Esther Greenwood and Sylvia Plath
The story of The Bell Jar is a first
person account of Esther Greenwood, Sylvia Plath herself, her story at 19. Esther,
like Sylvia, is a girl who has almost everything she could ask for.
She’s an individual with a mind that is above average , extremely sensitive,
intellingent and talented . With all of that provided for her, Esther is also
struggling with the perennial problems of morality, behavior and identity
crisis. The stress and the pressure of being an achiever burns her mind out ;
the tension of sexual relations and the double standards on women’s virginity,
the ups and downs of family relationships increase her sense of derangement. Esther compares her life to that of an existence in a bell jar, where the air
is stiff, heavy and unchanging. She feels as if she is watching her own life
and everything that happened to her from within the jar.
Perhaps the best thing about the book is the fact that the life of Esther is synonymous with what the author, Sylvia Plath, had experienced. Like Esther, Plath had gone through a struggling ordeal in finding the real meaning of life and its hidden uncertainties and her eventual fall into the pit of madness.
The book has some similarities with J.D.
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: both Esther and Holden are troubled
young souls searching for the true meaning of life. Both escapes the reality
they can’t accept. Both are considered crazy because of their atypicality and
fragility.
“For the first time in my life, sitting
there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could
play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew
so many idioms I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been
inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
The one thing I was good at was winning
scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. felt like a
racehorse in a world without race-tracks...” (The Bell Jar, chapter 7, pp. 72-73)
