The Fig Tree and The Bell Jar

As we finish up with The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, we enter blog 4, where we identify what kind of reader we tend to be. James Seitz, in “A Rhetoric of Reading” helps us identify what a capable reader is, but that in itself is a layered experience.  As I start to write this blog I almost find myself stuck on what to write, as I look back at the past blog 4’s for inspiration, I see where I can start. I learned that when I read the narratives it tries to trick me into reading for more than what is in the text. But as I open each book to read I have to ask myself what type of reader do I need to become to read The Bell Jar?

There’s something I find important about this novel as I start to read: the point of view. The text is in the first person, which means as a reader I am in Esther’s head.  Everything is through the lens of whoever the narrator is. And it is because of the bias that this point of view creates that we get sentences from Esther like, “I thought it must be the worst thing in the world” (Plath 1). This shows that in the first person we see her feelings towards the electrocution of the Rosenbergs. Through this narration, we are able to go inside the mind of Esther, as if she was personally telling us this story. Not only am I in Esther’s head but I almost feel that I am her, because when reading out loud it sounds like I am telling the story in my view. 

As we read about Esther’s life and problems I learn that she has a depressive side to her. I begin to realize that her depression is something that has power over her but I would have to look past her mental health as being the answer to her problems. 

By identifying these types of narratives, we are able to begin to enter the role of what a  “capable reader” is. Seitz defines this as people “who not only has the ability to ‘follow’ the text but also the ability to jump ahead of it” (146).  To be in this role as a reader I feel that I am constantly focusing on her sex life, as she is always wishing or wanting to have sex with everyone just to become even with Buddy.  Something I learned from Professor Kopp and was mentioned in Angelina’s fourth blog was the term “inauthentic resistant reader”. This is when a reader never lets themselves enter the world of the text. They are resistant to it. 

An inauthentic resistant reader would be someone who sees Esther as a madwoman. They would believe that Esther is exaggerating her struggle to be perfect. As she makes multiple attempts to commit suicide and thinks of how she should do it and not why she should, she becomes this crazy person who should receive help.

“The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers– goggled eyed headlines staring up at me every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway.” (Plath 1)

This disturbing introduction to the novel immediately calls attention to the idea that Esther may have some sort of problem, or fear and bothered attitudes towards the Rosenbergs. Her personification of the newspaper headlines having eyes and the subway having a mouth help us in identifying her interesting style, this would be described to me as a Narrative Audience.

The danger comes if we continue to submit and end up in the ideal narrative audience. This audience, Rabinowitz refers to as “[an audience that] believes the narrator, accepts his judgments, sympathizes with his plight, laughs at his jokes even when they are bad” (134).  This danger would be Esther fully committing to her suicidal tensions. 

We notice Esther constantly trying to picture herself with a new life, in the beginning of the novel Esther reads a story about a Jewish man and a nun who meet under a fig tree. Their relationship is doomed, just as she feels her relationship with Buddy is doomed. Later, the tree becomes a symbol of the life choices that face Esther. She imagines that each fig represents a different life. She can only choose one fig, but because she wants all of them, she sits paralyzed with indecision, and the figs rot and fall to the ground. Not only does the fig tree represent a different life, but it also represents her doomed attempts at love. Each time she finds a man she thinks could be her potential love she then comes to the realization that it will never be that. When discussing with my group leader about the fig tree, the fig represents fertility. Which Esther also struggles with. 

Not only that but when my group met with Professor Kopp, we discussed the meaning behind the title The Bell Jar. The bell jar is an inverted glass jar, used to that in a vacuum, there is no sound. For Esther, the bell jar symbolizes her madness. When gripped by her insanity, she feels as if she is trapped inside an airless jar that distorts her perspective on the world and prevents her from connecting with the people around her.  At the end of the novel, the bell jar has lifted, but she can sense that it still hovers over her, waiting to drop at any moment.

Throughout the novel we see many occurrences where Esther is stuck in this Bell Jar, we tend to wonder will she ever break out? We first get introduced to the bell jar in chapter 15 “[W]herever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (Plath 185).

But later on in chapters 18 to 20, we discuss Esther’s rebirth and her break from this Bell Jar as Joan fascinates and disgusts her, for “her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of [Esther’s] own”(Plath 219).  Because Joan functions partly as Esther’s twin, her burial symbolizes Esther’s burial of the suicidal part of her life. This rebirth allows the novel to end on a hopeful note, although the symbol of the bell jar returns when Esther asks, “How did I know that someday . . . the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”(Plath 241). But we notice that this Bell Jar will always be hovering over her head waiting to be brought back. 

I firmly believe this was one of Sylvia’s fears being transferred into Esther. As we learned as a group that Sylvia Plath committed suicide. Right before her death, she wrote this novel about Esther and her pain. This book was a call out for help as she seemed to suffer from depression.