N
A
F
F
_
O
n
l
i
n
e
-
Richardson, C “Inside The bell jar: adolescent crisis or resisting the American dream?” NAFF_Online 5.1 (2007): pp.29-31.
The Bell Jar (1963), Sylvia Plath’s novel about Esther Greenwood’s
breakdown and subsequent therapy, would be Plath’s only novel. Many
reviewers have compared the themes of social maladjustment and
dissatisfaction in the novel to Plath’s own life and her eventual suicide.
However, in the novel, Esther Greenwood survives to tell the audience
about her experiences, apparently from the vantage point of a (now)
seemingly contented married woman with a baby, suggesting that perhaps
the crisis was one of an adolescent failure to adjust easily to an adult role
(Bundtzen 1989, pp. 111-112). On the other hand, it could also be argued
that Esther’s vision of female adulthood in the nineteen-fifties was
essentially a critical view of a society that limited women to the expression
of their sexual and reproductive functions at the expense of their personal
and intellectual development. Esther rejects this concept of femininity, and
is therefore considered to be transgressive and dysfunctional, leading to her
psychological distress at being excluded from her peer group, albeit through
her own choice. The notion of being inside ‘the bell jar’, able to see life, but
being isolated and unable to interact meaningfully with others, regarding
them through the lens of an almost scientific detachment, is Esther’s image
of her internal state, precipitated by her rejection of societal values that
marginalised and trivialised her intellectual achievements:
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 (Plath 1963, p. 3).
American society underwent massive changes in the post-war period.
Women had made some early gains in the first part of the century,
American suffragettes succeeding in their fight for the vote in 1919 with the
ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which states (in
part): “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”
(Whitley 2006). In addition to political power, women now had the means to
employ economic power; they were able to own property and have
meaningful work. Women had also begun to make inroads into traditionally
male professions, such as the law and medicine and during the Second
World War, had been drafted into factories to undertake the blue collar
manufacturing work that could not be done by men who were away fighting
in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific theatres of war. It seemed that
women were overthrowing the Victorian values of compulsory female
domesticity and helplessness that had circumscribed their lives for so long.
Eventually, the men came home, expecting their jobs to be there for them,
and for women to return to their traditional roles as housewives and
nurturers. French argues that: “Because women bear children, men persist
in seeing all women as mothers owing them caretaking service” (1992,
p.19). As Wolf (1990, p.63) notes, the Manpower Commission had made a
grave error in assuming this would be the case, as it found that 61-85% of
women surveyed stated that they did not want to go back to being
housewives and mothers. They enjoyed the personal and economic
freedom of working outside the home and did not consider it a burden.
However, this left a crisis in Western economies: if women did not leave the
workplaces, how could the implied promise of economic good times and
employment made to the returning soldiers be fulfilled? How then, could
men retrieve economic power from the hands of women? The Bell Jar tells
the story of what happens to women whose claims to economic power and
personal and intellectual fulfilment are denied by institutions that operate to
preserve male hegemony.
In her influential book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan
contends that women were persuaded to move back into the home through
an avalanche of propaganda promulgated through advertising, educational
institutions, television and women’s magazines, for primarily economic
reasons:
the really crucial function, the really important role that women
serve as housewives is to buy more things for the
house…women are the chief consumers of American business.
Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that
women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused,
nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of
housewives (1963, p. 181)..
state
of
being
Friedan (1963, p. 138) also says that feminism itself was blamed for female
dissatisfaction in the post-war years, accused of setting up unreal
expectations of careers in women’s minds that they were (according to
patriarchal belief) not capable of pursuing meaningfully as a result of their
reproductive and sexual roles. Women who wrote professionally and
successfully were often dismissed as sentimental (Cunliffe 1986, p. 286).
Thus, although The Bell Jar’s Esther is a talented scholar who is good
enough to win awards and a guest editorship in New York, Pereira (2000, p.
108) points out the significance of the actual prizes she wins, which consist
of fashion shows, clothes, hair styling and makeup, which emphasize
physical beauty rather than intellectual achievement.
This view of the feminine role within society was the now largely discredited
sociological theory of functionalism, which itself was taken from distortions
of Margaret Mead’s anthropological studies of primitive societies, in which
women were valued primarily for their reproductive ability (Friedan 1963, p.
113). Unfortunately for women, when sociologists defined what was
‘functional’ in American society, they failed to take into account the myriad
differences between primitive societies and modern technological societal
organisation, as well as their own cultural biases, a mistake Sigmund Freud
also made in his observations about the psychology of women. As a result,
the scientific fraternity disseminated a theory of functionalism that locked
women into a role that was defined by their function as mothers and
housewives, thereby ‘protecting’ them from competition with men (Friedan
1963, p. 113). This normalised an artificial view of ‘femininity’, which is, in
any case, a performance (Cranny-Francis et al, 2003, p. 167) and typifies
male sexuality as active and penetrative, while female sexuality is
considered to be receptive and passive (Horrocks 1997, p. 131). A woman
who persists in dissenting, resisting abjection and failing to embody
traditional feminine traits is considered to be monstrous.
Plath’s description of the Amazon Hotel and its purpose in The Bell Jar
shows that she understood how this worked in practice:
This hotel – the Amazon – was for women only and they were
mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure
their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them
and deceive them; and they were all going to posh secretarial
schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and
stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from
places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and
junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting
to get married to some career man or other (1963, p. 3).
A woman’s choices were circumscribed neatly – if she wanted to be a
‘functional’ member of society, she would embrace her ‘destiny’ to be a wife
and mother and concern herself only with the domestic. If she wished for a
role outside the home, she was doomed to life as a ‘celibate’, unable to
have family or love. Although Jay Cee, the editor of the magazine at which
Esther has her placement, is married, it seems inconceivable to Esther and
the other girls that the marriage could be happy. Philomena Guinea, the
novelist whose scholarship money Esther has won, lives on her own in a
large house and is considered eccentric.
Pereira (2000, p.66) states that this period was prone to dichotomous,
opposition-based ideologies, not only present in gender relations, but race
relations as well. Esther’s denunciation of Buddy Willard as a ‘hypocrite’
when she discovers that he has had a sexual affair is due to her envy of his
freedom to have both a life outside the home and to function sexually, a
choice that is denied to her because of her female gender. As a woman,
patriarchal ideology has made her responsible not only for her biological
function, but also for controlling the sexual urges of her male partner,
ensuring that he doesn’t go ‘too far’; the “God’s Police” stereotype
(Summers 2002, p.67).
When Esther seeks to redress the balance by sleeping with a mathematics
professor, she is ‘punished’ by undergoing an awful experience, ending with
Page 29
N
A
F
F
_
O
n
l
i
n
e
-
Richardson, C “Inside The bell jar: adolescent crisis or resisting the American dream?” NAFF_Online 5.1 (2007): pp.29-31.
her haemorrhaging in hospital. Esther’s vision of the fig tree is another case
in point; she feels that she can only choose one fig and that once she has
done that, all the other figs will be off-limits to her. In the circumscribed
society of ‘fifties’ America, every choice is an either/or, never ‘that and that
also’. Esther finds herself unable to break free of this dichotomous ideology.
Esther is disengaging from a game she knows she cannot hope to win. The
symbol of the ‘bell jar’ is Esther’s only escape. As Friedman (1995) notes in
her essay on (Post) Modernism and Gender, female texts will look beyond
culture, disengaging from a patriarchal narrative that gives them no real
place. Esther cannot escape outwardly, so her escape is an internal one;
she seeks to disengage, but the tools are not available to her, so instead
she isolates herself. Her horror upon finding herself incapable of writing
properly and expressing herself as a functioning adult immediately prior to
her hospitalisation echoes the infantilisation of women within the patriarchal
worldview.
The silencing of a woman’s ‘voice’ is one of the most effective means of
control. Even one of the most famous feminists of the twentieth century,
Simone de Beauvoir, has had her work trivialised, censored and
misrepresented first by her translator, Parshley, and secondly by her
publisher, who failed to make corrections to the work when de Beauvoir
complained (Moi 2002, p.1006). The cuts could not be considered
“ideologically innocent” (Moi 2002, p.1007) as they served to open the door
for criticism of de Beauvoir as dismissive of other women and “maleidentified”, which a reading in the original French would soon deny. Esther’s
relationship with her mother is distant and at times, hostile, as her collegeeducated mother has been forced to teach shorthand and typing to make a
living after the death of Esther’s father as she did not have a career of her
own to fall back on due to her acceptance of the traditional housewife role
within her marriage. Esther’s mother’s pleas to Esther to learn shorthand
only drive her further away from a mother that Esther sees as unsupportive
and the ‘enemy’, who does not value Esther’s intellectual accomplishments
at college.
My own mother wasn’t much help. My mother had taught
shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and
secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no
money because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen. She was
always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a
practical skill as well as a college degree (Plath 1963, p. 41).
The story Esther tells about Buddy Willard’s mother making a beautiful
hooked rug, but then using it as an everyday kitchen rug that is dirtied and
ruined quickly, is illustrative of Esther’s view of the older generation of
women’s complicity in patriarchy’s refusal to value the work of women and
their artistic and intellectual contributions to society. Esther is unable to
respect the choice her mother and Mrs Willard have made. She fails to
recognise that perhaps her mother and Mrs Willard may have made the
best choices open to them at the time and that they were under the same
pressure to conform that Esther is presently experiencing. Esther’s
comment that she has not felt happy since she was nine years old is
indicative of the fact that after this age, the pressure was on to become
traditionally female. Thus, patriarchy uses women to police each other’s
behaviour through creating envy between generations of women;
separating women from the support they would normally give freely (Wolf,
1990, p. 14).
Esther is unhappy because she is seeing through the ideology to the reality
of her life. She knows there is something wrong, but can’t quite put her
finger on what it is. The avocadoes filled with crabmeat at the Ladies’ Home
Journal lunch have been used in a magazine shoot. Sitting under the hot
spot-light of perfection and beauty have turned them poisonous, much as
the woman who is only valued for her looks is poisoned with unhappiness
by being turned into an object for the visual delight of the masculine gaze.
Wolf (1990, p.14) asserts that not only does the act of becoming a beauty
object damage a woman’s internal psychology, it also puts her in
competition with other women and therefore works to support institutional
male power by dividing women from one another. It is not a coincidence
that Esther becomes sick from eating (accepting?) the poisonous fruit while
watching a film:
I could see the nice girl was going to end up with the nice football
hero and the sexy girl was going to end up with nobody, because
the man named Gil had only wanted a mistress and not a wife all
along and was now packing off to Europe with a single ticket.
At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at
all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them
at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and
they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains (Plath 1963, p. 44)
Unlike Persephone, Esther has rejected the fruit that will keep her trapped
forever underground. Her vision of the audience ‘the rows of rapt little heads
with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow
on them at the back’ is a metaphor for how the public is taken in by the
propaganda it sees, and it’s black and white nature. You are either a good
girl, or a sexy and therefore bad girl. Women with an overtly sexual nature
have been demonised throughout time. The Victorians believed that a
woman who was not asexual and pure would put men in danger by draining
their ‘essence’ during sex acts, which would lead to effeminate behaviour
and weak-mindedness and eventually to the decay and fall of Western
civilisation (Dijkstra 1996, p. 203). Esther wants a life of the mind and a life
of the body, but the society she lives in will only offer two mutually exclusive
choices.
Kate Baldwin (2004, p. 22) says that The Bell Jar has “an uncanny sense of
perpetual female entrapment” that allows a reader to connect emotionally
with Esther’s plight. She also hypothesises that the novel expresses Cold
War ideological narratives and their success in building a sense of national
community, and “the reach of its logic through various cultural and social
strata” (Baldwin 2004, p.23). Esther’s obsession with the fate of the
Rosenbergs and their execution by electric chair in 1953 and her assumed
eventual subjection to the cult of domesticity serves to support this view.
Esther has seen the price of dissent and chosen to conform. However,
Baldwin (2004, p.23) also points out that these passages in the novel seem
to express an ambivalence that almost amounts to detachment. Esther’s
references to ‘the baby’ are impersonal and leave the reader to ponder
whether Esther’s eventual capitulation to conformity has brought her
happiness or contentment. Instead, Baldwin (2004, p. 32) suggests that
Esther has fallen victim to “Althusserian interpellation, in which the state
conditions the subject to be an ideal participant”, intended to be a cog in the
machinery of psychological warfare considered necessary to overthrow the
communist Soviet regime.
This then raises the spectre of fascistic institutional control of the private
lives of civilians. It is no coincidence that the rise of Nazism in Germany in
the thirties and fascism more widely in Europe generally had the theme of
Kuche, Kinder, Kurche (kitchen, children and church), as its embodiment of
the ideal role of women within society (Friedan 1963, p.33). In the United
States, this was echoed in the rise of fundamentalist ‘muscular’ Christianity
and its call to return to Victorian moral codes and to ‘defeminise’ a religion
that had been weakened by women’s involvement (French 1992, p.50). The
stage was set for systemic intervention at the state and institutional level.
Scientific and medical professionals were co-opted, their work and findings
selectively sampled and distorted to fit an ideology intent on reasserting the
‘rightness’ of patriarchal hegemony as Friedan (1963, p.108 & p.113) noted
about the work of Freud and Margaret Mead.
Therefore, scientific theory and psychiatric practice accommodated and
reinforced the propaganda of both the Cold War and the patriarchal view of
the world. Cooper (1997, p.90) believes that Esther’s electrical torture due
to Dr Gordon’s incompetence in the administration of shock treatment is
connected in her mind to the Rosenbergs’ execution; for her, it is not shock
therapy but aversion therapy, a punishment for not toeing the party line.
This is the treatment for traitors, communists and other malcontents. It also
harks back to the Victorian ideas of pathologising female complaints,
wherein every expression of female sexuality that deviated from the
Page 30
N
A
F
F
_
O
n
l
i
n
e
-
Richardson, C “Inside The bell jar: adolescent crisis or resisting the American dream?” NAFF_Online 5.1 (2007): pp.29-31.
patriarchal ‘norm’ was considered to be an illness to be treated (Lyman et
al, c1880, pp. 900-901). The John Waters movie, Hairspray (1988), set in
the 1960s, satirises the tendency of post-war society to turn to psychiatry as
a catch-all cure for non-conformance. Penny Pingleton, a teenage girl who
has become politically active and is dating a black boy, is imprisoned in her
room by her mother who calls a psychiatrist to ‘cure’ her. The psychiatrist
arrives, circular ‘hypnotic’ card in hand, and zaps Penny repeatedly with a
cattle prod while reciting a litany of her supposed transgressions. However,
instead of ‘curing’ her, Penny runs away from home. A Clockwork Orange
(1962), Anthony Burgess’s dystopian science fiction novel also explores the
uses of aversion therapy and institutional interference in the psychological
life of the individual. Alex’s aversion therapy consists of being drugged to
induce nausea while he is forced to watch images of the sort of violent acts
of which he has been found guilty. Eventually, he rejects the treatment and
suicides. While Esther does not physically run away, she does attempt
suicide, only to be rescued. From this she learns she has no escape – the
evil is totally pervasive. The electro-shock therapy has violated not only her
bodily integrity, but also her psychological integrity and perhaps even her
soul.
Lyman, Henry M., AM, MD, & H. Webster Jones, AM, MD, Christian Fenger,
AM, MD, & W.T. Belfield, AM, MD, Circa 1880, The Practical Home
Physician and Encyclopedia of Medicine: A Guide for the Household
Management of Disease. World Publishing Co: London.
Moi, Toril, 2002, ‘While we wait: the English translation of The Second Sex’,
Signs, Vol. 27, Iss. 4, pp 1005 – 1035, (online Proquest).
Pereira, Malin, 2000, Embodying Beauty: Twentieth-Century American
Women Writers’ Aesthetics, Garland Publishing Inc., New York.
Plath, Sylvia, 1963, The Bell Jar, Faber and Faber, London.
Summers, Anne, 2002, Damned Whores and God’s Police, (2nd rev. ed.),
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Camberwell.
Whitley, Peggy, 2006, ‘American cultural history: 1910-1919’, Kingwood
College Library, http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decade10.html, viewed 25
April, 2007.
Wolf, Naomi, 1990, The Beauty Myth, Vintage, London.
To conclude, it could certainly be said that The Bell Jar is a novel about
Esther’s adolescent crisis, but it would be a mistake to stop there. To do so
would be to trivialise the enormous pressures that post-war American
society put on its women: perfect housewives, perfect mothers, and perfect
lovers as well as a living example of The American Dream to use as
propaganda in the Cold War with Soviet Russia. Esther found her situation
so intolerable she tried to escape through suicide, only to ultimately fail in
her escape attempt. However, Esther continues to resist in the only way she
still can; through her emotional distance and her refusal to deny her
younger self a voice, no matter how little we may like what that voice has to
say. The Bell Jar should be required reading for a new generation of women
who have become complacent about the gains feminism has made in the
last few decades, if only to show how easily all the gains can be eroded by
a society whose ideology considers women to be inferior beings defined by
their biology.
References
Baldwin, Kate, 2004, ‘The radical imaginary of The Bell Jar’, Novel, Vol. 38,
Iss. 1, pp. 21-41, (online Proquest).
Bundtzen, Lynda K., 1989, Plath’s Incarnations: Woman and the Creative
Process, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Burgess, Anthony, 1962, A Clockwork Orange, Penguin Books, London.
Cooper, Pamela, 1997, ‘”A body story with a vengeance”: anatomy and
struggle in The Bell Jar and The Handmaid’s Tale, Women’s Studies, Vol.
26, Iss. 1, pp 89 –123, (online Infotrac).
Cranny-Francis, Anne, Wendy Waring, Pam Stavropoulos & Joan Kirkby,
2003, Gender Studies, Terms and Debates, Palgrave McMillan, Hampshire.
Cunliffe, Marcus, 1986, The Literature of the United States, (4th ed.),
Penguin Books, London.
Dijkstra, Bram, 1996, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality in
Twentieth-Century Culture, Henry Holt and Company Inc., New York.
French, Marilyn, 1992, The War Against Women, Penguin, London.
Friedan, Betty, 1963, The Feminine Mystique, Penguin, London.
Friedman, Ellen G., 1995, ‘Where are the missing contents? (Post)
modernism, gender and the canon’, in Stanley Trachtenberg (ed.), Critical
Essays on American Postmodernism, GK Hall & Co., New York.
Hairspray, 1988, DVD recording by New Line Cinema & Stanley F.
Buchthal, in association with Robert Shaye Production, United States of
America.
Horrocks, Roger, 1997, An Introduction to the Study of Sexuality, Macmillan
Press Ltd., London.
Page 31