Insight Spring 2021

Reflections on The Bell Jar Emma Kim ’23 When I first read The Bell Jar, by the late poet Sylvia Plath, I felt seen and heard in a way I had never before. It was as if my innermost thoughts were poured out onto a page and written for everyone to see. Watching Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of the novel, slowly break down and unravel was like watching someone else go through my own, unique experiences; the feeling similar to that of floating above my sleeping body in a dream. I too prided myself in my accomplishments — my ability to win awards and even to attend a prestigious school such as Lawrenceville — but I often felt lost and misguided. That feeling of stupor permeated my waking moments and I would spend hours lounging on my bed doing nothing but wanting to do everything, scrolling through social media with no goal and feeling disgusted with myself.

The Bell Jar, however, is not sacred to me in the way that the Bible might be to Christians or a Torah might be to Jews, but more like a diary is to the loner protagonist in a coming of age movie. “In order for a book to have a [meaning], a book has to have someone reading it, interpreting it, applying it to their world” and that is exactly the case with Plath’s novel. It’s changed the way I’ve thought about women, success, and even mental health (Fuerst and Goodwin). When I was struggling with dark thoughts and pushing away my emotions, I always thought I was so alone in my strife. But being able to read the story of a young woman who went through my experiences and made it safely to the other side helped me to realize I wasn’t alone. The Bell Jar has also had a large effect on society in general and has become a symbol of feminism, women, and depression, which slightly misconstrues Plath’s actual, darker material. To further understand the text, “we must also learn to read how those texts are reproduced and woven into other cultural outlets” (Nye 155). Identifying how Plath’s book is represented in other media can lend to our understanding and interpretation of it. For example, a copy of The Bell Jar is found next to Heather Chandler’s dead body after she presumably commits suicide in Heathers, and next to Mallory Knox from Natural Born Killers as she is sleeping, a scene that predates the murder of her sexually abusive father and neglectful mother by her and her boyfriend. In this context, Plath’s The Bell Jar can be seen as a symbol 26