This is a bell jar, and
bildungsroman does not in fact refer to roman architecture but to a coming-of-age story.
In retrospect, I must not have had a typical literature class in high school because I didn't read "Pillars of the Earth," or "Catcher in the Rye," or "The Bell Jar". But it's well-known that Sylvia Plath is the novelist who killed herself by sticking her head in an oven.
Howard Moss argues (
on Illness and Disclosure) that this makes a impure approach to the novel inevitable; you read it in the context of the author's situation, as an autobiography (though Plath admitted as much). It's interesting to compare Plath with Virginia Woolf, who also committed suicide--drowning--but whose literary merits overshadow her tragic/dramatic end. In Plath's case, it seems more like her death inspires curiosity about her work.
"The Bell Jar" is all about identity -- who is Esther? A coming-of-age novel about a woman in the late 1950s is bound to involve conflicting identities, and Plath takes it to the extreme. The book's been compared to "Catcher in the Rye" but really it's more like Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" where "women have their identity primarily through relationship to a man" (
Bonds). Esther is powerless to act on her desires against the stifling norms of society (
Wagner), and her subsequent madness has echoes of the Victorian "hysterics". The sense of entrapment which leads to her suicide attempt is darkly similar to Edna's end in "The Awakening", quoted here:
The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.
And this was in 1899, so it's ridiculous that these exact feelings are mirrored so closely more than 50 years later (and probably even today in some quarters).
Esther tries on various identities and friendships but finds herself more and more isolated. Much of the literary criticism on "The Bell Jar" mentions psuedo-psychiatrist R. D. Laing, whose work on "The Divided Self" explores the inner self vs outer self. We all have public masks, but Esther's is extreme to the point of insanity. I enjoyed
this essay on Esther's identity crisis, specifically the idea that Dr. Nolan's character is the "anti-model" that forces her to become herself rather than adapt another insufficient role model. Going back to Laing, he viewed mental illness as a social issue instead of a biological one, since the self is always defined by others (i.e., I am what my friends see me as, and I am also what my neighbor sees me as, and I am also what the stranger on the street sees me as, etc.). This is very Foucault-ian. That being said, according to Foucault there is no such thing as individuality, so there would only be a false resolution (you only
think you're not letting others define you).
This brought up the idea of something called ontological security, which is a person's sense of order and continuity in life -- the ability to give meaning to your life. Basically, Esther doesn't have this. Ontological security can be threatened by death, but if it's lacking to begin with then perhaps death isn't so scary and it might even be a welcome escape in Esther's case. This and the quote "the world itself is the bad dream" reminded me (
again) of Kirsten Dunst's character in the movie "Melancholia" (so hey, I guess a woman's sense of entrapment/depression continues in the modern era).
Personally, I didn't feel that "The Bell Jar" spoke to me as it apparently did for teenager girls in the 60s-70s. As for coming-of-age novels, I adored "Catcher in the Rye" back in my younger teens. Salinger's style of writing is so much more real to me -- and maybe because I didn't study it and missed half the metaphors, I wanted to cry when I read:
And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.
