Plath's novel uses a chronological and necessarily episodic structure to keep Esther at the center of all action. its principal elements are "a growing up and gradual self-discovery," "alienation," "provinciality, the larger society," "the conflict of generations," "ordeal by love" and "the search for a vocation and a working philosophy."
Plath signals the important change of location at the opening of The Bell Jar Readers have often stressed the analogy between Greenwood and the Rosenbergs and sometimes lamented the inappropriateness of Plath's comparing her personal angst with their actual execution but in this opening description, the Rosenberg execution is just one of the threatening elements present in the New York context. It is symptomatic of the "foreign" country's hostility, shown in a myriad of ways throughout the novel.
In The Bell Jar, as in the traditional bildungsroman, the character's escape to a city images the opportunity to find self as well as truths about life.... As Buckley points out, however, the city is often ambivalent: For Esther Greenwood, quiet Smith student almost delirious with the opportunity to go to New York and work forLadies' Day for a month, the disappointment of her New York experience is cataclysmic. Rather than shape her life, it nearly ends it; and Plath structures the novel to show the process of disenchantment in rapid acceleration.
Events as predictably mundane as these are hardly the stuff of exciting fiction but Plath has given them an unexpected drama because of the order in which they appear. The Bell Jar is plotted to establish two primary themes: that of Greenwood's developing identity, or lack of it; and that of her battle against submission to the authority of both older people and, more pertinently, of men. The second theme is sometimes absorbed by the first but Plath uses enough imagery of sexual conquest that it comes to have an almost equal importance. For a woman of the 1950s, finding an identity other than that of sweetheart, girlfriend, and wife and mother was a major achievement.
Esther Greenwood's struggle to know herself, to be self-motivated, to become a writer as she has always dreamed is effectively presented through Plath's comparatively fragmented structure. Ester carries the weight of having to maintain a number of often conflicting identities the obliging daughter and the ungrateful woman, the successful writer and the immature student, the virginal girlfriend and the worldly lover. In its structure, The Bell Jar shows how closely these strands are interwoven.
One central image is that of the fig tree, first introduced after Esther has nearly died from food poisoning and is reading the stories Ladies' Day has sent the convalescents. When the fig tree metaphor recurs to Esther, she sees it filled with fat purple figs.... She sits in the crotch of the tree, however, "starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest." The dilemma of her adolescence unlike that of most men was that any choice was also a relinquishing. Greenwood believed firmly that there was no way, in the American culture of the 1950s, that a talented woman could successfully combine a professional career with homemaking.
Eventually, in Esther's metaphor, the figs rot and die, a conclusion which aligns the image tonally with the rest of the novel. In her highly visual presentation of Esther's education, Plath consistently shows characters who are poisoned, diseased, injured, bloodied, and even killed. The violence of her characterization seems a fitting parallel for the intensity of her feelings about the dilemmas Greenwood faces as she matures. Greenwood's persona is clearly marked by feelings of uncertainty, based on her all-too-sharp understanding of her "absence of power."
Plath structures the book so that role model figures are introduced and either discredited or approved.
The image of relentless suffering recurs throughout the second half of The Bell Jar. It is, in fact, the title image, an encasement, unrelieved, where Esther is "stewing in my own sour air." More frightening than the bewildering crotch of the fig tree, the bell jar presents no choices, no alternatives, except death.
The first half of The Bell Jar gives the classic female orientation and education, with obvious indications of the failure of that education appearing near the end of the New York experience. The second half gives an equally classic picture of mental deterioration and its treatment, a picture relatively new to fiction in the late 1950s, important both culturally and personally to Plath. The Bell Jar gives the reader the sense that Esther has, at least momentarily, gained the ability to achieve that coherence.
The apparent connections between Plath's experiences and Esther's are legitimate topics of discussion when bildungsromane are involved because the strength of such novels usually depends on the author's emotional involvement in the themes.
The Bell Jar ultimately showed a woman struggling to become whole, not a woman who had reached some sense of stable self.
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