Quote 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.
