CRITICAL ESSAY SUMMARY #1

 The Bell Jar, critics begin to question Sylvia Plath’s  claims to literary superiority.

In The Divided Self, R. D. Laing gives this description of the split between inner self and outer behavior that characterizes the schizoid personality: "The ‘inner self' is occupied in phantasy and observation. It observes the processes of perception and action. Esther's inner self observes her own external response with strange detachment. If we take the division of Esther's self as the motive or starting point of the novel's plot, the central action of The Bell Jar may be described as the attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self system so that a real and viable identity can come into existence.  Esther's experience differs from that of so-called "normal" girls in degree rather than in kind. It is simply a stylized or heightened version of the young American girl's quest to forge her own identity, to be herself rather than what others expect her to be.

The novel's flashbacks make clear that Esther has always played those roles others have wanted her to play. For her mother, she has been the perfect good girl. For Buddy Willard, her one serious boyfriend, she is all sweetness and acquiescence. The more the false self responds in this contrived and artificial way, the more Esther's inner self nurtures a hatred for Buddy.

The scenes in the present which lead up to Esther's breakdown reveal the same pattern. The false-self system finally crumbles, and the old Esther must die before she can be reborn as a human being.

For Sylvia Plath's focus in The Bell Jar is not on mental illness per say, but on the relationship of Esther's private psychosis to her larger social situation. Indeed, her dilemma seems to have a great deal to do with being a woman in a society whose guidelines for women she can neither accept nor reject. 

Female roles are no longer clearly defined, women are confronted by such a bewildering variety of seeming possibilities that choice itself becomes all but impossible. Sylvia Plath 's feminism is never militant; Esther's diagnosis of her situation is totally devoid of self-pity or self-importance. Shortly after describing her vision of the fig tree, she beautifully undercuts her own high seriousness. 

Throughout the novel, Sylvia Plath emphasizes the curious similarity of physical and mental illness as if to say that both are symbolic of a larger condition which is our life today. 

In the world of The Bell Jar, no one is exempt from illness. Sylvia Plath is no silly sentimentalist; she knows quite well that her heroines different from most college girls, that her bell jar is less fragile, less easy to remove than theirs. But the external or official distinction between madness and sanity, she suggests in her linkage of physical and mental illness, is largely illusory. 

The plot of The Bell Jar moves from physical sickness to mental illness and back to the physical, culminating in Esther's hemorrhage. The arrangement of incidents implies that all illness is to be viewed as part of the same spectrum: disease, whether mental or physical, is an index to the human inability to cope with an unlivable situation. Esther is a sensitive young girl, isolated from friends and family and unable to express her most deep-seated feelings to anyone.