The Bell Jar

Esther Greenwood is nineteen, academically exceptional, and spending a summer as a guest editor at a New York magazine. She is supposed to be having the best month of her life. She is instead becoming unable to recognise any version of the future that she wants.

She returns home, deteriorates, attempts suicide, and is treated in a series of institutions. The novel follows the treatment as closely as the illness.

The book's subject is not sadness. It is the disappearance of desire, described very precisely.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The tone is the achievement: Esther is wry, observant and often very funny about the people around her, right through her own collapse. Plath refuses the register readers expect, which is what makes the deterioration credible rather than performed.

The fig-tree passage — a woman starving in front of a tree of possible lives because choosing one means losing the rest — is the book's most quoted image and an exact description of a particular paralysis.

The fig tree is not a metaphor for indecision. It is a metaphor for a choice architecture built to trap.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel is closely autobiographical and was first published under a pseudonym, partly to protect people Plath had drawn from. It sits beside a real 1950s American expectation that a clever woman would choose between work and a family and be grateful.

It is also a period document about psychiatric treatment: the electro- convulsive therapy scenes are drawn from Plath's own, and the difference between the two hospitals in the book is a difference in how a patient is regarded as much as in method.

The novel opens with a magazine internship: the clothes, the lunches, the hotel for young women, the prizes. The glamour is rendered flatly and without pleasure, which is the first symptom the reader is given — everything a nineteen-year-old is supposed to want, correctly described and felt as nothing.

Everything she is supposed to want is present, accurately described, and produces nothing.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The title's figure is precise rather than poetic: a transparent enclosure that lets you see everything and admits no air, so the world continues visibly at a distance while you suffocate. Plath's account of depression is unusually specific about the sense of being present and unreachable at once.

The passage in which Esther sees her possible futures as fruit on a branch, each one excluding the others, and starves while unable to choose, is the book's most quoted and most misread. It is about paralysis rather than ambition, and the paralysis is the illness rather than a personality trait.

The hospital chapters document electroconvulsive therapy administered badly and then well, insulin treatment, and the ordinary indignities of committal. Plath had undergone this; the novel is one of the few contemporary accounts written from the patient's side by someone with the skill to render it.

Esther's rage is directed largely at a sexual economy in which men are expected to have experience and women are required not to, policed by the same people. Her preoccupation with contraception and with a particular young man's hypocrisy is more central to the book than its reputation as an illness narrative allows.

It appeared in Britain under a pseudonym a month before her death and was kept out of the United States for years at her mother's request. Reading it now means reading a novel that its author never saw received, under her own name, in the country it is about.

The correspondence with Plath's own life is close enough that the temptation to read the book as a document rather than a novel is very strong, and most readers give in to it. It is a constructed work with a deliberately shaped arc, a comic and frequently savage register that surprises people who arrive expecting unrelieved bleakness, and an ending that is provisional on purpose rather than resolved.