ISSN No-2231-5063 Vol.1,Issue.XI/May 2012pp.

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Research Paper

Realism in Sylvia Plath's Novel The Bell Jar

Dr. N. B. Masal
Dept. of English,
Dr. Ghali College, Gadhinglaj
Dist. Kolhapur.
ABSTRACT
Sylvia Plath was undoubtedly one of the most prominent poets of the mid-twentieth century American Literature.
But she is known to readers for her largely autobiographical novel The Bell Jar published in 1963 under the pseudonym
Victoria Lucas. It has become a classic in American Literature. She is also known for her short-stories, letters and journals
which too are highly autobiographical. Born in a middle-class family in Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath began her literary
career at the age of eight by publishing her first poem. She was a very sensitive, sincere and intelligent girl and always
wanted to achieve perfection in all her works. This perfectionist attitude of hers was the main source of her frustration
and disappointment that led her towards committing suicide. Before committing suicide, however, she wrote over four
hundred poems, a novel, 696 letters and journals and a collection of short-stories.

She had brought home name and fame as a poet It is in the medical school that Esther goes to meet
even before she entered Smith College on a scholarship in Buddy that she sees in the maternity ward the birth of a baby.
1950 She had written and published a number of poems prior Here Buddy tells her that she had sex with a waitress that
to her entry in the college. Her perfectionist attitude, the summer before. Her hypocrisy is exposed and Esther breaks
death of her father when she was hardly eight years of age, up her relations with him. Then he suffers from tuberculosis
her relations with her mother, brother, room-mates, class- and is sent to a sanatorium for treatment. When she visits him,
mates, her friends and above all with her husband, Ted he puts a marriage proposal before her. She straightway
Hughes, his adultery with her by establishing extra-marital rejects it by telling him that she will never marry. In an
relationship with 'other' woman, her continual scarcity of accident while skiing with Buddy, she gets her leg broken.
money, frequent rejection of her poetry by publishers and her Constantin is yet another person who comes in
infighting with her own self, all these incidents and Esther's life. He once takes her out for lunch. After lunch they
happenings have been reflected in her works. go to his room where Esther wants to have sex with him. He,
The Bell Jar is an autobiographical novel, based on on the contrary, does not respond to her mating call. She feels
her own experiences. This is a story of a young girl, named humiliated and frustrated and breaks down in tears. Doreen
Esther Greenwood, a student from Boston who has won comes for her timely help and takes her to the hotel. With
several prizes and scholarships and also a guest editorship on them are Lenny and his friend Marco. Macro tries to rape her
a national magazines. Here she has to face the challenges of but she resist, punches him and goes away. In her highly
the bewildering world that was at her feet. She decides to be a frustrated and desperate mood, she takes off all her clothes
writer – a perfect writer, but here too she has to struggle and throws them on the roof of the hotel. After this incident
against the problems of morality, behaviour and identity. she goes home to spend the summer there.
Here she has written about her disappointments, anger, Now, she finds herself in very complicated
depression, schizophrenia, psychological problems, mental situation. The frequent insults and humiliation,
breakdown and the treatment she receives. disappointments and torture, felling of being neglected make
When the novel opens, we see the protagonist of the her depressed. She is not even able to read and write and
novel, Esther Greenwood working in New York as an sleep. Further she has to take refuge of the sleeping pills. She
editorial intern. By winning the position, along with eleven is taken to a doctor who sends her for psychiatric treatment,
other girls in a writing contest, she has joined the national the psychiatrist instead of listening to her, advises her of
magazine as an intern. This is a very new and strange world shock therapy. She tries to run away from the psychiatrist but
that she comes across in New York, She is living with a girl, in vain The shock therapy brings her in worse situation. She
named Doreen as her roommate. Doreen is a very bold and cannot stand all this and tries to put an end to her life first by
beautiful girl. The girls come across Lenny Shepherd in a bar hanging and then by cuttings the veins of her wrist by razors,
where they go, in fact, they are supposed to go to a party. That and even by drowning, but without much effect. She, as a
night both Esther and Dorren go to Lenny's place. Doreen final attempt takes a overdose of sleeping pills and hides
enjoys Lenny's company and Esther leaves for her room. The herself in the basement. She is then taken to the hospital and
next day they eat crabmeat from which they get food given treatment. Here, she breaks a mirror and this taking her
poisoning. Esther's boos Jay Cee criticizes her for not to be mentally weak, she is once again take into the mental
planning her life. After recovery, Esther begins to read a short hospital for psychiatric treatment. In this hospital too she
story and thinks about her boyfriend, named Buddy who had behaves like a mad woman. She is more and more depressed.
kissed her. He was admitted in a sanatorium for the treatment It is private institution of one Dr. Nolan, that she begins to
of tuberculosis he was suffering from. improve. One night, however, she make a show of extreme
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Realism in Sylvia Plath's Novel The Bell Jar Vol.1,Issue.XI/May 2012;

violence. The doctor realizes that it was due to the visit of her shock-treatment. During an accidental shock, when she by
mother and other friends and relatives. Then nurse here tells mistake, touches her father's electric lamp, she becomes so
Esther that they will not receive any visitors for some time. scared that a scream is 'torn' from her throat. The most fearful
Esther, finally gets well and moves into another nightmare, however, is the first shock-therapy which Doctor
building. She even tolerates the shock therapy at the hands of Gordon gives her.
Dr. Nolan. She has improved in such a way that she even Then something bent down and took hold of me and
desires to have sex. The man with whom she has sex gives her shook
the disease like hemorrhages. Once again she has to got to me like the end o the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee, it
hospital for treatment. Now, Esther is not willing to leave the shrilled,
institution of Dr. Nolan as she is afraid of the outside world. through an air crackling with blue light, and with
But Dr. Nolan encourages her to go out as she is alright. Here, each flash a
Buddy comes to see her, but she does not care a fig for him. great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would
She becomes ready to face the exit interview. The novel The break and
Bell Jar ends on this note of Esther's reconciliation with the the sap flay out of me like a split plant. (BJ, 151)2
situation that the novel ends. This shattering sense of fear continues even after
The Bell Jar is a novel about the events of Sylvia she leaves Doctor Gordon's private hospital. Even she feels
Plath's life about how she tried to put an end to her life, and Dodo Conway's black station wagon outside the hospital as a
how she struck together with glue. It resembles her later 'panther' waiting for its prey to pass by. In a better private
poems. It is a fine novel in which bitter and remorseless hospital, Doctor Nolan comforts her a great deal, even then
feelings dominate. Esther feels that the sight of the shock-therapy machine
In the novel The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath has used the would 'strike' her 'dead'. She is 'scared to death' till the end of
most important technical device of realism. Sylvia Plath's the novel, although she is cured of the mental breakdown and
technique of realism ranges from tiny verbal witticisms that is to be allowed to attend the college after a formal meeting
bite to images that are deeply troubling. When she calls the with the board of doctors.
hotel for women where she stays at New York as Amazon, Esther Greenwood then begins to doubt not only her
she does not merely enjoy the closensess of the sound of that social compatibility, but also her academic and literary
word to Barbizon. She forces us to rethink the entire concept abilities. Jay Cee, the editor attached to Esther realizes, her
of a hotel for women. She says, that 'mostly girls of her age growing loneliness and gives her a thorough dressing down
with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure that their for not making the most the most of her stay with the journal.
daughters would be living where men could not get at them This 'unmasking' jolts her from within and she begins to see
and deceive them'. And thus she announces a major theme in the futility of her ambitious career :
her work, the hostility between men and women. After nineteen years of running after good marks
With Esther Greenwood this hostility takes the and prizes
form of obsessive attempts to get herself liberated from a and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up,
virginity she finds oppressive, by a masculinity she finds showing
hideous. When her medical student boy-friend suggests that down, dropping clean out of the race. (BJ, 31)3
they should play the traditional children's game, I will show
you mine if you show me yours, she looks at his naked From this period Esther Greenwood begins to
maleness and she feels very depressed. This is the realism realize the horrible reality of her existence like a burnt-out
with a vengeance. The image catches up all cocky masculine case.
pride of flesh and reduces it to the level of giblets. It sees an The cruel impersonality behind New York's
inexorable link between generation and death. glittering facade has shattered Esther. The city seems to her
In the novel we find that in the face of such cosmic 'like some rootless island rock-abbeying itself on nothing at
disgust, psychological explanations like 'penis envy' seem all'. Before leaving the city, she throws all her costly dresses
pitifully inadequate. In the novel The bell Jar the main to the wind as a gesture of dissociating herself from the
character Esther Greenwood wants to be a human being who metropolitan glamour and corruption. When she returns to
cannot avoid the price to be paid for living.. It is death Sexual her hometown she wants to return empty-handed and empty
differentiation itself is only a metaphor for human headed. But these traumatic events cannot be thrown away so
incompleteness. The bottle sexes is, after all, a war in human easily. As a sadomasochistic gesture, she keeps dried-up
society. blotches of blood on her cheek, a reminder of her encounter
The protagonist of the novel, Esther Greenwood, is with Marco, 'Like the relic of dead lover'.
a highly intelligent, sensitive girl of nineteen, breaking, “Out Once outside the cage of New York, Esther is
of cramped adolescent cocoons”. N. H. Steiner (1973:33)1 entrapped in another event in her hometown. This sense of
Throughout the novel, She is haunted because of a very impending enrichment is amply clear when Esther describes
fragile and vulnerable self. At college, she is 'panic struck' by her feeling about the approaching suburb :
diagrams and formula of Physics, and it is with 'horrible' The grey, padded car roof closed over my head like
effort that she drags herself through the first half o the course. the roof
In New York, she is apprehensive of the bearer inside the of a prison van, and the white, shining identical
hotel and cabbies outside on the road, for she does not know clapboard
how much to tip them. The tiles of the bathroom in the hotel houses with their interstices of well-groomed green
remind her of some glittering white torture-chamber, and the proceeded
delivery table in the hospital, where she has gone with Buddy past, one bar after another in a large but escape-
Willard out of curiosity and that too seems to her as 'some proof cage.
awful torture table'. UNO, her ignorance of the foreign (BJ, 127-128)4
language, makes her think herself 'dreadfully inadequate'. An escape from this cage is hardly possible. Esther's
But what Esther Greenwood fears most is the application for a course on short story at Harvard that
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Realism in Sylvia Plath's Novel The Bell Jar Vol.1,Issue.XI/May 2012;

summer has been rejected. She tries her hand at writing an The Bell Jar Spoke to a generation of women who
autobiographical novel and feels that this 'would fix a lot of would come of age in the 1906s, and would help to give them
people', but he novel does not shape. As she lacks experience the confidence and the courage to change the world. In a
of life, she does not know how to write in a convincing way : simple phrase this novel is awe inspiring, Sylvia Plath truly
How could I write about life when I could never had outdid herself when she wrote The Bell Jar. It is indeed truly
a love miraculous for anyone who lays eyes on it.
affair or a baby or seen anybody die? (BJ, 135)5 Thus in The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses her fictional
When failed at writing, Esther Greenwood tries to characters to relate with her own experiences, her father's
learn shorthand because of her mother' s encouragement and death and her own desire to join him in that world. This novel
guidance. But soon 'the white chalk curlicues' of shorthand is abounding in many personal influences. It tells the story of
becomes senseless to her just like as the Physics formula of a young woman facing the right of passage into adulthood
Prof. Manzi at her college. As a last desperate attempt to signified by the last year of college. Outwardly, she has all the
divert her mind from the descending bell jar, she thinks of conventional earmarks of an individual destined for success
writing her honors thesis on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, – an outstanding college record, contact in the world of
but the thick book makes 'an unpleasant dent' in her stomach fashion writing, even a conventional boy-friend. Inwardly,
Because of these failures to concentrate on some productive however, she is scared of the future and of any indecision that
work, she takes her life as meaningless and her future devoid implies growth toward maturity and the autonomy of
of any sense. Suffering from insomnia now, night after night becoming one's own parent. One way of avoiding growth is
she stares blankly at the ceiling of her bedroom. This was an to become imprisoned in neurotic indecision. She wants to
ominous sign that The Bell Jar in reality, was tightening its live both in the country and in the city. She states explicitly
grip over her mind. It makes Esther quite apprehensive, for thus, “I am neurotic. I could never settle down in either the
she would 'have anything wrong' with her body than country or the city. if neurotic is wanting two mutually
something wrong with her mind. There is a distressing exclusive things a tone and the same time, then I am neurotic
realization all the same that there are 'real glasses' in the as hell. I will be flying back and forth between one mutually
corner of her mind. exclusive thing and another or the rest of my days. (BJ, 76)6
This novel is very realistic because it was drawn The bell Jar teaches the readers that Sylvia Plath like all
directly from real life- the protagonist is Syliva Plath, more human beings was sensitive to parental loss, the stresses of
or less. Sylvia Plath very vividly describes every detail of young adulthood, the burden of choice and the idea of her
everyday, and flashes out her character completely. Every own mortality.
one of the characters is so real that one probably knows Thus “No other major contemporary American
someone exactly like t hem – the crusty Jay Cee, a complete writer has inspired such intense curiosity about her life, as
jerk Buddy Villard, all the various young women, who think Sylvia. The intimate and eloquent personal diaries of the
nothing of giving away their bodies to a fleeting twentieth century's most important female, reveals the true
acquaintance, Esther, who is think nothing of giving away story behind. The Bell Jar and her tragic suicide at thirty one.
their bodies to a fleeting acquaintance, Esther, who is This novel is a classic of American Literature which is a
incapable of achieving anything despite her obvious talent largely autobiographical work about Sylvia Plath's own
and so plans to affirm her identity through sleeping with summer of 1953 when she was a guest editor at
someone she just met etc. None of them are exaggerated in Mademoiselle and experienced a breakdown.” Suman
the least. At the end, the story leaves the readers asking why Agrawal (2003:152-153)7
all this happened, why Esther went crazy, why she could not According to Evans, William R., “The Bell Jar, may
do something with her talents, why no one seems to have any have come from Oliver Wendell Holme's The Autocrat at the
reason to take up space on the earth, whose fault is it, what do Breakfast Table. He quotes the most pertinent section of that
we do about it, why it has to be like this and so on. The book work where Holmes asserts that, Society places its
provides no answers to any of that, and unfortunately, it is too transparent bell-glass over the young women who is to be the
late to ask Sylvia lath to answer. This is an easy book to read, subject of one of its experiments.” William Evans (1977 :
however, it can be very confusing when Esther becomes 105-107)8 Gayle Whittler, “Places the criticism of The Bell
completely insane. While reading this book one questions Jar into three main categories : that which labels it as thinly-
whether or not Esther is truly insane. At that point one begins veiled autobiography, that which dismisses its technique as
to rationalize her thoughts and is pulled into her world. Are that of the poet's novel, and that which regards it as a feminist
the humans on this planet living in a bell jar? manifesto, discusses the reason for the diversity of
Ester Greenwood, a young woman who finds interpretation. The confusion results from the sociological
herself nauseated at the increasingly narrowing path down shaping of the book, for it is structurally deceptive and totally
which young women in the 1950s were being led. Her candid deficient, at once open ended in contrived way and tightly
observation about sex, her peers, the city, her school and her narrated by its own participant, Esther Greenwood.” (Gayle
family, echoed thoughts that have often entertained in the Whittler (1977 : 127-146)9
readers mind. Esther has little interest in beings a mother and The structure of the novel is episodic and
living in the suburbs, she is not even certain that she wants to digressive, with many individual climaxes and the first part
be married. It is for her refusal to accept the role that society moves freely backward and forward in time. The flashbacks
prescribes to women that she is rendered crazy by her mother, reveal that Esther's depression is not brought on solely by
her peers, and her doctors. If Esther Greenwood is indeed new experiences in the big city and the adult world , but also
crazy, then one wonders about the mental health of people at by a series of vents from her past new having a cumulative
large. It was not Esther's mind that drove her to attempt effect and distorting her vision of the present.
suicide it was confining society that kept her from feeling
free enough to explore her own interests and goals, and being REFERENCES
understood by her mother and the other people who loved 1 Steiner, N. H. A Closer Look At Ariel. New York :
her. Harper and Row, 1973. P. 33.
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2 Plath Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London : Faber and

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