on with life afterwards. Sylvia Plath does an amazing job capturing a truly dark time and making accessible to an outsider who might not otherwise understand.