The Bell Jar 871mind, they are self-exclusive, forcing her to choose
only one. In her indecision, each opportunity shriv-
els up and falls away.
The novel’s conclusion addresses Esther’s uncer-
tainty with regard to ambition and identity. For
Esther, the two have been intertwined; it is always
her potential that provides her sense of self. In an
earlier image, she imagines a series of 19 telephone
poles, one for each year of her life; after the 19th,
though, she can only see a dangling of wires. In the
end, instead of feeling confident about the future, all
Esther can envision are question marks. However,
this feeling has been transformed into a cathartic
one, and she is poised to step into the interview
room, her future in all its uncertainty before her.
Eric Leuschner
educatIon in The Bell Jar
Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Sylvia
Plath’s semiautobiographical novel The Bell Jar, is
a 20-year-old senior at a private women’s college
in New England. In the novel, education, symbol-
ized by the campus’s physical environs, is repeat-
edly invoked. The image of campus suffuses and
informs the novel, controlling the narrative with its
intrusions and flashbacks. The novel contains more
than 40 references to campus, and while some may
appear minor, the cumulative effect creates a type of
omnipresence for the idea of education. Esther—
like Plath, a graduate of Smith College, a private
women’s college in New England—constructs her
future based on her performance in college, but it is
a future that is torn between opposing desires and
realities.
Much of Esther’s thought processes in the novel
are filtered through her educational experience. For
instance, she thinks of her Ladies’ Day fiction editor
Jay Cee as her former science teacher, Mr. Manzi. Of
the college references in the novel, however, Esther’s
association of place with the dorm are the most
revealing. For Plath and Esther, the dorm room
functions as the microcosm of college where the
social and the academic mix. The Amazon Hotel,
with its cluster of 12 girls sharing rooms on the same
floor in a protected environment, reminds her of her
dorm room. Plath’s description of the hotel reiter-
ates the college-like feeling: “This hotel—the Ama-
zon—was for women only, and they were mostly
girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to
be sure their daughters would be living where men
couldn’t get at them and deceive them.” The protec-
tive nature of college is also suggested by the fact
that, although Esther won many prizes and received
accolades while in college, none of it really matters
in New York and at home.
Even more striking is how Belsize, the psychiat-
ric hospital, also reminds her of a dorm. The patients,
all women, are often seen socializing in a common
parlor, congregating around the piano, playing cards,
or talking. In contrast are the single, cubicle-like
rooms where they sleep or occasionally lock them-
selves in for solitude, just as students retreat to their
rooms to study. When Buddy Willard visits Esther,
the nurse’s announcement takes Esther back to col-
lege: “The smiling, snow-capped nurse poked her
head in through the door, and for a confused second
I thought I really was back in college and this spruce
white furniture, this white view over trees and hills,
an improvement on my old room’s nicked chairs and
desk and outlook over the bald quad.” The nurse’s “A
man to see you!” is the identical phrase used by the
“girl on watch” who answers the dormitory phone.
Esther’s realization that there is nothing “in Belsize,
so different from the girls playing bridge and gossip-
ing studying in the college to which I would return”
is cathartic for her as she realizes in the novel’s accu-
satory announcement, “Those girls, too, sat under
bell jars of a sort.”
Esther sees college as deciding point in her life
and career. Before the summer of the novel, her
success has been wrapped up in her accomplish-
ments. She must do well and must make the right
decision. In her image of the fig tree, which offers
all her opportunities—famous poet, brilliant profes-
sor, wife and mother, amazing editor, Olympic lady
crew champion, international traveler—she finds
herself “starving to death, just because I couldn’t
make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.
I wanted each and every one of them, but choos-
ing one meant losing all the rest.” These choices
are, in a sense, offered by education and her college
experience. Without the credentials college provides,
they would not be available. In Esther’s mind (and
enforced by the institution), however, they are also