Women's Studies

ISSN: 0049-7878 (Print) 1547-7045 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20

Rebirth in The Bell Jar

Teresa de Lauretis

To cite this article: Teresa de Lauretis (1976) Rebirth in The Bell Jar , Women's Studies, 3:2,
173-183, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1976.9978385

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.1976.9978385

Published online: 12 Jul 2010.

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 Rebirth in The Bell Jar

TERESA DE LAURETIS

University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee
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SINCE ITS publication in 1963, Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel

The Bell Jar has rapidly attained the status of feminist manifesto.1
Plath's is certainly not the first novel whose protagonist is a woman,
nor the first account of a heroine's struggle with herself and the world.
But it is a statement about the female condition which, filtering a
unique emotional and experiential content through the sieve of sym-
bolic discourse, communicates at the highly complex interpersonal, or
universal, level of literature. I believe that its success and forcefulness
are due in large part to the author's ability to integrate the historical,
diachronic self (the heroine in her contemporary world) with a syn-
chronie, timeless, mythical structure, the descent-ascent pattern, in
which the heroine mediates the transition from one world to another,
or from one state of being to another. The theme of rebirth, under-
lying the narrative pattern, and witnessing the attainment of her con-
sciousness and self-determination, makes of Esther a true culture-
heroine.2
The Bell Jar is the account of a journey, of Esther's descent into
the hell of self-disintegration, her rebirth, and ascent to self-unity and
freedom. Although she actually travels through different physical
spaces from one geographical location to another, the journey is mainly
an inner one, inward into the self and outward toward the world.
Thus it follows the pattern of psychoanalytic novels and case histories,3
but whereas in the latter the main interest lies in the psychological pro-
cesses described rather than in cultural and existential ones, Esther's

Women's Studies © Gordon and Breach Science Publishers Ltd.

1976, Vol. 3 pp. 173-183 Printed in Great Britain
 174 T. DE LAURETIS

story is totally entwined with a specific and fully detailed culture, from
which it takes life and meaning. Her "madness" is presented as a
necessary consequence of, indeed as consubstantial with the world
surrounding her. We perceive Esther's alienation not as individual and
aberrant (hence, an illness), but as a quality of existence itself, defined
in the confines of the book and in terms with which we are familiar.
Esther's madness is not "another country," it is New York in the 50's,
the small Massachusetts town, the United Nations, the private clinic,
the state psychiatric ward where she is submitted' to shock treatment,
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the cellar where she hides to die. To us, Esther's words sound as
familiar as the echo of our own voices, as Plath's private vision has
become today's public awareness. But such precise and keen sociocul-
tural consciousness is not the only distinctive trait of her writing. There
is also the qualitative difference between experience and expression
which is brought about by the medium of language and its symbolic
and semantic functions. The events of her life are presented to us in
an order not chronological but emotional, both in flashbacks and in
forward linear sequence. We first see her in New York, at the crucial
moment of her life, when all the threads of her existence, disillusion-
ment with people, fears, guilt, doubts, frustrated expectations, and vain
longing, come to a sharp focus in the false, alienating environment of
the city and the ladies' magazine milieu :

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel
to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a
numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other
girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty,
the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of
the surrounding hullabaloo (p. 2).

Her first experience in New York is that of being used by her girl-
friend Doreen who asks her to go along to a man's apartment where
Esther sits alone watching the other two's sexual play, and feeling
"gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow" (p. 8). As the man
walks across his living room, Esther's perception of him is that he
"grew smaller and smaller until he vanished through a door in the
distance" (p. 12). And shortly after the distortion occurs again, this
time in herself :
 REBIRTH IN THE BELL JAR 175

The two of them didn't even stop jitterbugging during the intervals. I felt myself
shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that
pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground (p. 14).

Returning alone to her room in the Amazon Hotel, Esther looks at her
mirror : "The face in it looked like the reflection in a ball of dentist's
mercury" (p 16). She tries in vain to sleep and then decides to take a
hot bath.

I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I
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guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy
water.
I said to myself : "Doreen is dissolving. Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie
is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of
them matter any more. I don't know them, I have never known them and I am
very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled
on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure" (p. 17).

At dawn Doreen is back at the hotel, sick and worn out. Her vomit on
the carpet appears to Esther "an ugly, concrete testimony to my own
dirty nature" (p. 19).
All the major themes and motifs of the novel are contained in the
opening two chapters: the guilt of loneliness, desire for purgation,
purification by water, the warmth of womb-like enclosures, sleep,
death, shrinking, disintegration, dissolution. All of these will reappear
throughout the novel's imagery, not at random but following a specific
movement, which is the movement of Esther's inner journey. Especi-
ally recurrent are the images of fragmentation, disintegration, sep-
aratedness, isolatedness, unrelatedness. They recur more and more
often until Chapter 13, in a crescendo that culminates with Esther's
attempted suicide. The cut-up cadavers and the babies in glass bottles
that she once saw in a hospital with her boyfriend Buddy come back
to Esther's mind while lying inert and apathetic in her New York bed.
At the UN the simultaneous interpreter sits in her booth mechanically
"rattling off idiom after idiom in her unknowable tongue" (p. 61).
Esther admires her accomplishment, and for herself, "I wanted change
and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the
colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket" (p. 68). Esther sees her
life like a fig tree with figs hanging alluringly from its branches, each
fig a possible future, a possible direction to take. Yet she is unable to
 176 T. DE LAURETIS

choose even one. And as she sits, empty and dull like the eye of the
tornado, the world around her is separating, disintegrating, becoming
meaningless : she stands on a snowcovered slope for her first ski lesson,
and "On every side of me the red and blue and white jacketed skiers
tore away from the blinding slope like fugitive bits of an American
flag" (p. 77). Below her, "Buddy's arms went on waving feebly as
antennae from the other side of a field swarming with tiny moving
animalcules like germs, or bent, bright exclamation marks" (p. 79).
Then she plunges down "past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts,
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through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into
my own past. People and trees receded on either hand like the dark
sides of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of
it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled
in its mother's belly" (p. 79). And when she comes to, her perception
is more partial, fragmented :

Buddy's face hung over me, near and huge, like a distracted planet. Other faces
showed themselves up in back of his. Behind him, black dots swarmed on a
plane of whiteness. Piece by piece, as at the strokes of a dull godmother's wand,
the old world sprang back into position (pp. 79-80).

She lives on in New York. Day by day the world becomes one-dimen-
sional, flat surface, people are automata, mannequins, her own bodily
responses are mechanical ("like the mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy,
my own mouth started to quirk up," (p. 83). During her last night in
the city, returning from a double date where she is almost raped and
then called a slut, Esther performs a symbolic funeral for herself :
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a
loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly
where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York (p. 91).

The next chapter, ten, deals with Esther's return home, when her
physical and psychic disintegration begins. Accordingly, the imagery is
intensified :
Like a colossal junkyard, the swamps and back lots of Connecticut flashed past,
one broken-down fragment bearing no relation to another (p. 92). All through
June the writing course stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the
dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white
blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap (p. 93).
 REBIRTH IN THE BELL JAR 177

Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of
scatty rabbits.
I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles,
threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three . . . nineteen telephone
poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see
a single pole beyond the nineteenth (pp. 100-101).

She tries in vain to write a novel about Elaine (herself). Her limbs do
not respond to her will :
My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp. I forced it toward
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the receiver again, but again it stopped short, as if it had collided with a pane of
glass (p. 97).
I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and
choked me off (p. 103).
When I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a
child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally,
as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along
and blown them askew (p. 106).

She tries to work at her dissertation on Finnegan's Wake and "My

eyes sank through an alphabet soup of letters to the long word in the
middle of the page."
It sounded like a heavy wooden object falling downstairs, boomp boomp
boomp, step after step. Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by
my eyes. Words, dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse
mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.
I squinted at the page.
The. letters grew barbs and rams' horns. I watched them separate, each from
the other, and jiggle up and down in a silly way. Then they associated them-
selves in fantastic, untranslatable shapes, like Arabic or Chinese (p. 102).

At home her anxiety increases, all activity loses meaning. Sleeping,

eating, and "everything people did seemed so silly, because they only
died in the end" (p. 105).
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes,
and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for
me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had
suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of
me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue (pp. 104-105).

Death becomes her only preoccupation. She identifies herself with

suicide victims in the local scandal sheet, or sees her pain as somebody
else's. Nothing makes sense :
 178 T. DE LAURETIS

I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George

Pollucci's face, spotlights like a three-quarter moon against a vague background
of bricks and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and what-
ever it was might just be written on his face. But the smudgy crags of George
Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves
into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium-gray dots (pp. 111-112).

Her attempts at suicide, in all forms and places, are the same as this
effort to objectify herself. She is drawn more and more to places of
enclosure and death—the zoo, the prison, the graveyard, the bathtub,
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the deep sea, and lastly the dark cellar where she takes an overdose of
sleeping pills and the final plunge into silence—all of them object-
symbols of what she later (after rebirth) describes with the extremely
powerful metaphor of the "bell jar," which unites the meanings of
water, purification, immobility, unrelatedness, birth, and death (the
"pickled" still-born babies).
The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage
of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping
tide, rushed me off to sleep (p. 138).

Until this moment Esther's language is packed with similes and meta-
phors of automatism (from the "numb trolleybus" to the "zombie" in
her throat) and disintegration, in a crescendo that reflects the advance-
ment of the "sweeping tide" over her. Both automatism and disunity
are symptoms of an affective deficiency, a lack of meaning, the un-
relation between the self and the world.
Esther's coming to, described in the next chapter, is a literary simu-
lation of birth. It represents symbolically the journey of the fetus from
the dark womb through the birth canal ("I was being transported at
enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth" [p. 139]), to the opening
("a slit of light opened like a mouth or a wound" [p. 139]). Then a
voice cries "Mother ! " (we later learn it was her own voice), and Esther
becomes aware of the air and the space around her : "If I opened my
eyes, I would see colors and shapes bending in upon me like nurses"
(p. 139). With rebirth a new life begins in which Esther, no longer
the repressed dutiful daughter and straight-A scholarship winner, ex-
presses herself, her violence and aggression, by openly hostile acts. For
one of these, breaking the nurse's thermometers, she is punished by
seclusion. But before she is taken to the place of loneliness, she manages
 REBIRTH IN THE BELL JAR 179

to secure an important and magical object,4 a symbolic safeguard of

the self, a little ball of mercury which trembled "like celestial dew."
I opened my fingers a crack, like a child with a secret, and smiled at the silver
globe cupped in my palm. If I dropped it, it would break into a million little
replicas of itself, and if I pushed them near each other, they would fuse, without
a crack, into one whole again. I smiled and smiled at the small silver ball (p. 150).

This moment, at the close of Chapter 14 marking Esther's rebirth,

is the beginning of her journey upward. The imagery of disintegration
no longer occurs in the novel, to be replaced by Esther's conscious and
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intellectual efforts to come to grips with her self. She covers in reverse
the path already trod downward, now meeting experience and con-
trolling it to the extent it is possible to her. She faces the Other in her
lesbian friend Joan, whom she rejects and yet feels much in common
with—her destiny of womanhood, mortality, frustration, defeat. She
faces the sexual taboo and buys her freedom from it in the shape of a
diaphragm. No longer threatened with the stigma of pregnancy, the
nightmarish vision of bottle babies disappears, to give way to mature
considerations about maternity. And if she is not yet willing nor in-
clined toward it, we must remember that Esther is still a very young
girl, that at the time of the novel's beginning she does have a child
(p. 3). She faces sexuality, and her hemorrhage is the counterpart of the
vomit caused by food poisoning at the Ladies' Day banquet (both
occur in a taxi). Again, the symptom/symbol has become the con-
ceptually accepted reality.
At the end of the novel, Esther is going to her interview with the
doctors who will decide of her freedom and sanity. After walking
through "the familiar labyrinth of shoveled asylum paths" (p. 196),
she faces the doctors in the examination room and "guiding myself by
them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room (p. 200). The
magical thread that holds the self to the world is like the magical ball
of Mercury (the guide of travellers, the winged messenger of the
Gods)—it may break into a thousand fragments and be put back to-
gether. And it may also be shattered again, as we know it came to pass
for Sylvia Plath. But Esther is forever safe, and able to share with us
her experience and what she has learnt in her journey. For her also,
life is no rose garden, but rather a very precarious path on which
choices must be made, enemies fought, and false myths demystified.
 180 T. DE LAURETIS

The episode of the ball of mercury, so cleverly understated that it

may pass unnoticed among the wealth of imagery and brief, seemingly
unimportant incidents that constitute the fabric of the novel, is a very
clear example of the way in which the literary work contains and re-
leases a multiplicity of meanings. I will compare briefly The Bell Jar
with Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl which, being non-
fictional, supplies what we may consider factual evidence. Esther's
anguish over the meaninglessness of words, whose letters separate and
reassociate themselves "in fantastic, untranslatable shapes" (p. 102),
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or the dissolution of human features into meaningless patterns of dots

(p. 112), is the fear of complete loss of meaning. In fact, when Renée
is at the farthest point of her regression, "sunk beyond language, be-
yond thought," she utters syllables that have no meaning to herself or
to others.5 For her the symbols of substenance (the apples representing
the nurturing breasts), prenatal unity (the "green sea," water), serve
as actual substitutes for the objects. Only with recovery will they
change to concepts, i.e. become conscious. To Esther the mercury ball
is a symbol of unity, or better of the integration of the many (selves)
into one (self). It is the emblem of a magical process that Esther ac-
cepts, irrationally, as a model of reality. Unlike Renée's apples, the
mercury is not a substitute for the object, but the meaningful symbol of
a new relation between Esther's self and reality. For us, however, the
mercury ball has a further connotation, which we perceive on the basis
of a shared cultural substratum. For, at Plath's suggestion, we make the
connection between the mercury and the later metaphors "familiar
labyrinth" and "magical thread," and assess the significance of Esther's
journey as a particular version of the mythology of our Western cul-
ture. In its total communicative context formed by the author, the
novel, and the readers, the mercury episode is then a sign (in the Saus-
surian sense) functioning in the system of denotations and connotations
which is the novel.
Esther's words show Plath's constant, strenuous effort to express
experience by verbal equivalents: the elaborate similes, the images
recurring at different moments in slightly different contexts are all
carefully chosen to represent fractions of change, minimal shifts in
consciousness. (The few pages devoted to Esther's attempt to write an
autobiographical novel show beyond doubt both the author's intent
 REBIRTH IN THE BELL JAR 181

and her method of writing, and thus give us a mirror image of Plath
herself.) But in addition to imagery and word association, there is an-
other aspect of stylistic elaboration of the personal experience that we
must consider, the arrangement of the time sequence. Almost all flash-
backs occur within Chapters 1 to 9, during Esther's stay in New York.
They tell of Esther's experiences up to that time, supplying back-
ground and psychological motivation for her present apprehension of
reality. The mere position of the flashback constitutes a built-in inter-
pretation of the heroine, her culture, the reasons for her present state.
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Take the ski accident in Chapter 8, when not knowing how to ski,
Esther plunges down a crowded slope, exhilarated by the risk and
conscious of her desire for death and purification. This episode is
apparently brought to memory by a pain in her ankle (which was
broken in the ski fall) Esther feels after her date with Constantin, the
UN interpreter.

Then I thought, "Buddy Willard made me break that leg." Then I thought,
"No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being
such a heel" (p. 70).

At the bottom of the slope, Esther had seen Buddy's face hanging over
her "near and huge, like a distracted planet." This distorted percep-
tion, joined with that of glossy surfaces and white light, is amazingly
similar to what Renée describes as unreality ("illimitable vastness,
brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things.")0 By
juxtaposing the ski slope flashback to the efficient and mechanical life
of UN translators (a parallel of Esther's scholastic achievements) and to
the frustrating noncommunication of Esthers date with Constantin,
Plath suggests connections and causes for Esther's feeling of unreality
in a purely literary form—she is giving us the diagnosis by showing
only the symptoms. In her novel, character, narrator, and doctor's
interpretation exist all together and at once, in one view of reality
which may seem simple and direct, but is actually the result of much
literary elaboration of a very complex experience.
The Bell Jar is built on the mythical descent-ascent pattern, with
parallel novelistic situations symmetrical to the central symbolic episode
of the ball of mercury. Thus it belongs to the subgenre of the quest
novel as well as to the autobiographical portrait—it is a novel of the
 182 T. DE LAU RETÍS

self much in the sense in which Joyce's, Kafka's, Proust's, and Svevo's
are. Traditionally men have sought to define themselves and mankind
by writing stories. They have succeeded, with varying degrees of
awareness and impact on their contemporaries, in shaping the images
and myths of their culture. Reading The Bell Jar, I became aware of
how much of myself there was in it that I never encountered in novels
before, and I realized how forcefully our view of the world and of
ourselves is shaped by the works of literature we read—written mostly
by men. The Bell Jar is not a single case history, but rather a syn-
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chronie view of womanhood, for once seen from the woman's perspec-
tive. In it we do not find archetypes such as the ewig Weibliche, the
Virgin Mother of God, Eve the Temptress, and other man-made
glorifications or condemnations of man's desire, to which women have
so long adhered that they have accepted them as their own image. For
example, the lesbian heroine of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneli-
ness apologizes for her "perversion," and we are asked to (and do) sym-
pathize with her. On the contrary, when Esther rejects her lesbian
friend Joan, she knows that Joan is her double, a part of her that she
must assimilate but not become enslaved to—freedom for Esther is
availability, refusal of classifications, growth, diversity. She cannot
accept the either-or of culturally defined roles which seem to be the
only alternatives open to her. What she is looking for, her own self-
development, is not yet visible, but by the end of the novel Esther has
learned to keep looking. If the new heroine that Plath has given us
does not reach the stages of transfiguration and apotheoás, common in
myths and folktales, the story is perhaps all the more powerful, insist-
ing as it does on the essential focus of mythical creation, the dialectics
of birth, death, and rebirth.

References and Notes

1. (New York: Bantam Books, 1972). All subsequent references will be to
this edition.
2. The notions of synchrony and diachrony, originally posed by Ferdinand
de Saussure (Cours de linguistique générale, Paris, 1965), are used here
following Claude Lévi-Strauss' theory of myth in Structural Anthropology
(New York, 1963) and The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966).
3 The best example of a non-fictional account is Autobiography of a Schizo-
phrenic Girl (New York: Signet Books, 1970), the story of Renée's struggle
 REBIRTH IN THE BELL JAR 183

with unreality, the terrifying inner world of her psychosis, and her slow
return from "another country" to "warm reality" and family. The account
is followed by the psychoanalytical interpretation of her analyst, Marguerite
Sechehaye. A fictionalized account is Hannah Green's (pseudonym of
Joanne Greenberg) I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (New York:
Signet Books, 1964).
4. For the function of magical agents in narrative plots, see Vladimir Propp,
Morphology of the Folktale (Austin and London, 1968).
5. "'Icthiou, gao, itivare, giastow, ovede' and the like. In no way did I seek
to create them; they came of themselves and by themselves meant nothing.
Only the sound, the rhythm of the pronounciation had sense. Through
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them I lamented, pouring out the gruelling grief and the interminable
sadness in my heart. I could not use ordinary words, for my pain and
sorrow had no real basis" (Autobiography, op. cit., pp. 79-80).
6. These are Renée's words: "But her smile, instead of reassuring me, only
increased the anxiety and confusion for I saw her teeth, white and even in
the gleam of the light. Remaining all the while like themselves, soon they
monopolized my entire vision as if the whole room were nothing but teeth
under a remorseless light" (Autobiography, op. cit., p. 22).