In Defense of Esther, sort of

Both in class and on our blogs, I see some looking down upon Esther Greenwood. One interpretation of the novel says she is coldhearted and presumptive in her mental dealings with others. This has some support but there is more to the story.

There are times when Esther is flat out rude, particularly at the height of her mental breakdown. The one that comes to mind is her reaction to her mother's birthday gift of flowers. However, while she is still in New York, her critical eye is in high gear and she makes plenty of downbeat judgements, likely owing to the cloud over her mental state.

A common talking point is Esther's views on Buddy. Perhaps I trust the narrators of first-person novels too much, but I highly doubt that Esther's views of Buddy stem from some immaturity in the sense of a character flaw. At worst, Esther is in the midst of an internal mental struggle that she has to sort out, in which case we should sympathize with her, not deride her. At best, she is completely justified. In the text, she talks about his remarks towards making her a housewife. We see his initial rejection of poetry and his attempts to make inroads, with the publication of his poem and Esther's nightly poetry readings to him. Esther's decision making is impaired by this point, so perhaps she should have given Buddy the bad news without waiting for him to get better. Her reason seemed to be in his best interest. Then we have his label as a "hypocrite" which has been beaten to death. Along the entire spectrum, we cannot excuse Buddy for his hypocrisy (as Esther does justify in the novel as a double standard) any more than we can excuse Stradlater for being a prick.

Framing The Bell Jar

Something about The Bell Jar prevents me from fully considering it a coming-of-age novel. The book reads like a description of the process of a mental breakdown, happening during and because of coming-of-age.

The book does start out with coming-of-age elements, but it drops them almost completely about halfway through. The Marco episode at the end of chapter nine marks the beginning of the novel's transition. It is completed in chapter ten, where we see Esther's behavior reveal itself while she narrates fewer "coming-of-age" musings and actions, as she tries and fails to write a novel and read Finnegans Wake. We read chapters that chronicle mental disruption, suicide attempts, and therapy, but that are not quite applicable to coming-of-age per se.

It's not to say that the two are unrelated. Unarguably, Esther's coming-of-age dilemma leads to her downward spiral. I could best describe what I sense about the book by saying "We don't get anything out of Esther." She lays out the contributing factors of her coming-of-age trauma, but her primary active role in the novel is breaking down. It's also not to say that we don't see her personal developmental issues showing through her mental condition—we do, such as her fleeting romance of the sailor—but they take a backseat.

In chapter 18 we suddenly see the dismal tone of the previous eight chapters lift just as Plath's metaphor of the bell jar does. We must remember that we do not see Esther getting better from sorting out her problems or overcoming some obstacle. Psychotherapy, including electroshock therapy, alleviates the six month breakdown. We do see coming-of-age progress with her fitting for birth control, the Irwin experience, her plans to return to college, and the hospital exit interview that the book leaves us imagining, but these feel like breadcrumbs.

We can reveal the structure of the novel further by comparing Esther to our good friend Holden. He too suffers some sort of mental breakdown and ends up in an undisclosed medical center (Salinger 1):

I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.

With Holden, we see a journey where Holden is a dynamic character, trying different things to pass the three days as another expulsion comes to pass. One of his most pronounced changes, if not the most occurs after Phoebe shows signs on the surface of wanting to follow Holden near the end of the novel.

Esther's nine pre-meltdown chapters contain a number of flashbacks before the technical position of the summer internship narration. Two entire chapters are flashbacks before the summer of 1953. If you said The Catcher in the Rye is Holden swimming laps, The Bell Jar is Esther briefly standing at the top of a high diving board (Ch. 1-5, 7, 9), thinking about how she got to the pool in the first place (Ch. 6, 8; parts of 3 and 5), executing a bellyflop (Ch. 10-17), then swimming to the pool edge and getting out, without telling us where in the pool she is going to next (including possibly back to the diving board) (Ch. 18-20).