Student Zone

The Bell Jar is very much a modern Catcher in the Rye. It’s true, that every new coming of age book to hit shelves is always comparing its main character to the infamous Holden Caulfield, but in this case, I really do agree that Ester Greenwood and Holden Caulfield combined could have a pretty awful marriage with some beautiful chemically imbalanced children running around their ankles. They are soul mates in this bitter, fucked up, unfair world of not quite fitting in.

The narrator in The Bell Jar is much like Holden in terms of alienation. Both are extremely bitter teenagers (or slightly older) who seem to be an audience viewing from another world (with much scorn, sarcasm, envy, hatred and awkwardness) the lives of their peers rather than actually partaking in this process called “being young and having fun.”

Obviously, the storylines vary because of the issues of femininity and the obligations Greenwood has to deal with as a young woman in her era and Greenwood did take her isolation a step further, leading to complete mental breakdown (much like Salinger’s Franny) but still the relation and constant comparison of the two novels is justifiable and easy to see.

Feminine issues aside, both books are stories of two youths who feel a strong urge to escape the world that they have been placed in. Both are extremely eloquent and in-depth in their insecurities and bitter thoughts towards their peers and life and social obligations, and both, though trying to hide it, want nothing more than to desperately fit in rather than feel such alienation, to the point where it is almost harmful to themselves. Basically, these books clearly share the same theme of social alienation.

Something all of us, at some points of our lives, can completely relate to. We need books like this to make the rest of us feel a little less crazy and a little more normal.

The comment on Esther's "confused sexuality" actually turned into a great conversation in class -- it focused not so much on literal sex but on her gender pose and poise, given that she makes various sensual observations of Doreen and alternately seems to find the male characters either laughable or sadistic (Dr. Gordon) and not so physically appealing.

Likewise, students in that class observed Esther's ravenous devouring of caviar -- spreading it on poultry. This developed into an odd but fun chicken-vs.-egg argument.

Feel free to bring up the "spicy" stuff in class!!!

So I found this in the backlog for Lit 126, anybody wanna respond to this duesy?

QUESTION: Do you feel Esther was a sexually confused woman and may have had romantic feelings towards Doreen? .......I feel she most certainly did.

Man thats spicy.

Is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar a feminine version of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye?

While both Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye are stories of coming-of-age teenagers they each have their own traits and respectable differences that go beyond gender.

The characters of Esther Greenwood and Holden Caulfield differ in many regards. Esther Greenwood is an over achiever at the beginning of The Bell Jar. Throughout the novel she mentions her exemplary academic performance in High School and College. To a certain extent Esther identifies with her achievements and uses them to show the differences between her self and other girls she has known. Holden Caulfield is the poster boy for ADD. He has never applied himself, “…I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself and all. They gave me frequent warning to start applying myself… But I didn’t do it.” (6) Caulfield draws strength from the fact that he has not and does not need to try. In Caulfield’s mind everything not immediately present is either phony or not worth a bother. The difference between trying and not-trying is not the same as trying and giving-up. Esther Greenwood tries and eventually gives-up. Caulfield had never tried before he simply did it.

The attitudes of the characters and the way in which they view the world are also drastically different. Esther sees the world as if she were an example of something in everyone else’s mind. She is constantly thinking of the example her trip to New York makes of herself. “Look what can happen, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, then gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and winds up steering New York like her own private car.” She thinks in grand delusion and places herself so high on a pedestal that reality fails to affirm what she has created from so much fantasy.
Holden’s attitude is almost the exact opposite because he makes such a mess of the life the people around him know that he is capable of achieving. Caulfield would rather be nothing than be a phony as long as his nothing is real. The difference between the two viewpoints is like night and day. A grand phony delusion is to Esther as a banal true contemplation is to Holden.

Both stories contain elements of rebellion and contempt for both the status quo and society at large. The story of Esther Greenwood is a tragic spiraling of the individual. The Bell Jar centers on the meaningless bourgeois society that is out-of-touch with the true human being. Greenwood’s insanity is a symptom of societal pressures just as is Caulfield’s nonchalance. The main disruption each portrays comes from within the character’s discovery of a different way outside of societal influences.

The Bell Jar cannot be considered a female version of Catcher in the Rye for these and many more reasons. They are drastically different stories coming from different places and meant to signify different issues. It is difficult to write a coming-of-age story from a perspective that doesn’t come-of-age during the telling. For this reason the stories are similarly structured and related by a common theme. What each story is and who each of the main characters are make all the difference, however, when they are set side by side.

Summary:
Esther Greenwood is an unhappy woman who lives her life in a constant struggle for acceptance in Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”. The story is told first-person as we meet the character during her internship that she has won in New York by submitting her writing samples to a very popular and influential fashion magazine. She joins eleven other women who share a housing facility and attend up and coming luncheons and parties during their stay. The only one of these girls that she can connect to is a woman named Doreen who eventually ends up having a boyfriend, and then continues to falls out of Esther’s life. This is the first time we are told of her feelings of isolations and depression.
After this we are shifted ahead in time to when Ester returns home and her state of sadness is increased. Her mother takes her to meet Dr. Gordon who decides that shock treatment is the first step in treatment. Esther’s condition worsens and she attempts suicide for the first time when her mother leaves for work. She fails but soon thinks of other ways to end her life and eventually succeeds.

Commentary:
The character’s feelings of alienation are apparent as soon as her trip to New York began. She tells us that she is unable to feel comfortable in befriending any of the girls besides Doreen. I felt that her choice to leave the cab with Doreen on the way to the girl’s function is a symbol of Esther’s struggle to get away from the pressured environment that New York brings. To her surprise, “ I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.” She soon realizes that she cannot escape these feelings no matter which path chooses.
Later when she returns home, she is faced with other struggles in her life that force her further and further from society. Esther’s mother decided that her daughter is in need of help and trusts her well being to Dr. Gordon. Esther is immediately alienated from the doctor when she feels no connection to either his methods or his “picture” of life. She noted that his features and his picture of his family are almost too beautiful to be real.

During the end of the last chapter we read, she decides to go to the cemetery where her father is buried. I think that her history of alienation stems mainly from her family’s influence. We learn that her father dies when she is young and her family never mourns or discusses his absence. This leads her to live life with out a male role model in a world that at the time was “made for men”. Her mother also seems to have a huge role in her depression. When she tells us about her father passing, she shares with us her mother’s comment, “…if he would have lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn’t have stood for that, he would rather have died than had that happen”. I think that this may have been true but the mother was constantly trying to convince Esther that everything was fine. In this sense she was making sure that no one would judge her or her husband and admitting that she believed life without being physically perfect was useless.

Also, I feel that this influenced Esther’s relationships with her peers. Throughout the story Esther’s only friend is Doreen who moves on quickly to her next interest. Esther seems to adopt a negative attitude toward everyone she meets. This includes the girls she shares the internship with, the doctor who treats her, all of the people in the homes she lives in, and even her mother at times. I am not convinced whether this is due to the depression or the fact that she resents her mother for never letting her express her feelings about life earlier. Either way she never builds a strong relationship with anyone in her life.
When her life (and her bank account) is coming to an end, she looks toward a religion to comfort and justify her feelings. Here again we find that she is lost in the big picture. She never finds one religion that suits her need and decides to try Catholicism even though she disagreed with many of the main principles. This echoes her life in the sense that she never really fits in and instead just changes to fit the molds of others.

Question: Why was Esther so unsuccessful in her suicide attempts? She could have easily found a way to successfully do so. Do you think this was a cry for attention that she never received, or just her poor frame of mind creating these situations of failure?

The Bell Jar opens with the electrocution of the Rosenbergs. The narrator feels a bit worried about the situation; they were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union in the 1950’s. Esther is working as a guest editor for a fashion magazine in New York. She feels that most girls would envy her because she is living this lavish lifestyle of parties and it is causing her to feel very unaffected. She feels like nothing excites her because she is just moving along because she is not enjoying her job and the perks that come along with it. This kind of numbness can be related to an aspect of Berman’s experience of modernity because our heroine is oblivious to the entire fast paced and chaotic world of this fashion industry. In the third chapter Esther reveals that she is depressed because she is remembering what Doreen had done to her. By Chapter 11 Esther is visiting Dr. Gordon, she feels that she doesn’t trust him because of his good looks. She is prescribed for electroshock therapy to cure her of her depression. In the hospital she notices that a woman tries to kill herself by jumping out off a window, but it is barred. A nurse rolls out a gurney to take Esther to her electroshock therapy. She attempts to suicide by hanging herself. She feels that her mother’s attempts to help cure her are slim. I have this thing for humor and dark humor but this story seems very bleak. Our heroine attempts suicide on various occasions. What motivated her to do so?

Summary
Sylvia Plath’s, “The Bell Jar” takes place in the beginning in New York, and then later in Esther Greenwood’s hometown outside of Boston. She is in Manhattan, New York in the summer of ’53 because she won an internship along with eleven other girls working for a fashion magazine. The magazine the girls are working for sets them up with what most girls would say a dream life; parties, a nice hotel, free tickets to various shows and tons of free stuff. Esther couldn’t seem to make herself really enjoy it, even though she knew what an opportunity it was, especially since she came from a really poor family. You could tell that she didn’t feel comfortable around the other girls. Esther only seems to be friends with one girl named Doreen, but soon into their trip Doreen met a guy and spent most of the time with him. One afternoon Esther was called unexpectedly into one of the magazine advisors office. After the talk Esther said “…I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer.” She ended that portion of the writing from New York by saying that the advisor had “said some terrible things to me.” She is then back at home and the writing style shows you that she has some sort of mental anguish and depression going on. She is brought by her mother to talk to a psychiatrist, because she hasn’t slept for seven days. She then starts getting into deeper and deeper therapy. She also starts talking more and more seriously about killing herself. She lands herself in the psych ward after taking a whole bottle of pills. She is uncooperative and paranoid throughout all of her writing and keeps saying how she wants to just end it all. In the final scene Esther was in bed at the hospital and purposely kicked over a tray of thermometers and got put into a barred room, but she had a chance to pick up some mercury from a thermometer. “I opened the cracks of my fingers, like a child with a secret, and smiled at the silver globe cupped in my palm… I smiled and smiled at the small silver ball.”

Commentary
Berman’s description of modernism relates to the way Esther acts. Bernam says “…the idea of modernity…loses its capacity to organize and give meaning to people’s lives.” This sums up a lot of how Esther feels in the beginning of the story. “It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.” Esther was stuck in a modern world and had done everything the right way her whole life, and then suddenly she thinks she realizes that its all a big circle and its not worth it. The abrupt style of writing with quick and frequent scene changes used after her trip to New York seems to sum up how she feels about life.

A good question for discussing is, “What was the turning point? Was Esther always suicidal or was it something that suddenly happened?

Summary:
Set in Manhattan in the summer of 1953 and later in and around a town outside of Boston, MA, “The Bell Jar” is written in the first person, from the perspective of a college-age girl, Esther Greenwood, who has a hard time adjusting to her newfound life in Manhattan. While at college, Esther wins an internship, along with eleven other girls from around the country, to work for a fashion magazine based in Manhattan. Partly because of her family’s financial state growing up—-in her own words, “So poor she can’t afford a magazine”—-Esther finds herself on the outside of the group, unable to fully trust herself among them. Esther’s less then feeble attempt to fit in aids in her withdrawal from every other girl except Doreen, a witty, cynical, southern girl, whom Esther befriends and spends most of her time with. The reader starts sensing her frustration with life in the fact that Esther doesn’t play well with other girls, and then even more once Doreen finds a boyfriend and is off on her own for much of the time.

We then skip to chapter 11, where we find Esther back at home, and obviously dealing with depression and possibly other mental crises. She frequently mentions killing herself in the text, and she sees psychiatrists to hopefully alleviate her problem. While never fully succeeding in killing herself, she describes a couple instances where she attempts suicide (unsuccessfully, both times), and gives many other indications of her veal for death. In the meantime, her condition worsens, and she is sent to a few different hospitals—-temporarily at first, but eventually permanently. In her visits to the hospitals and in her interactions with people, especially doctors, the reader senses her frustration with life. It seems that Esther thinks that many of them are simply attempting to help her for their own amusement, which seems to further exacerbate her frustration. Eventually, she attempts to kill herself by swallowing an entire bottle of pills (sleeping pills, maybe?) and hiding herself in a hollowed out part of her basement wall. She’s then taken to a hospital and after an outburst, transferred to a mental institution where she remains through chapter 14, thus ending our reading.

Commentary:
Esther Greenwood finds herself in the midst of a life-changing experience in the summer of 1953. She moves to New York for a month and sees what she considers to be the real world—-a cut-throat, opportunistic, capitalistic (however, “high-class”) world—-from the perspective of a poor, small-town girl. This perspective acts as a catalyst in skewing her idea of the world (and her reality, it seems later). The idea of modernism in this novel is evident in the way Esther Greenwood can’t seem to fit herself into the (singular) niche of the modern world. In other words, while almost everyone else is conforming (a.k.a. continuing to be sane), she refuses to ignore the “maelstrom,” (as Marshall Berman puts it) of modernization. However, one can easily argue, based on Berman’s definition of modernism, that Esther, and those like her, are actually the intentional, resulting products of modernization. Berman says that modernization will “give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own.” While not exactly making it through the maelstrom, Esther seems to be one of the few that is making the world her own by refusing to conform. Berman, though, goes further by saying that modernization has resulted in a loss of culture and meaning in people’s lives, and thus being counteractive to the ideals of modernity. This is more along the lines of what happened to Esther Greenwood, in my opinion. While not being exactly the ideal result of modernization, she’s become an extreme example of a side-effect of it.

Question:
Do you think Esther ever fully intended to kill herself in the beginning? How about her last attempt with the pills?

It seems to me that she didn’t intend to at first, but it certainly gets more convincing as the story goes on. I couldn’t find it again in the text (which makes me believe I might be imagining it), but I think she mentions that she’s too weak or afraid to attempt to kill herself. She tries to hang herself with the silk scarf by simply pulling it tight around her neck. She also mentions drowning herself by swimming to a rock that’s far away, but rationalizes that she’d probably save her own life by resting on the rock and waiting until her energy is back up before swimming back. Why doesn’t she just swim somewhere other than toward the rock if she’s serious about killing herself. However, her last attempt seemed much more legitimate, which ruins my point, but it’s still a question I wanted to pose.