by Heather Voight

Created on: March 04, 2010   Last Updated: March 06, 2010

In The Bell Jar, Plath's character Esther is a product of the male-dominated society in which she lives. Esther is a very intelligent woman and has much education; however, her environment has restrained her by indicating that health and fashion are the only appropriate things for women to know. Buddy tells her that a poem is "a piece of dust." In contrast, Buddy expects Esther to take an interest in his job as a doctor, which he sees as much more important. Similarly, in her college dorm Esther can only gain respect when she is invited by Buddy to the Junior Prom. Even her magazine job, with all the free makeup the girls get and the cooking luncheons, implies that women must be attractive and have etiquette lessons if they want to be successful. Symbolically, Esther vomits on the way back from the hotel. She must cleanse herself from the constraints of society. She states, "I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and on all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces." Esther wants to rise up against the suffocation of society but has been unable to do so. If she could discover her identity, she could show other women that they are entitled to theirs.

Unfortunately, Esther remains trapped in a bell jar, which is Plath's title for her novel. A bell jar is defined in the Random House Dictionary as a bell shaped glass jar for protecting delicate instruments, bric-a-brac, or the like, or for containing gases or a vacuum in chemical experiments. In Sylvia Plath’s novel, Esther believes herself to be contained in a bell jar by the society in which she lives. The other women in the novel do not see their invisible bell jars because they follow what their society tells them without realizing how truly confined they are. Esther states that “...wherever I sat...I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” Even when she is in the hospital the building she is moved to is called Belsize because people rejoin society after they are treated there. Indeed, Belsize becomes a smaller bell jar in that the women there go shopping, dress fashionably and do basically everything that women in the outside world do. 

Esther’s only true freedom from society comes in the form of her shock treatments. After her treatment she says, “The bell jar

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