Under The Bell Jar: It’s Hard to Fight Insanity When You’re

Depressed
tanyajpeterson.com /under-the-bell-jar-its-hard-to-fight-insanity-when-youre-depressed/

Tanya J Peterson

(For a brief explanation as to why I’m commenting on novels about mental illness, see Books As Insight Into Mental
Illness.)

This is a bell jar:

Imagine living inside one of these. Not just the top of your head, mind you, but all
the way down to your toes. It would be like wearing one of those awful plastic
Halloween masks only worse. Worse because there are no air holes. Worse
because it would fog up. Worse because there would be no air circulation but you
couldn’t just slide it easily to the top of your head and let it rest. Worse because it
wouldn’t be worn by choice, for fun, but instead against your will and for no fun
reason at all.

It is this object, this functional device turned torture device, that Sylvia Plath
chose as the symbolic title of her 1963 novel. It’s an apt title. It represents mental
illness itself, a heavy, stifling, confining jar that descends over one’s very mind
and impedes the ability to fully, freely live.

The novel’s main character, the young woman who sinks deeply into mental
illness, is one Esther Greenwood. She muses over this thing that she doesn’t
fully understand, this illness that has covered her and seeped deep within, and
the description she gives is telling: “…wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street
café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my
own sour air.” For Esther, like so many who live with mental illness, the problem isn’t
where in the world she is. The problem is the stifling, oppressive bell jar that has fallen
down upon her, and even in an exotic location there it would be.

Sylvia Plath wrote a fiction novel. However, it was slightly autobiographical. Esther, while
indeed a separate entity, is representative of Plath herself. Sylvia Plath struggled with
mental illness, and, tragically, she took her own life in 1963, the same year The Bell Jar
was released (originally under a pseudonym). In the novel, it is Esther’s attempted
suicide, the result of inner torment, that lands her in psychiatric hospital after psychiatric hospital.

The terminology used in The Bell Jar is very much indicative of the lack of understanding typical of the era. To be
sure, the fields of psychology and psychiatry existed. Modern psychology had been ushered in by Sigmund Freud
over half a century before. The American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual existed but
was in its infancy; the first edition was released in 1952, and while it provided a uniform terminology, there was
much that went unmentioned and more that was misunderstood. (In fact, the manual is still being updated and
revised as we advance our understanding of the brain; the fifth version was released in 2013, and it most certainly
won’t be the last version.)

In the 1960s, the time of The Bell Jar, so little was fully known that Esther is simply considered to be “insane.” She
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stays in an “insane asylum” where she is not so much treated but managed and controlled. She receives a series of
shock treatments, very common back then and used much more recklessly than they are today. The reader gets the
feeling that these treatments aren’t quite administered with accuracy and purpose. It seems more as though the
doctors are trying what they can to jolt, force, shock, shake Esther back to the world of the sane.

And indeed, this is how it often was. Sadly, people didn’t really know enough about the brain, mental illness, and
psychiatry to truly be helpful. Thankfully, people wanted to know more, so they researched and studied and listened
until we have arrived where we are today. Oh, we still have a long way to go as both scientific and lay communities,
toward fully understanding, treating, and accepting mental illness. At least, though, the term “insane” isn’t applied as
a blanket term for someone experiencing mental illness and most people aren’t controlled and most people aren’t
shocked recklessly and against their will (electroconvulsive therapy does exist, but it’s not like the shock treatments
to which Esther was subjected).

Because of the lack of true understanding and the use of the term “insane,” Esther never does receive a more
specific diagnosis. (Which explains why she wasn’t helped very well; how can one be helped if no one understands
what’s going on?) I only know what is revealed to me by Esther, of course, so I can’t make an official diagnosis for
her. That said, it seems evident that Esther was experiencing major depressive order, commonly known as
depression.

More than one thing points to depression as the culprit for Esther’s immense suffering.

Detachment:

The entire book (told by Esther) has a detached feel. She is completely disengaged from life around her. She has no
desire for connection with those around her or even for simple conversation. She shows little emotion, other than
occasional irritability or anger.

Esther shows us how depression can feel: slow; separate from reality, as if things are happening around her but
she’s not fully part of it; powerless to take action, which is fine because she doesn’t want to anyway; a confused
detachment from the world, as though watching people parade around you, saying strange, incomprehensible
things.

Misinterpretation of the world:

In the hospital after her suicide attempt, she is visited by her friend George. George just wants to see her, but Ester
is hurt and angry, believing that he only wants to gawk at her as if she’s an animal in a zoo. She “knows” he wants to
see what a crazy girl who tried to kill herself looks like. He tries to convince her otherwise, to no avail. She screams
at him to get the hell out and never come back.

Later, in a different hospital, another patient by the name of Miss Norris is completely silent. Esther is hurt by this
silence, and she believes that the staff told Miss Norris that Esther is stupid and bad and so now Miss Norris is
ignoring her.

She even misinterprets her mother. She is hurt and angry because she thinks her mother is ashamed of her and
embarrassed to have a daughter in an insane asylum. She goes so far as to throw away the bouquet of roses her
mother gives her on her birthday and then order her mother to leave.

Many forms of mental illness, depression among them, make it difficult for people to interpret the world accurately.
Thought patterns are different than they would be without mental illness, and the stigma attached to mental illness
can make it easy to believe that others are judging you.

And speaking of stigma! It existed in Esther’s world as it does still in ours today. I believe a simple quote from The
Bell Jar will say it all. The comment was made by one Buddy Willard when he stopped by briefly to see Esther (or,

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more accurately, to make sure there wasn’t something he did to land her there). Buddy and Esther had previously
dated, and at one point Buddy was interested in marrying her. Buddy had recently been released from a year-long
stay at a special hospital for people with tuberculosis. (Those facts amplify the impact of his statement).

Buddy to Esther: “’I wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther. Now you’ve been,’ and Buddy’s gesture encompassed the
hill, the pines, and the severe, snow-gabled buildings breaking up the rolling landscape, ‘here.’”

The Bell Jar is a powerful novel for many reasons. It takes us inside the mind and heart of someone experiencing
“insanity”—or, if you will, depression. It’s powerful, too, because it leaves us with a sense of hesitancy yet hope.

Says Esther, “But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe,
somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” And another time, “…all I
could see were question marks.”

And that is so accurate. With any mental illness, there’s always a shadow lingering, a fear that things might get bad
again. And again. And that a good spell is only temporary. Yet Esther’s statement is significant. She’s thinking
ahead. She’s envisioning college and Europe. No matter where the bell jar may be, there is possibility. There is
hope.

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Filed Under: Musings of a Mental Health Writer
Tagged With: asylum , attempted suicide in literature , depression , detachment , hope , insane asylum ,
insanity , mental illness , novel , stigma , Sylvia Plath , The Bell Jar

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