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).
I also don't really see the Bell Jar quite as a coming of age novel. It's more of an eery look the attitudes toward mental illness during this time, and the experiences of those with these diseases.
ReplyDeleteThe ending of _The Bell Jar_ isn't all that different from the previous two novels: in all three, we have a *potential* coming of age, but the future is unwritten and remains to be seen (which means, for the reader, we have to evaluate where WE think the character has come by the end of his or her story). We see Dedalus on the *brink* of his grand flight from Ireland; we see Caulfield wondering aloud whether or not he'll "apply himself" at his next school; and we see Esther about to step into a room for her exit evaluation, after which she'll return to school.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that she doesn't depict herself as fully "cured," but she has come somewhere important from the start of the novel. She seems better equipped to deal with the uncertainty of her future, more confident in her ability to reject traditional feminine roles (as we see her successfully take the "masculine" role in her affair with Irwin).