Plaths Bell Jar

Born in the great depression of america massachusetts 1932, Plath's childhood was bought to a premature end, when father Otto died a week after her eighth birthday. At that young age Plath denounced her faith in God, and remained ambivalent towards religion for the rest of her life. Plath later described the first nine years of her life as having been "sealed...off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth". Her father's early death affected Plath deeply, creating lines that would forever run jagged and empty on the landscape of her life, like permanent flashes of lightning intense against an indigo sky. Plath struggled with depression throughout her life, and tried several times to kill herself. Many of her later poems reference her abandoned childhood following the loss of her father, along with her suicide attempts which she wrote about with a harsh, precise awareness. This is also a subject found at the heart of ‘The Bell Jar'.

On February 11th 1963, Plath succeeded in committing suicide at 4.30 in the morning.

Plath's only novel ‘The Bell Jar' is an intimate, controlled account of a mental breakdown. As the reader, you are compelled to journey along with the heroin of the novel Esther, who spirals out of the grips of reality, and the material world which she rejects, into the surreal, detached, and stifling conditions of the bell jar, which is a metaphor for her depression and the significant title of the novel itself.

‘To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.'

Instead of standing outside the bell jar and viewing Esther in her state of depression through a distorted lens, unable to really discern what is happening to her, the reader is inside the bell jar with her, seeing the world outside through her twisted glass. This gives you a clear understanding of what's happening to her and what she perceives is happening around her. It also makes the novel a lot more intimate and personal and helps you grasp and relate to esther's character.

Although ‘The Bell Jar' is fiction, the events in the novel are based on Plath's own life experiences.

Set in the 1960's it deals with a male dominated society, advertising in a material world, and the pressure woman were under to become the ideal housewife, with propaganda and the older generation encouraging woman to look and play the part. It is these conditions which trigger the depression that leads to Esther's mental breakdown. Unable to be who she wants to be, unable to find and accept her own identity, she draws into herself and down comes the bell jar. The fact that Esther sees the extreme solution of death as her only escape, I believe, helps me and other readers to realise the extent of suffering

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