What happens in "The Bell Jar"?

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Why: In Ryan O'Connell's essay "How to See a Shrink" on Thought Catalog:

Experience a kind of depression you’ve never felt before. Live in the bell jar, cry during commercials in the middle of the afternoon when the sun is still shining and people are outside living their lives. Or just have lots of money and like to talk about yourself. Decide to call a therapist.

I never read that book, and I don't think I want to.

Answer: Oh, it has much more narrative than I suspected. Here is a summary of the summary:

Esther Greenwood, a girl from Boston, gets a summer internship at a magazine in NYC. She is not as excited as she feels like she's supposed to be, just kind of meh about the whole thing. She has a bitchy friend Doreen, and knows a baby-machine idiot named Dodo, but she respects Betsy from Kansas who is always good and nice.

Esther goes to her job and things happen. She has a beau back home who she expects to marry. She thinks a lot about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, those communists who are scheduled for execution. She applies for a writing course by a famous author, but when she goes home, her seaward of a mom tells her she was rejected. She wants to write a novel, but she doesn't think she knows anything. After school, she doesn't want to pop out babies like Dodo or be a stenographer like all the other women of America, and the idea of not being able to do anything else bums her out.

Esther's depression makes her unable to asleep. Her mother sends her to a hot psychiatrist who Ester does not trust. He hastily diagnoses her and has her put in a hospital, where she receives electroconvulsive therapy that's is improperly administered. When she tells her mom she doesn't want to go back, her mom is all, "I knew you'd decide to be all right."



Esther gets more and more blue. She feels like she's trapped under a bell jar, struggling for breath. She half-asses some suicide attempts, and after a particularly elaborate one, she is sent to a different hospital. She is given a lady therapy, Dr. Nolan, who gives her psychotherapy and ECT done the right way.

Esther confides in Dr. Nolan that she envies the freedom men have, and that she worries about getting pregnant. Dr. Nolan hooks her up with a diaphragm, which makes Esther feel less scared about sex and having to marry the wrong man. She improves a lot, and the novel ends with her entering the room for an interview that will decide whether she can leave the hospital.

Esther.

Source: Wikipedia

The More You Know: The real reason I am posting this is because I just read a ton about Sylvia Plath (b. 1932) who kilt herself at age 30. Points of interest:

• Almost all of the major plot points in The Bell Jar really happened to her.
• She married English poet Ted Hughes on 6/16/56.

• They had 2 kids, Frieda (b. 1960) and Nicholas (b. 1962).
• In Aug. 1961, she finished The Bell Jar.
• In July 1962, she discovered her husband having an affair with Assia Wevill, who was renting their flat in London with her [third] husband David. The couple separated.
  
• In Oct. 1962, Plath wrote most of the poems in Ariel (published posthumously).
  
• In Dec. 1962, she rented a flat in William Butler Yeats's old house with her two kids. It was cold and miserable; the kids were sick all the time, and she didn't have a phone.
• In Jan. 1963, The Bell Jar came out, published under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.
• Plath's friend Dr. Horder saw that she was not doing well, and he prescribed her anti-depressants and arranged for her to have a live-in nurse.
• On Feb. 11, 1963, Plath put wet towels under the doors of her children's rooms and stuck her head in the oven. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
• At the time of Plath's suicide, Assia Wevill was pregnant with Hughes's child, but she terminated the pregnancy soon after. She helped Hughes care for Plath's children.
• In March 1965, Wevill gave birth to a daughter nicknamed Shura while still married to David Wevill. Though Hughes never publicly claimed Shura was his daughter, he believed she was his.

• On March 23, 1969, Wevill gassed herself and 4 year-old Shura in their London home using a gas stove. The two were found lying on a mattress.
• In Oct. 1998, Ted Hughes died of a heart attack.
• On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at age 47.

#dark

Plath in photos: Cape Cod 1952, in Paris