She knows the world of fashion she inhabits in New York should make her feel glamorous and happy, but she finds it filled with poison, drunkenness, and violence. Her relationships with men are supposed to be romantic and meaningful, but they are marked by misunderstanding, distrust, and brutality.
Esther almost continuously feels that her reactions are wrong, or that she is the only one to view the world as she does, and eventually she begins to feel a sense of unreality. This sense of unreality grows until it becomes unbearable, and attempted suicide and madness follow. Esther feels pulled between her desire to write and the pressure she feels to settle down and start a family. The girls at her college mock her studiousness and only show her respect when she begins dating a handsome and well-liked boy.
Buddy assumes that Esther will drop her poetic ambitions as soon as she becomes a mother, and Esther also assumes that she cannot be both mother and poet. Esther longs to have adventures that society denies her, particularly sexual adventures.
She decides to reject Buddy for good when she realizes he represents a sexual double standard. He has an affair with a waitress while dating Esther, but expects Esther to remain a virgin until she marries him. Esther understands her first sexual experience as a crucial step toward independence and adulthood, but she seeks this experience not for her own pleasure but rather to relieve herself of her burdensome virginity.
Gordon, he suggests electro-shock treatments on an out-patient basis. He assures Mrs. Greenwood that she'll "have her daughter back" soon. Meanwhile, Esther is reading lurid scandal sheets and is intrigued by the story of a man who almost commits suicide by jumping from the seventh floor of a building; he is finally helped to safety by a policeman. Esther analyzes in detail the matter of killing oneself by leaping. The seamy sides of life and violence and death fascinate her, partly because all her family ever read was the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper that Esther claims treated such things as "if they didn't happen.
She decides that the Weeping Scholar Tree must have come from Japan, and then she goes into a long reverie on the merits of disembowelment. However, she concludes, she hates the sight of blood. All of Esther's thoughts lead to suicide, it seems. And then, to make matters worse, Dodo Conway and Esther's mother drive her to Dr. Gordon's hospital in the Conways' hearse-like car.
Gray images have now turned to black. Significantly, we only get the description of the Conway car after Esther has received her first shock treatment. We, as readers, almost wish that Esther had run away to Chicago, or that she had started hitchhiking somewhere. However, Esther always returns home after her fantasies of escape — and thus she continues to be "a dutiful girl," following Dr.
Gordon's plans, and doing as her mother and society think best. One of the reasons why Esther always goes back home is that she feels she is "hopeless at stars" — and although she can find directions on a map, she can't understand them when she is lost. She also tends to lose track of time and frequently discovers that it is "too late.
Gordon's private office is decorated in monochromatic beige, with green plants. The private hospital is also very chic and makes Esther think of a guesthouse in Maine. This sense of fashion is attractive to her. But both places have an air of unreality. The office is icily air-conditioned and windowless; the private hospital, in spite of its secluded drive, is white with quahog shells, and its light, summer resort appearance is peopled with motionless human bodies, who have almost uniform-looking faces.
Finally, Esther sees that some of the people in this institution are making "small, birdlike gestures," yet her final conclusion is that she is in a department store, surrounded by mannequins. As Esther follows Dr. Gordon and prepares to undergo her first electro-shock treatment, she sees a shouting, struggling woman being dragged along the hall by an unsympathetic nurse with a medicinal smell.
This wall-eyed nurse tells Esther that everyone is "scared to death" before their first shock treatment. When it is time for Esther's treatment, her temples are covered with grease, and Dr. Gordon fits two metal plates, one on each side of her head, with a strap. When Esther bites down on the wire that he gives her, she is shot through with "air crackling with blue light," and the jolts and flashes that split her body make her wonder "what terrible thing it was that I had done.
The scream that she emitted then was "like a violently disembodied spirit. Gordon asks her how she feels, and Esther lies and says, "all right. Her disembodied spirit is not strong enough to rebel against him, to reject the institutions that ultimately seem to fail to protect and help her. On the way home in Dodo Conway's car, Esther experiences a feeling in which her mind seems to be sliding off into empty space, and after she is home she tells her mother that she is not going back to the hospital.
Her mother, in classic denial fashion, smiles and says, "I knew my baby wasn't like that. Back home, Esther becomes fixated on stories about a starlet who committed suicide, and her own demonic voices begin to chide her about her work and her neuroses.
She is afraid that she'll never get anywhere so she toys with her package of Gillette razor blades. She goes to the bathtub because a Roman philosopher had said it would almost be pleasant to open his veins in a warm bath.
But Esther can't slit her own white, defenseless skin, so she packs up her blades and catches a bus to Boston. Esther seeks directions to go to Deer Island. She weeps a few honest tears, and she finally gets the proper instructions. Before Esther's father died, the family lived on this island.
It was an island then, but it is now connected to the mainland. Only a prison is out there now. Esther meets a guard and ponders how her life would be if she'd married him and had a large family.
As she sits by the sea, a small annoying boy comes up to talk to her. She is about to bribe him to go away when his mother calls. Esther is left to think about a cold sea death. But as the icy water reaches her ankles, she winces and picks up her things and leaves. Chapter 13 begins with another beach scene.
Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Sylvia Plath. Previous Next. Greenwood Joan Giling Mrs. Willard Dr. Nolan Dr. What's Up With the Ending? The plot of the novel follows her descent into and return from -madness. The Bell Jar tells an atypical coming-of-age story: instead of undergoing a positive, progressive education in the ways of the world, culminating in a graduation into adulthood, Esther learns from madness, and graduates not from school but from a mental institution.
Esther behaves unconventionally in reaction to the society in which she lives. Society expects Esther to be constantly cheerful and peppy, but her dark, melancholy nature resists perkiness. Society expects Esther to remain a virgin until her marriage to a nice boy, but Esther sees the hypocrisy of this rule and decides that like Buddy, she wants to lose her virginity before marriage.
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