A_Short_Summary_of_the_Bell_Jar

A Short Summary of The Bell Jar When The Bell Jar was first published in 1963, the reviews were lukewarm, for British critics found it to be a critique of American society and deemed the title character a hopeless neurotic．The novel did not reach American shores for another several years，despite great demand in America for it. By the time that the novel arrived in America in 1971，Sylvia Plath was a household name and confessional literature was in vogue, and the women’s movement was in full bloom. The Bell Jar easily became the bestseller and it quickly established itself as a female adolescence novel. The Bell Jar is set in the New York City of summer 1953 in which narrator, Esther Greenwood, is one of twelve young women who has won a prize to work on a women’s magazine for a month as a guest editor. In New York, Esther becomes friends with Doreen, and admires her sexual attractiveness and social experiences，yet she despises Doreen’s dissipated and purposeless life. In contrast to Doreen, Jay Cee, the editor of the magazine, a successful career woman, tries to encourage Esther to apply more energy to her career, but Esther begins to feel as if she does not have a direction in her life. She is faced with a future dilemma of choosing between career and family, but she doesn’t want to choose, in fact, she wants both of them. Esther is supposed to grasp the big chance and have the time of her life; however, she does not fit into the world of high fashion. Esther wonders if she should marry and live a conventional domestic life, or attempt to satisfy her ambition. Buddy Willard, her college boyfriend, is recovering from tuberculosis in a sanitarium, and wants to marry Esther when he regains his health. But he does not understand Esther’s desire to write poetry, and when he confesses that he slept with a waitress while dating Esther, Esther thinks him a hypocrite and decides she cannot marry him. On the last night of her New York stay, Esther goes on a blind date with a man named Marco, who hates women and almost rapes her. She gets away from him and gets back to the hotel，then she takes all the clothes that have been given to her as promotional advertisements for the magazine and throws them off the hotel roof as if throwing away the unhappy memories of the past month spent in New York City. Esther returns to the Boston suburbs and discovers that she has not been accepted to a writing class she had planned to take. She had to spend the summer with her mother instead. She makes vague plans to write a novel, learn shorthand, and start her senior thesis. Soon she finds the feelings of unreality she experienced in New York taking over her life. She is unable to read, write, or sleep, and she stops bathing. Her mother takes her to Dr. Gordon, a psychiatrist who prescribes electric shock therapy for Esther. Esther becomes more unstable than ever after this terrifying treatment, and decides to kill herself. Finally, she hides in a basement crawl space and takes a large quantity of sleeping pills. Esther awakens to find herself in the hospital．She feels completely paranoid about the doctors in the hospital. Fortunately, Mrs. Guinea, a writer of romantic fiction who sponsored her scholarship in college, pays to move her from the city hospital to a private hospital. Esther becomes the patient of a competent woman psychiatrist, Dr.Nolan, who seems to provide the role-model Esther so desperately needed. Eventually she is good enough to be granted permission to leave the hospital from time to time. During one of these short leaves, she goes to Boston and obtains a diaphragm, then experiences her first sexual encounter with a math professor named Irwin. She hemorrhages badly from the intercourse and was taken to the emergency room by Joan, a mental patient from her hometown and college who had dated Buddy before her. Despite the disillusionment of a wholly unpleasant sexual experience, and despite the death of Joan, who hangs herself in the woods, Esther looks forward to being released from the hospital and returning to college. But she still has great doubts about her future and worries whether she will suffer the same depression again. In the end, Esther leaves the hospital “patched, retreated and approved for the road”. However, “it is worth observing that a patched, retreated tire may be ready for the road, but somewhere down the highway the owner can expect a flat.”