The Novel That Helped Me Understand American Culture
The Bell Jar provided an emotional context for a country I found alluring as a teenager growing up abroad.
Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.
With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the Baby Boom. The Bell Jar, with its sneering descriptions of ski trips to the Adirondacks and boys who ran cross-country, offered me permission to write a certain way: intensely, cuttingly, in English. It also provided an emotional context for the East Coast culture I found so alluring, and that I’d been trying to figure out. But my teenage self missed part of the novel’s project: its effort to tear down the veneer of complacent satisfaction that enveloped the American suburban lifestyle.
The Bell Jar first appeared in England 60 years ago, a month before the author’s suicide, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. After a copyright battle, it was finally published in the United States in 1971 with Plath’s name on the cover. The novel begins when Esther leaves her small town in Massachusetts for New York City, having won a coveted spot for a summer job at Ladies’ Day magazine (a fictionalized version of Mademoiselle). The glitz and artifice of the fashion world shock and repel her; upon her return to the cloistered suburbs, she comes undone. The plot culminates with her suicide attempt and her stay at a mental institution, based on Plath’s own experience at the renowned McLean Hospital.
Today, the novel is seen as a poignant account of the stifling oppression of the Eisenhower years, particularly as experienced by young women. In the introduction to her recent biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark writes that The Bell Jar “exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even ‘the best minds’ of a generation crazy.” In life, Plath had trouble squaring her idea of herself as an ambitious writer with the expectations held for a girl like her—to marry young and start producing children. Some of the impact of her poetry emerged from this misalignment. Oft-quoted lines from her poem “Edge” read: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.” Clark, parsing the image, notes, “Only a dead woman is ‘perfected.’ Not perfect, perfected––like … something controlled, without agency.”
The Bell Jar’s achievement, in turn, was to paint a portrait of America full of jagged inconsistencies. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life,” Esther declares in the first couple of pages. Described as “drinking martinis … in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures,” she embodies the mid-century’s ideal of an accomplished, educated girl—but only up to a point. At Ladies’ Day, Esther, an aspiring poet, hopes to discuss literature with her editor; instead, her goals are treated with condescension. On campus, her sense of achievement is limited to four years of pseudo-freedom that are supposed to climax in marriage to a respectable Yale medical student, for whom she is expected to “flatten out … like Mrs. Willard’s [her would-be mother-in-law] kitchen mat.” This prospect––which would assure a secure, suburban life––is an urgent threat to someone who desires the tumult of experience; it makes Esther feel “very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
Pitted against her decaying sense of self, the overdone polish of the Northeast becomes sinister. Taut prose elucidates this feeling: Swimming far from the shore, Esther considers drowning before admitting to a self-preservation instinct (“I knew when I was beaten”). Longer, more rambling sentences describe the off-kilter beauty of the landscape, and how it corresponds to Esther’s mood: Driving to the Adirondacks, “the countryside, already deep under old falls of snow, turned us a bleaker shoulder, and as the fir trees crowded down from the gray hills to the road edge, so darkly green they looked black, I grew gloomier and gloomier.”
Writing about the novel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick observed that “the pleasures and sentiments of youth––wanting to be invited to the Yale prom, losing your virginity––are rather unreal in a scenario of disintegration, anger, and a perverse love of the horrible.” As a teen eager to understand these signifiers of American adolescence, I was drawn to that sense of unreality, even as I responded to Esther’s frustrations with her codified environment. From the writing, I understood that the purportedly joyful rituals of growing up were attended by rage, but Plath was also gesturing at a source for this rage: the culture that created these rituals in the first place.
The title of the novel, as readers might recall, is an image of Esther’s claustrophobia: Trapped by her surroundings and her depression alike, Esther feels as though she will always be “sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [her] own sour air.” According to Clark’s biography, Plath considered an ending that would see Esther going to Europe, fleeing the brutality of the Northeast. It was what Plath did herself; she wrote her best work—The Bell Jar and Ariel, the poetry collection that propelled her to posthumous fame—while living in England. In this sense, The Bell Jar’s mistrust of suburban prosperity can be read as a precursor to later works that similarly explore the dark underside of small-town America; it is often paired with Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, its influence deeply felt on the depiction of the Lisbon girls. And Esther’s description of the grimy hole in her mother’s basement, into which she crawls to attempt suicide, calls to mind the opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, when the camera digs under an immaculate suburban lawn to reveal the rot lurking underneath.
Plath’s writing and biography seem to indicate that what she really wanted was freedom: to be herself and to wear her contradictions on her sleeve. But that aspiration was accompanied by an obsession with emphasizing the distance between herself and others—and, by the same token, stereotyping those she was defining herself against. As the writer Janet Malcolm points out in The Silent Woman, her book about Plath’s legend and biographies, critics including Leon Wieseltier and Irving Howe have criticized Plath’s appropriation of the suffering of the Jewish people in her poetry: Through her use of Holocaust imagery in “Daddy,” she equates her individual pain to the generational trauma caused by Nazism. And in The Bell Jar, as in poems such as “Lady Lazarus,” her fetishization of difference could be a myopic way to assert her distinction from those she seemed to see as beneath her.
As such, the novel occasionally enacts the overbearing homogeneity that characterized the America Plath supposedly held in contempt. Racist imagery pervades the text: the anti-Black sentiment that emerges in her description of a Black worker in the hospital where Esther is institutionalized is particularly unsettling. In the first few pages, Esther compares her pallor to the skin of a “Chinaman,” and my own home country is a symbol of faraway exoticism: On a humid day, the rain “wasn’t the nice kind … that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they have in Brazil.” The bell jar that descended over the suburbs seemed to come into focus for Plath only insofar as her entrapment went. She couldn’t quite look outside of herself to see how that bell jar might be suffocating for others.
When I first read The Bell Jar, New England was an abstract concept to me: a made-up place where the push and pull of conformity and subversion appeared to emerge in perfect clarity. Growing up in a country that idealized the American experience, I held Plath’s America at a remove. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, it stood still in time, immoveable, sentimental, and untrue. To revisit the book now, as an adult who has lived in the United States for almost a decade, is to see the idea of a romantic, preppy East Coast collapse under the harsh, more revealing light of experience. Plath’s novel didn’t materialize out of those beautiful images of coastal American adolescence; it was born of a thorny, damaging relationship with an environment that could be as cruel as it was rewarding.
In college, I fell in love with a boy from Massachusetts and went to see New England for myself. Everything looked just as I’d expected it to, even if, in the past 70 or so years, a lot had changed; not least of all the fact that, according to a University of Massachusetts at Boston report from 2020, the state is home to the second largest Brazilian population in the country. But the air in Massachusetts is thick with history, and its cunning appearance still compels. The sight of those colonial houses surrounded by maple and pine, their floors trod on by feet clad in G. H. Bass loafers, combined with the strange recognition of visiting a place I’d only ever imagined before, kept me tethered to Plath’s own descriptions. Still, as much as her legend insists that she was a prototypical all-American girl, Plath died a foreigner and an outsider. The last dinner party she ever attended, according to Clark’s biography, was at the English house of family friends from home.
It took me years to realize that no matter how diligently I studied the America I initially saw in Plath’s work, I would always be foremost a foreigner and an outsider—someone with a tormented predilection for a culture that excludes, confines, and punishes you for not fitting in. Still, I like to think that Plath wrote The Bell Jar for those who, like me and her, are seized and haunted by certain images and certain notions—even those that may, at any point, turn on us.
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