Understanding Esther Greenwood is important for understanding what happens to her in the course of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. If one doesn’t understand who Esther is and what her history is about, one will never understand why the story unravels as it does.
Esther Greenwood – Falling Apart
Esther Greenwood is the main character in Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar. She is an extremely intelligent young woman who, at the beginning of the story, is living in a hotel while she serves as an intern at a prestigious magazine. Esther ought to feel as if she owns the world. A poor girl, she has earned a scholarship to college, wins prizes, and finally wins a coveted internship.
However, things are not right in Esther’s world. Two pages into her story, Esther says “I know something was wrong with me that summer because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs…and how all the little successes I’d totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing.” (2)
Esther’s life is unraveling but she is able to maintain the semblance of normality for most of her internship. However, the reader who listens to Esther’s thoughts and feels her ambivalence towards others and recognizes her detachment from all practical concerns realizes that something is seriously wrong.
Female Roles
Throughout the novel, Esther shares her impressions of the women who pass through her line of sight. At different times during the story various women either inspire hope in Esther as potential role models or disgust for how they surrender their identity to men.
Identity is one of Esther’s primary concerns. She always seems unsure of what she wants. Does she want to write or does she want to be a wife and mother? Does she want to be a nice girl or does she want to be independent? Her insecurity is evident in how she waffles in making decisions about what to do or how to do things. She even gives a fake name to a stranger so that he won’t know who she really is.
Because of Esther’s identity crisis, she is ambivalent towards men. She sees men as potential husbands, which means potential jailers because she views marriage as a surrender of who she is and what she wants. After her date with Cal, Esther begins to look at men only as a means of losing her virginity.
The Bad Mother
The only person in the book with whom Esther seems certain of where she stands is her mother, Mrs. Greenwood. Esther lives with an intense dislike for her mother that often morphs into hate for her. Little time is spent on Mrs. Greenwood in the novel. However, the refusal of the Esther’s doctors to allow her to return to her mother or spend time with her reveals how destructive their relationship is.
Rebuilding Esther’s World
Esther’s life is slowly rebuilt. Therapy with Dr. Nolan in combination with shock treatment helps her rebuild her personality. Dr. Nolan gets Esther an appointment to obtain birth control so that she doesn’t have to worry about being under a man’s thumb because of the risk of getting pregnant.
At the doctor’s office, while she waits for her fitting she considers the babies that are in the room and realizes that she would go mad if she “had to wait on a baby all day.” (248) As she climbs up onto the examination table for the fitting that will protect her from unwanted pregnancy she thinks “I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person…just because of sex.” (249) After she is granted the ticket of freedom, Esther finds a man to have sex with and to practice her “new, normal personality on.” (252)
The death of Joan is an affirmation for Esther. At the funeral, Esther listens “to the brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” (272) Esther wonders if there is a prescribed ritual for those who are born a second time “patched, retreaded and approved for the road.”
Rebuilt, Esther goes before a panel of doctors who will decide if she is well enough to leave the hospital. “The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.” (273)
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper and Row, Publishers Inc. 1996.
Read more about Sylvia Plath and her work at Suite101.
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