If Esther had been accepted into the writing program after New York, would she ever have fallen into a depression and tried to commit suicide? Is that a defining point in the novel that leads to the events in the rest of the story?
When Esther gets back from New York, she is under the impression that she will be accepted into a writing course and will only have to stay at home for a little while before leaving for the rest of the summer. When she gets the letter from her college and realizes she must spend the rest of the summer with nothing to do, she falls into a sort of pit of despair. She is desperately looking for things to distract herself with, like writing a novel. However, there comes an issue when she faces writer's block and is unable to keep busy by writing this story. With nothing to write about, she is left to sit with her own thoughts, something she never really did before. She was constantly jumping from school to writing programs, etc. I think Esther was doing this because she needed to stay busy and away from her own thoughts, but also because she needed writing material.
When Esther tries writing a novel, her idea is to create a sort of parallel story to her own life with small changes. I think this tells us a little bit about Esther’s inspirations for writing being that she tends to pull a lot from her own experiences. When Esther gets back from New York, she doesn’t have any experiences to find inspiration in because the events in New York held bad memories she didn’t want to think about. She finds herself in a position where she is unable to pull inspiration from her life, but she is also stuck in the suburbs and therefore has no other experiences she can write about. Because she was rejected from the writing program, she is stuck with nothing to do because she can’t write, and only has her thoughts for company. I think this is a situation she direly wants to avoid, especially when she has just had a traumatic experience in New York and likely doesn’t want her mind to stray there. In a way, she is trapped with the thoughts New York leaves her with, yet unable to write about them. She is also left in an identity crisis, because she centers her life around writing, and is now unable to do it.
Ultimately, Esther being rejected from the writing program left her mind undistracted, which led to her falling into a sort of rabbit hole into depression, leading to her suicide attempt. And I wonder, if Esther had been accepted into the writing program, would she have ever gone through these events? Would being able to distract herself from the events in New York help her eventually work through them in a healthy way, or would it only delay the events of the second part of The Bell Jar?
Hi Olive, You pose an interesting possibility of whether Esther being able to occupy herself mentally would have helped her better cope with what happened in New York. With my reading, I feel like it would've helped, she may have looked on the outside like she was in a better place mentally (rather than having articles published about her condition in the newspaper) but much of her dissatisfaction and feelings of not wanting to live anymore come from a general dissatisfaction with her life - she feels that she's being put on a track of life that she has no control over and so she has to keep running on this hamster wheel of academic achievement in having any say over her future. The rejection from the writing course puts a break in this endless cycle and while it makes her spiral, it helps her and the people around her come to terms with the dissatisfaction she feels with her life that existed in interactions with her mother and Buddy Willard before she ever went to New York. Anyways, nice post!
ReplyDeleteI agree with the previous comment; awesome post and fun hypothetical! When she tries to write her novel, she's at a point in her life where she doesn't understand herself, doesn't understand what kind of role she's supposed to have in the world, and she's just so traumatized and overwhelmed with everything that trying to immediately make any sense of it proved futile.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with Janaki that the rejection was necessary for her to come to terms with preexisting problems. She sees academic achievement as the only escape from her hell: suburban motherhood. So while she's plunged right into it because she doesn't get into the course (which does a number on her mental health), the desperation with which she chased academic validation was also just a symptom of her fear of the kind of life she'd face if she failed. In that sense, I think partially healing her relationship with womanhood was ultimately necessary and kind of inevitable.
I think Esther being rejected from the writing center was more like the last straw in a series of bad experiences that sent her into a downward spiral. I totally agree that the setting that she has this spiral in does nothing to help her mental state, since she's back at home and feels trapped. It definitely leaves her with little to turn to for support, since she can't write. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI think that if Esther had been accepted, she would still have had her mental struggles, but they would be more buried and would have had less of a direct impact than that of living in the suburbs. I definitely think that living in the suburbs had a big impact upon her, so I think that removing this variable would have slightly changed the end result.
ReplyDeleteYour point about Esther being stuck in her own thoughts while not making any new ones is a really good way of describing her sense of imprisonment in the suburbs. For people who like to suppress thoughts they want to avoid (such as Esther), they tend to dodge them for as long as possible and once they can no longer do so, the harsh reality hits them as all their negative thoughts come rushing back. In Esther's case, this is truly the worst possible scenario. However, when a person is forced to confront their true thoughts, it makes them learn a lot about who they are as a person which is why I think we see Esther go through so much change throuhgout the novel, and why The Bell Jar makes such a good coming of age novel.
ReplyDeleteI think this is an interesting conundrum, because there is truly no way of knowing how being accepted into the program would have changed the course of Esther's life. I do think that there's something innate about Esther, a childhood trauma, a chemical imbalance, or something that made her predisposed to depression and suicidal ideation. But I also agree that, without the time to let her mind wander after her internship in New York, she would have had a lot less time alone with her thoughts, and perhaps would have been on a better path.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting question to consider: we have to assume that Esther completed the application when she was healthy, around the same time she applied to and won the New York internship. So sometimes the winning streak comes to an end, but she is in the worst possible frame of mind to deal with it when it happens. The Esther who would have arrived in Boston for the course would not be the same person who applied for the program in the spring. It's not hard to imagine a similar kind of dislocation, detachment, imposter syndrome kicking in in Boston as it did in New York. Maybe even worse, if she's in a writing workshop with a bunch of other talented writers her age, to whom she'd compare herself and feel like she's failing because she can't focus or write.
ReplyDeleteBUT, the stuff about her lack of experiences in the suburbs giving her nothing to write is interesting, as clearly the New York ordeal IS good writing material, given enough time for reflection (Plath writes about it 10 years later, to very good effect). Maybe she would have been able to process the New York thing in the more familiar context of a writing seminar. Who knows?
It is clear that the LOSS of this plan is devastating, and seems to confirm her worst fears about herself--but we can only speculate how it might have gone differently. A fascinating question to consider.
I really like this idea because putting a pin on a single event that lead to Esther's mental spiral is very hard to do. I think the rejection from the writing program is certainly a very catastrophic event for her mental health, and it is one that makes her mother notice that Esther is not feeling normal. However, I also feel that there were many things that had happened previously that make it hard to say that her rejection from this program was the only thing that pushed her over the edge. Great post!
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