To Be Perfect or Not To Be That Is The Question.

The novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath follows Esther Greenwood, a young woman who has recently started an internship in New York City, through a complicated peek into some of the most haunting corners of the psyche. The novel starts with Esther in NYC as she won a summer internship for Ladies’ Day magazine, and refines her passion for writing as she works for Jay Cee, the boss of the magazine. But the story is interrupted by memories of Esther and the present time. Esther talked about her current life and past. Which, she showed a glimpse of herself as a person and a look into her mentality. And while doing so, Esther talked about the views of virginity, marriage, and kids, as she looked at them to be a burden. 

Now that you have an idea of the storyline, it is time to figure out the premise. Robert Mckee, in his essay, “Structure and Meaning” describes the premise as, “ the idea that inspires the writers’ desire to create a story” (112).

At first, I thought the premise was along the lines of, What if a girl is too focused on her virginity? But that did not click with me, so then I thought more about Esther’s character and thought about what perplexed me. I came up with this second version: What if a depressed young woman judges others? I noticed that Esther was a little judgmental; however, my group leader, Angelina, and I went back and forth about this and lingered in the aspects of the social norms. I had an idea of it being about judging others, while Angelina thought it would be about mental illness. But together, we came up with this current version: What if the pressure to be the ‘perfect woman’ triggered a psychotic break? With that premise, our ideas came together and matched.

You might be wondering what it means to be the perfect woman.

Well, there is an underlying view of marriage and virginity and the freedom of sex. I noticed how Esther viewed the girls in the internship, who seem to be there to find a man and marry. Esther said, “…and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other. These girls looked awfully bored to me” (Plath 4).

Esther is not interested in the rules of young girls going to New York to find a man and marry. She said to herself that they looked bored. She even said to Buddy Willard, a boy she was steady with but had grown to dislike when he proposed, 

“‘I’m never going to get married.’

 ‘You’re crazy.’ Buddy brightened, ‘You’ll change your mind.’

 ‘No. My mind’s made up.’”

(Plath 93)

So with the premise, What if the pressure to be the ‘perfect woman’ triggered a psychotic break? That would lead us to identify the controlling idea, which Mckee defined as something that “may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end” (115). What does the controlling idea look like in The Bell Jar? I think it could be, Striving for perfection will help you fall into your place in the world. However, there is a counter controlling idea that works as a negative outlook of the premise. I believed this statement to be, Trying to be perfect because you were sad about the imperfections you have. 

So here are the controlling ideas in action, Esther finds out that Buddy lost his virginity to a waitress, and they slept together about thirty times throughout their affair. Esther feels accosted by the whole experience. When she first started dating Buddy, she said, “he kissed me and said I must go out with lots of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about” (70). In this instance, Esther feels perfect and embodies the idea. Her place with Buddy is emerging and is starting to look quite comfortable. 

Buddy made Esther feel sexy, perfect, and valuable, only to find out that his pureness no longer existed. Buddy, and especially his overbearing mother, rant and rave and preach virginity for both men and women until marriage. He acts like a hypocrite, and she laments as such, “What I couldn’t stand was Buddy pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure when all this time he’s been having an affair with that tarty waitress and must have felt like laughing in my face” (71). Now, after Esther learns about the affair, she feels inadequate, invaluable, and used. Her ‘perfectness’ was ripped away from her. 

In another instance, Esther finds power in the controlling idea again. After deciding to get a diaphragm implanted, a method of birth control, she feels freedom with her virginity and sexuality. Esther thinks to herself, “I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex…” (Plath 223). Here, Esther finds a way to achieve those feelings of perfection again. She no longer has to be as concerned with holding onto her pureness. Now she can feel sexy of her own accord.

Notice the difference between controlling and counter ideas. With the controlling, Esther felt freedom after getting the diaphragm because she was able to choose who to sleep with and not wait for marriage. While she may have regretted picking the wrong husband, and although the controlling idea is about being perfect, it leads you to make your own choices and find your perfections. The counter, on the other hand, lingers in those moments where Esther does not feel perfect. It sat with her and followed her. It reminded her that Buddy was free to sleep with as many people as he pleased. It reminds her that a woman is not allowed to sleep around unless she wants to be deemed easy, or a slut. In a perfect world, a woman would wait.

To further illustrate how the ideas are at play in The Bell Jar, the following is a narrative value graph. Here critical moments from the text are plotted to show how the charges of the text move between positive and negative.

As I read through The Bell Jar, I wondered what’s at stake for me? I wonder about Plath as I knew that she had depression and sadly committed suicide in my writing class. So I yearned to know how much of her experience was in the novel, or was Esther Plath, but with a new name and possibly background. I guess the stake for me was that The Bell Jar was not what I thought it would be. It was more mysterious, scary, and clever, and I read it to figure out the meaning behind the text, which made me a thematic reader as I read to know the meeting within the context, as Professor Kopp explained on his website. And what I learned between the lines that even if the story was directly about Plath, every woman could relate to it in some way or another, which made it a whole lot more interesting.