Mental Illness In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

The explanation of suffering has been long sought, composing itself as an almost futile yearning to understand a pain that has no answer. This search can be linked to the human condition to romanticize the unsightly in order to make it an ideal, but mental illness is unfortunately unyielding to easy explanations. In Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” protagonist Esther Greenwood struggles with her mental illness in many ways, most of all in finding the strength to understand it. While wrestling with her separation from the world, she explores the ways in which to represent and analyze, as well as cope with, her tragic descent into depression. Her attempt at reconciliation takes the form of a fixation surrounding the duality of beauty and ugliness …show more content…
Esther’s personality combats a stereotypical version of women in her time; the 1950s young woman values the pursuit of finding a husband for whom she can bear children and please by means of chores and sexual submissiveness. Esther breaks this archetype as a young woman with passions in academia and she “hated the idea of serving men in any way” (76). The bell jar intensifies her inability to connect to the world around her, as she can see her outside surroundings and finds them peculiar. In her eyes, the typical future for a woman “seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight As” (84), and she acts as a foil to Buddy, who represents the traditional values of this time. Esther is repeatedly unable to relate to Buddy and despite the social pressure to find romance, she is disillusioned by his advances, keeping her eyes open during their kiss and finding it “dry [and] uninspiring” (61). Buddy pushes the stereotype of the ideal young woman upon Esther to the point that it drives her further into the bell jar. The sexual hypocrisy and sexism that Buddy presents act as an opposing force to Esther’s character, and the bell jar only further hinders her ability to fit in with this society. The bell jar not only discourages Esther from assimilation, but also makes …show more content…
Her obsession with suicide initially manifests itself in an attempt to bleed out in the bathtub, a manner of death that she wants to view as easy to commit and peaceful to endure. She describes the self harm as “seeing the redness flower from [her] wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till [she] sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies” (147). The repeated imagery of flowers illustrates the beauty with which Esther associates this attempted act of suicide. She takes the image of death and masks it with the image of a garden full of life, but this act ultimately fails and she does not take her life. However, she does cut her calf, and likens the blood to “fruit” (148), directing her effort towards making this tragic act more pleasing. The consequence of cutting oneself manifests itself as a scar, one that is sure to appear on Esther’s calf. Similar to the dull hurt of her once-broken leg, the scar from her self harm will not only serve as a reminder of her actions, but also destroy the notion that the suicide attempt was all beauty and no unattractive pain. This continued act of portraying death as beautiful is unhealthy and only further proves that Esther’s mental health requires