Important Quotations Explained
1. Look
what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some
out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford
a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins
a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like
her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself.
I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties
to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have
been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t
get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the
eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of
the surrounding hullabaloo.
This quotation, which concludes the
first section of Chapter 1, describes the
disconnect Esther feels between the way other people view her life
and the way she experiences her life. By all external measures,
Esther should feel happy and excited. She has overcome her middle-class,
small town background with luck, talent, and hard work, and her
reward is a glamorous month in New York. Although she recognizes
these objective facts, Esther feels uncertain both about her own
abilities and about the rewards that these abilities have garnered
her. To her own puzzlement, she does not find New York thrilling
and romantic. Instead, she finds it dizzying and depressing, and
she finds the fashion world she inhabits superficial and disorienting.
The feeling of numbness that Esther describes here is the kernel
of the madness that will soon overtake her. Eventually, the gap
between societal expectations and her own feelings and experiences
becomes so large that she feels she can no longer survive.
2. When
I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world
being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and
Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw
the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people
who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between
one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come
over me the day I crossed the boundary line.
This quotation from Chapter 7 shows
that Esther inhabits a world of limited sexual choices. Convention
dictates that she will remain a virgin until she marries. If she
chooses to have sex before marriage, she risks pregnancy, displeasing
her future husband, and ruining her own name. Esther sets out to
defy conventional expectations by losing her virginity with someone
she does not expect to marry. Despite this firm goal, she finds
it difficult to gain an independent sexual identity. The men in
her life provide little help: Buddy has traditional ideas about
male and female roles even though he has mildly transgressed by
having an affair with a waitress; an acquaintance named Eric thinks
sex disgusting, and will not have sex with a woman he loves; and
Marco calls Esther a slut as he attempts to rape her. When Esther
finally loses her virginity, she does not experience the “spectacular
change” that she expects, although the experience does satisfy her
in some says. Esther only partially escapes the repressive ideas
about sexuality that surround her. By losing her virginity, she
frees herself of the oppressive mandate to remain pure, but she
fails to find sexual pleasure or independence.
3. [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.
This quotation, from the beginning of
Chapter 15, introduces the symbol of the
bell jar. Esther explains that no matter where she goes, she exists
in the hell of her own mind. She is trapped inside herself, and
no external stimulation, no matter how new and exciting, can ameliorate
this condition. The bell jar of Esther’s madness separates her from
the people she should care about. Esther’s association of her illness
with a bell jar suggests her feeling that madness descends on her
without her control or assent—it is as if an unseen scientist traps
her. Esther’s suicidal urges come from this sense of suffocating isolation.
4. To
the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the
world itself is the bad dream.
This quotation comes from the last chapter
of the novel, in which Esther attempts to draw some conclusions
about the experiences she has undergone. Her mother suggests that
they treat Esther’s madness as if it were a bad dream that can be
forgotten. This quotation records Esther’s inward response; she
feels that madness is like being trapped in a bad dream, but it
is a bad dream from which one cannot awake. Esther likens the person
who suffers from mental illness to the pickled fetuses she saw at
Buddy’s medical school, a morbid connection that illustrates the
terror of madness.
5. How did
I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the
bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
This quotation, also from the last chapter
of the novel, provides the final word on Esther’s supposed cure.
The bell jar has lifted enough that Esther can function more or
less normally. She has relinquished her desire to kill herself,
and she begins to form tenuous connections with other people and
with the outside world. But Esther still feels the bell jar hovering
above her, and worries that it will trap her again. Her madness
does not obey reason, and though she feels grateful to have escaped
from it, she does not believe that this escape represents a fundamental
or permanent change in her situation. If we read The Bell
Jar as partly autobiographical, Plath’s own life story
confirms that the bell jar can descend again. Just as the pressures
that culminated in her late teens drove Plath to attempt suicide,
the pressures that culminated in her early thirties drove her to commit
suicide.
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