The Bell Jar in 10 Minutes: The Glass Dome Clamped Over a Brilliant Girl's Head

In New York she falls in with two women who mark her two poles. Doreen, from a Southern college, is sexy and defiant, contemptuous of rules, and drags her out to bars past midnight. Betsy, from the Midwest, is sunny and well-behaved, the kind of girl her roommates call a Pollyanna Cowgirl. Esther resembles neither and wants to become neither, so she drifts in the space between them. Outside New York, two more people she cannot get past: Buddy Willard, a Yale medical student and the on-and-off boyfriend she keeps circling back to, sunny in public and holding a double standard in private; and Jay Cee, the magazine's plain-looking, middle-aged editor, who puts her career ahead of marriage and gives Esther her first real look at what a working woman's life could be.

The Plot: How the Jar Comes Down, and Lifts

The story opens in the sweltering summer of 1953, the summer the Rosenbergs were executed. Esther arrives in Manhattan as a guest editor, sharing a hotel with eleven other equally accomplished young women. Days go to copy, nights to parties, all of it glossy as a magazine spread. But from the first day she is caught in a strange numbness: she laughs when the crowd laughs, then goes back to her room feeling hollowed out. Plath renders this state of being present yet absent with one merciless detail: Esther counts out the sleeping pills she has swallowed the way you'd count rounds in a gun you already know will be turned on yourself.

The two women represent models she can equally not accept. Doreen takes her to a country club dance, where her blind date Marco gets her drunk, drags her into the mud, and tries to rape her; she fights free and walks home covered in blood. Buddy, meanwhile, confesses he once slept with a waitress, then turns around and expects Esther to stay pure: he has had his desire and used it, but she is not allowed hers. The double standard is the moment Esther sees it plainly for the first time, that men are indulged and women are policed.

When the month's internship ends, she goes home to the Massachusetts suburbs and is rejected from the summer writing course she wanted. Something gives way for good: she stops sleeping, can't get through a line of a book, can't produce a word when she tries to write. The world starts to look like it's seen through warped glass, the bell jar making its first appearance around her. Plath buries the metaphor in the plainest sentences in the book, the kind that leave a chill only after you've read past them.

Her mother panics and sends her to a young male psychiatrist, Doctor Gordon. He is handsome, runs a private practice, and looks exactly like the kind of man who should be able to fix her. After barely a few minutes of consultation, he schedules electroshock therapy, badly explained beforehand, roughly administered, carelessly ended. It pushes Esther further into despair. This is the novel's sharpest indictment of clinical indifference: the same treatment can heal or harm, and that depends entirely on who's holding it.

A few months later, in the small hours of one morning, she crawls into a crawl space beneath the family cellar and swallows an entire bottle of sleeping pills. She had prepared for this before climbing in; the act carries a planned, deliberate calm. She is found barely alive days later and revived. Philomena Guinea, the wealthy novelist who funds her scholarship, steps in and has her transferred to a better-equipped private psychiatric hospital.

At the private hospital she meets Doctor Nolan, a woman psychiatrist who explains the electroshock procedure in full beforehand and stays with her through it. The treatment is the same, but this time Esther slowly starts to breathe again. Two doctors, two rounds of the same therapy, one pushes her down and the other lifts her up. Plath runs it as a controlled experiment in the novel, showing the reader that being heard is itself a form of medicine.

During her hospital stay she runs into Joan Gilling, an old college acquaintance. Their breakdowns run on strikingly similar tracks, the same brilliance, the same talent, the same kind of collapse. Joan seems to be getting better too, but hangs herself the very week Esther begins to see a way out. The news detonates in Esther; for the first time she is forced to ask herself why she survived. Plath writes survivor's guilt light and heavy at once, and it only takes a few words to knock the breath out of you.

Near the end of her recovery, she seeks out a math professor named Irwin and sleeps with him for the first time, then hemorrhages badly enough to be rushed to the emergency room. She treats the act as a bid to take her body back, not romance, but a single cut that seizes the choice away from everyone who had been making it for her. This is the passage most likely to be misread. Plath writes it cold and exact, with no romanticizing at all.

Themes and Craft

The novel turns on two central images. One is the bell jar itself: depression is not sadness, it is a sealed, warped state of existing that no one else can see into. The other is the fig tree. Esther imagines herself sitting beneath a fig tree where every branch is a possible life, writer, wife, mother, professor, and choosing one means letting all the others wither. She starves to death under that tree not because she cannot choose, but because the world will only let a woman take one branch. The image has since become one of the most quoted metaphors in literature for a woman's impossible choice.

Stylistically, Plath writes in a first-person voice so composed it borders on ruthless. She never cries on Esther's behalf, never explains her away; every line leaves the reader to feel that airlessness firsthand. That is why the book still lands on readers more than sixty years later who never lived through that particular history: it is describing an interior state, and interior states don't keep to a decade.

She is trapped not by one fate but by the posture of every fate opening to her and being refused at once.