MindMap Gallery The Bell Jar Book Summary

The Bell Jar Book Summary

The Bell Jar is a fiction-based novel about Esther Greenwood, a college student who aspires to be a poet. She is chosen for a month-long summer job as a guest editor at Ladies' Day magazine, but her stay in New York City is unfulfilling as she grapples with identity and societal conventions. She meets two other interns, the rebellious and sexual Doreen and the wholesome and virginal Betsy, who represent opposing the ideas of femininity as well as Esther's own internal problems. During the internship, Esther feels neither stimulated nor excited by the work, fashion, and big-city lifestyle that her peers in the program seem to adore. She finds herself struggling to feel anything at all aside from anxiety and disorientation. Esther is thinking about her lover, Buddy Willard, and how angry she was when he acknowledged he wasn't a virgin and claimed to have been seduced. She thinks he's a hypocrite because he pretended to be more sexually experienced than she is. Esther must spend the rest of her summer at home with her mother after being denied for a writing class; Esther's father died when she was a child. She tries to write a novel and gets progressively miserable, attempting suicide on multiple occasions. She eventually overdoses on the sleeping pills but manages to survive.

Edited at 2022-08-23 08:38:47

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The Bell Jar Book Summary

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Outline

The Bell Jar

Overview

The Bell Jar depicts the spiraling deterioration of 19-year-old Esther Greenwood over the course of multiple stays in psychiatric institutions from 1953 to 1954. Brilliant and talented, with a golden future ahead in media, Esther sinks into a suicidal depression fueled by the pressures of gender and society.

Symbols

Mirrors

Mirrors and other reflective images represent a lack of identity as Esther does not recognize herself.

fig tree

The fig tree represents Esther's inability to make decisions or choices for her life.

The Bell Jar

This container seals its contents from the exterior environment and serves as a metaphor for captivity.

Main Characters

Dr. Gordon & Dr. Nolan

Esther's doctors, whose views are exemplary of female stereotypes

Buddy Willard

Esther's chauvinistic would-be boyfriend

Mrs. Greenwood

Esther's mother, in favor of traditional gender roles

Doreen

Esther's uninhibited friend

Joan

Esther's best, and very similar, friend

Esther Greenwood

19-year-old self-critical narrator

Themes

Gender

The novel challenges traditional female gender roles such as virginity, nweisotai end motherhood.

Social Expectation

The parental values of 1950$ America based on tradition and materialism prove confining tor woman such as Esther

Birth and Death

The person in the bell jar and the world itself is the bad dream.

Identity

The struggles to define identality as failure SWUM to depression.

Numbering

Names under which The Bell Jar was first published (by Plath and under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas)

Plath's age when she published her first poem in the Boston Herald

1982

Year Plath became the first posthumous Pulitzer Prize recipient

Author

SYLVIA PLATH 1932-63

Born in Boston, Plath worked as an editor for Mademoiselle magazine in the summer of 1953. Struggling with depression all her life, she overdosed on sleeping pills and was treated in a psychiatric hospital shortly thereafter. She committed suicide in London the same year the novel was published.