Imagery and Metaphors

When I began reading The Bell Jar, I honestly did not understand the metaphor of the title. I didn’t give it a second thought and just decided to enjoy the book. However, when we began discussing the title in class, I was fascinated. I found the title to be an excellent metaphor and extremely compelling. Throughout the book, Sylvia Plath used this type of imagery and description not only to bring her Esther to life but to provide context and tangible examples for her readers. I found the descriptions, explanations, and metaphors in this book extremely vivid and they brought the book to life.
     With the descriptions, as with the metaphor of the title, Sylvia Plath brings the characters to life through her writing. One passage that I found particularly interesting was when Esther talks about the future. Plath writes that Esther sees the future “glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue” (Plath 128). I found this description of how she sees the future incredibly vivid, and it’s just one of the many descriptions that allowed me as a reader to see into Esther’s mind. The way that Plath harnesses the intangible made this book even more enjoyable for me to read.
     In this book, we are able to glimpse how Esther, and by extension Plath, thinks, and how the breakdown felt from inside. As readers, we aren’t viewing this breakdown from the outside world but as the person going through it. We share her inner most thoughts and feelings regardless of the nature of them. Often, we are only told what depression is like from the outside and how someone interacts with the world. In this book, we see what she thinks, how she feels, and why she does what she does. This is why this novel is so powerful: everyone can have a glimpse of how Esther feels.
     Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper Perennial, 1963.

Comments

  1. Aryan LalwaniMarch 21, 2021 at 2:33 PM

    I agree! Plath does an excellent job of describing the novel's events using vivid imagery. One of my favorites was how a withering fig tree was used to represent Esther's feeling of losing future potential. This provided an almost direct entry into Esther's emotions at the time and allowed the reader to relate to her in a much deeper way than a simple description would have.

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  2. locally locayleeMarch 26, 2021 at 7:55 AM

    I also enjoyed the imagery the Plath conveyed through the title and descriptions throughout the book. I think the "bell jar" metaphor was particularly powerful as it sheds a considerable amount of light into how Esther views herself and the world around her. I agree that the book is interesting because we view the world in Esther's eyes.

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  3. MitchellMarch 26, 2021 at 9:09 AM

    I love the way that Plath/Esther's comments about the title--near the end of the narrative--lead us to go back and reexamine earlier chapters and general impressions of Esther's "reliability" as a narrator. We can see the "bell jar" distortions throughout the New York sequence, when we go back and read them in light of this metaphor, and it applies well throughout the stages of her decline and recovery. Especially chilling (and realistic/sober) is the late mention of the bell jar suspended "just over her head," ready to descend at any time. She knows she is "better," but she also knows that she'll never be free from the possibility of relapse. As an artist/writer, the creation of this multileveled metaphor represents Plath herself coming to understand her condition in a way that she doesn't when she is in the midst of it.

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  4. FarahMarch 28, 2021 at 7:49 PM

    I definitely agree! One of my favorite ways to think about the metaphor of a bell jar is the distortion it causes in Esther's perception of the world and people around her. I like the idea that as the bell jar lifted, she kind of had a type of "blindfold" removed from her eyes. So when she can finally see clearly it is a kind of coming of age for her. By the way, I think that the bell jar didn't just one day magically remove itself, I got more of the sense that it was a gradual process and it was not always linear (the phrase one step forward, two steps back comes to mind). It also makes so much sense when you think about the dream like quality (distortion) in the narration, and something that comes to mind right away is when Doreen and that guy are dancing, I just thought that was such a weird and nightmarish scene.

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