Reading The Bell Jar
I've been having these weird thoughts about Sylvia Plath lately, like is any of this for real, or not?
If you’ve heard anything about Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, it’s that damn passage about the fig tree. A tumblr staple, an IG classic, a Pinterest board fixture. And now, TikTok.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked —
Plath’s narrator, a girl named Esther, is doing a summer internship at a women’s magazine in New York. Despite the glamor and the opportunity, she finds it dreary and unfulfilling. Over the course of the internship and its aftermath, she slips into a depression death spiral. Mostly melancholy punctuated by profound paranoia.
Eventually, she attempts suicide.
If you know anything about this book you know that it’s semiautobiographical. Auto fiction, even. Plath did her internship at Mademoiselle magazine in 1953. Like Esther, she used sleeping pills to attempt suicide. She underwent electroconvulsive therapy and intensive psychoanalysis at a luxurious hospital for six months.
There is still fiction. Names have been changed, and Esther’s general hospital stay is drawn mostly from another writer’s work by way of a review.
Still, I bet you don’t know what a bell jar is. I didn’t. I thought it was like a mason jar. Googling it yields only results about the novel, summaries of the novel, opportunities to buy the novel, this free version of the novel from Project Gutenberg.
The bell jar, our central metaphor, is a bell-shaped piece of glass that shields fragile objects, instruments, or even gasses from the rest of the laboratory, room, world. Here in the novel, Esther is the device. Something delicate. Weak.
Yet this book isn’t from the perspective of the scientists who placed the bell jar, or any detached third party — it is from the perspective of the specimen. The vapor. The instrument. Trapped under the glass, Esther can only gaze through it.
“To the person in the bell jar,” Plath writes, “blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
Through her eyes, every other character is duplicitous. Everyone has an ulterior motive. A judgment. Beauty is just out of reach, the future is a speck on the horizon — and it’s getting away.
The fig tree passage is through the eyes of the jarred. Plath gives us this beautiful image, a tree overflowing with fruit; every fig an opportunity, a different girl and a different life.
“One fig was a husband and a happy home and children…”
Only to slowly turn the screw. With just five sentences, Plath wields her devices and places the jar on us: lists upon lists upon parallelism —
“...and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe…”
— upon image. Everywhere she could go and everyone she could be, the tree bears it all like fruit.
“Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Atilla and lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion…”
Consider the turn. Her eye turns back on itself. Back on herself.
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs to choose.”
The image is all but inverted now. A tree bearing fruit is literally mother. It’s giving life. But for the bell jar; beautiful images are warped in the glass. Potential arrives already wasted. Opportunities are born lost. Conceived lost.
It might surprise you to know that my early twenties were not great. I wasted years in a bad relationship — the boy wasn’t bad and I wasn’t bad, but together we were terrible. We were shiftless, aimless, and bitter. In lieu of the life I was living, I imagined.
Imagined being an author, being in college, being an influencer, being famous, having a podcast, becoming a lawyer, and I imagined finally getting my stupid license and finding a way to have good sex with my boyfriend again; and I imagined quitting my job at the movie theater for a better one so I could afford gas for the car, my car, that I would have; and I saw myself waiting tables to pay for college, or writing my way into generous scholarships, or going to the gym and becoming so beautiful that my whole life would be set —
“And, as I sat there, unable to decide —
Every day bled into every other day, because I spent those years on my boyfriend’s twin-sized bed watching anime, or on my own queen-sized bed watching anime and gay porn and anime that was gay porn. I was adding books to my kindle that I would never read, and I was starting novels that I would never write —
“[T]he figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one —
I would imagine killing myself: jumping, hanging, drowning. Quick. Final.
“[T]hey plopped to the ground at my feet.”
I have a friend who read The Bell Jar for his book club. He told me that when he asked the rest of the group if they felt as cynical as this narrator is, every other person said yes. “Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort,” Plath writes.
I’m in my thirties now. My ex and I broke up eight years ago. While we both moved to the Bay Area, we’ve never spent any time together; but we do text every day, mostly about Brandon Sanderson novels.
I moved to San Francisco to get a degree in writing funny made-up stories. And I have. I’ve been journaling every day for almost three years, and one of those years my journal got water damaged at Coachella — you see, I’ve spent my time dancing and listening to new music, often live, thanks mostly to that friend I already mentioned. The one without the cynical worldview.
I don’t have a boyfriend but I have hella boy friends. Straight boys like brothers; gay boys like sisters. And always the dolls. Thanks to them I’ve seen Frank Ocean and Ethel Cain and Omar Apollo; I’ve done party drugs under neon ceilings, but also under the moonlight, with the house music. Warehouses and townhouses.
It’s thanks to them that I am alive, more alive than I ever was, more alive each year.
On foot, the tallest buildings in the city are ten minutes away. Often, when I step outside to go see those buildings — or parks, or beaches, or bars, or cafes, or museums — I smell piss. Other times, I smell the ocean.
In the final pages of The Bell Jar, Esther is preparing to leave her rehabilitation facility after both her failed suicide attempt and another girl’s terrible success. Esther has been drugged, electrocuted, and therapized. She has been ignored and she has been listened to.
Before she can leave, she has to convince a panel of doctors that she will live if they let her go.
This is the image that sticks with me, even more than the figs. A young girl stepping into the room to make her case.
“How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” she writes, predicts. Esther’s past augurs Plath’s future.
I was still thinking about her months after I closed the book. The way she died. The bell jar has always descended on me, too. Even as a child, I remember it. It is always lifted again, each time, eventually, with a little help from my friends, and in its absence I see the unfiltered light.
I wonder about when it will come down again.
The book has beautiful writing, cynical writing, ultimately hopeful writing — but Keats’ name was writ in water, and Sylvia’s name was writ from inside the glass, with fogging hot breath. We could be cynical ourselves. We could say that Plath was wrong. That the jar always wins.
When I read The Bell Jar, I think about my many figs, some lost and many chosen — and all the people that helped me with the choosing. “The eyes and faces all turned towards me,” as Esther comes upon her panel of doctors.
Reading after college is still like reading in high school, where you see in The Crucible and Romeo and Juliet and Lord of the Flies you and your friends reflections, as if on a pane of glass.
“...and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”
These pieces helped fill the gaps in my memory about Sylvia Plath’s life.
You can read The Bell Jar for free online.
I’m still processing Ethel Cain’s sophomore album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, but Preacher’s Daughter was this essay’s soundtrack. Still goated.
The essay’s structure — literary analysis by way of personal essay — is heavily inspired by John Paul Brammer’s substack. Particularly his review of the Smurfs Movie. No, really.
This essay wouldn’t exist without prompting from two of my best friends. Dedicating this one to Ram and Jason.
And Sylvia, of course. Thinking of you today and always.