Third Quarter of The Bell Jar

Esther's end and beginning.

The predictions I made last quarter proved to be true- Esther received extreme treatment in the form of shock therapy. She was treated with little respect from the psychiatrist, who didn’t listen to her and jumped to an unnecessary method as a failed attempt to “cure” her. Esther keeps hoping some form of treatment will “make her better”, and so does her mother. Esther also reached the downspiral I predicted- she attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. She had attempted suicide a number of other times before that- first hanging herself (with a flat ceiling), then cutting her wrists, and drowning herself out on a beach day with friends. After these attempts weren’t successful, her thoughts became more centered around death, even thinking about jumping out of a moving car and off a bridge, or shooting herself with her friend’s gun. When she is found after she swallows the pills, she is taken to the hospital and then a psychiatric facility, where she began to receive treatment that is just as unsuccessful as the first doctor.

I really like how raw and real The Bell Jar is. Plath doesn’t hold anything back, especially not in this quarter. It’s both what I like and what’s scary to me because it’s so real to me. She doesn’t sugar-coat her suicide attempts or her thoughts of death, she doesn’t apologize for the way she feels, she’s blunt and brutal and determined in one way or another. The character of Esther feels real, and I can tell it came from a place of someone who’s been there. She doesn’t try to glamorize or romanticize depression, she shows it’s a bitter, twisted reality for everything that it is. I like Plath’s descriptive words and observations about what’s going on around Esther, they’ve helped me connect with the character a lot better.

In this section, the thing I’m struggling with the most is how Esther is communicating with everyone around her and how they’re treating her. It feels like everyone is making her crazy, they’re not listening to her or understanding her perspective and reading it from first person makes it scary being in her shoes. It really gives me a feel for what it was like to be in her time period and being faced with the struggle of having a mental illness and not being considered “normal”. Seeing such a relatable, likable character get to a place that they don’t believe they’ll come back from is hard to read.

The line that grabbed my attention in this quarter was “The most startling thing about the face was its supernatural conglomeration of bright colours.” (Plath, 164) This is my favourite quote partly because of the words Plath uses and partly because of the context. In this chapter, Esther’s in the hospital being treated after she swallowed the pills. She asks the nurse for a mirror, but the nurse doesn’t want to let Esther see what her face looks like after what happened. When she finally gets to see her reflection, she sees it as a picture of someone else, not of herself, then describes it as a beautiful display. I loved how she could see something that everyone else saw as ugly and demented as something to appreciate. Immediately after this, Esther drops the mirror, and it’s unclear if it was deliberate or not. It’s interesting that the only indication the reader gets is from the nurse saying she did it on purpose. Overall, this scene was really interesting to me because it showed a new side of Esther that I hadn’t really seen before.

I’ve definitely been able to relate to Esther’s character because of the challenges she faces. She loses friends, gets into toxic relationships, and never has a real sense of self to drive her in one direction. In my generation, we face the new issue of social media harassment, pressures to be active online, to communicate with everyone all the time over the various devices, and it adds another level of anxiety. While this day and age is much more open to discussing mental illness, it doesn’t mean the problems go away, but it certainly makes them easier to handle. I can’t compare my situation exactly to Esther because I live in such a different world than she did fifty years ago, but I can connect with what she felt.

I already know that Sylvia Plath’s story ended with her unfortunate suicide, but this was after the book was released. So... I’m not sure how the story will end. I’m hoping that in the book, Esther finally gets the help she deserves, and is able to recover with a new network of support that she never received from the people around her. I’m hoping that writing the book helped Plath get a weight off her chest, and she saw a positive end for Esther that she hoped for herself as well.