![]() ![]() Finally, another doctor gives her the longed-for diaphragm. It’s this quest that makes The Bell Jar a founding text of Anglo-American feminism.Įventually, as Esther spirals lower, with successive suicide attempts, she is given shock treatment (ECT), echoing the Rosenbergs’ fate, in horrifying scenes, graphically described. ![]() Esther’s predicament, more generally, is how to develop a mature identity, as a woman, and to be true to that self rather than conform to societal norms. Then, having failed on another date, in which she is labelled a “slut”, she hurls her clothes off her hotel roof, and returns home for a suicidal summer, a worsening depression which she compares to suffocating under a “bell jar”. At first, released from her mother’s repressive scrutiny, she decides to lose her virginity (a “millstone around my neck”) to Constantin, a UN Russian translator, but he’s too sensible to fall for her. Plath’s essential theme, a staccato drumbeat, is Esther’s obsession with the opposite sex. ![]()
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