Parallels between Esther’s mental health and her narration
From our very first impression of Esther and the way she described what she saw of New York, we could feel how she felt unsteady in her life. After convincing Doreen to come with her to go out with Lenny and the guys, Esther is trying to lead the way into experiencing what it’s like to really embrace the atmosphere of New York city. She displays nervousness as they stay at Lenny’s apartment and soon become frightened by the reality of the sexual activity between Doreen and Lenny while they were still in front of Esther. During this phase of her life, it seems like she wants to be “cool” or step outside of the scholarship girl she was always known to be.
I think throughout this entire book, we see Esther finding her actual personal identity through the choices she makes without involving the consequences of all other variables. One of which is when she comes back home to find out the news that she didn’t make the writing course. She says, “Then my mouth shaped itself sourly. I had expected it” (Plath 114). It’s the way that she claims how her mouth moved automatically, in a way that she already expected or accepted the failure. This reaction adds onto the way she talked about quitting her writing career when she was in Jay Cee’s office, how she failed to make out a reason why she wanted to do this job. It almost seems like Plath used this as the first notion to signal that Esther was deterring from her planned out life.
We see the deterioration of her mental health slowly as she depicts Dodo for living her life, stating “one more morning listening to Dodo Conway’s baby carriage would drive me crazy” (Plath 118). This harsh judgment reflects on her views of traditional domestic roles and the way she rejects them. After entering the asylum for treatment, I can also see her unstable emotions taken out on her mom. Despite her mother’s kind gestures, buying flowers for her birthday and showing up for her, Esther responds with “I hate her” (Plath 203). I think throughout the later half of the book, we can see a lot more variety and genuine growth in her character because of accepting her “failure.” Then later on when she spends time with Dr. Nolan and her peers at the asylum, she is able to self reflect and release herself from the bell jar encapture.
I honestly really enjoyed the bell jar because of the way it really showcased Esther’s growth in the aspects of her own mind and depiction of other people. Rather than a climax or peak turning point, this book gradually shifted in terms of character growth. We saw Esther go through the different stages of coming-of-age, from experiencing independence in New York, realizing the mixed characteristics of guys, to accepting who she is at the end.
ReplyDeleteHey Helen! I really liked how you connected Esther’s mental health to the way she narrates her experiences. Your point about New York struck me because even from the beginning, Esther’s descriptions feel slightly unreliable, like she is observing life rather than fully living it. The night at Lenny’s apartment really does show that tension between wanting to seem “cool” and realizing she is uncomfortable with that reality. Also, I found your point about her reaction to Dodo and her mom to be quite interesting and thought-provoking. Overall, this was a thoughtful well-organized blog. Great job, Helen!
Hey Helen! I also appreciated the way you highlighted Esther’s struggle with identity throughout the novel. The scene at Lenny’s apartment is a great example of her identity shift; she wants to participate in the exciting lifestyle around her, but at the same time she feels deeply uncomfortable and detached from it. Overall, you did a great job connecting specific moments in the book to Esther’s internal development. Great blog Helen!
ReplyDeleteHi Helen, great blog! I agree that it's important to look at Esther's development of identity and mental health crisis as not two discrete events, but experiences that are deeply intertwined and interact with each other. So much of what Esther experiences is the typical "coming-of-age" in which an adolescent learns who they by being exposed to new things, good and bad. Yet in Esther's case, her "coming-of-age" is complicated and enhanced due to the onset of mental illness.
ReplyDeleteNote that Esther, as she enters the suburban setting, deploys Holden's preferred formulation when she refers to Dodo Conway going back and forth in front of her house to torment her: she is being "driven crazy" by Dodo and her many children, whom Esther sees as actively taunting her with the future she desperately wants to escape. This is the section of the novel where we see Esther really confront the idea that this string of successes in college will eventually come to an end, and that perhaps it's all be a giant scam, since she WON'T actually get to travel the world as a poet and professor but may just end up back in her home town married to Buddy Willard pushing the baby carriage like Dodo Conway. If there's a social-critical aspect to Esther's mental-health crisis, as there is in Holden's, it comes from this idea that on some level, her response to the world as she knows it as a young white woman with an education in 1950s America is to recoil from its strictures, to see herself as apart from the mainstream "brainwashed" crowd, to think independently and critically. It's "society" that "drives her crazy," rather than incipient mental illness.
ReplyDeleteFor critical readers of this novel, we might say that it's BOTH: Esther IS truly ill to a life-threatening degree that must be taken seriously, but she is ALSO legitimately feeling that she's been "had" by this whole education-and-society arrangement. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd argue that Dr. Nolan manages to "treat" Esther in both of these areas.