The Bell Jar Summary and Complete Study Guide

Mental illness as suffocation and distorted perception. Being trapped under glass where air grows stale, reality warps through glass, and you're cut off from others. It can lift but might descend again.

Semi-autobiographical. Plath had a magazine internship in 1953, attempted suicide, and received psychiatric treatment—like Esther. But it's fiction transforming autobiography into art. Esther is character, not simply Plath.

Esther walks into her exit interview at the psychiatric hospital, preparing to leave. But she wonders: 'How did I know the bell jar wouldn't descend again?' The ending is deliberately ambiguous—recovery is uncertain, not guaranteed.

1950s gender expectations that trapped women: be pure but sexy, educated but domestic, ambitious but selfless. These contradictory demands created impossible positions that contributed to mental breakdowns.

Joan is another patient who seems to be recovering but dies by suicide. Her death shows mental illness's potential lethality and demonstrates that Esther's survival wasn't guaranteed—some people recover, some don't.

Plath died by suicide in February 1963, one month after The Bell Jar's publication. She was 30 years old. The bell jar descended again for her, making the novel's ambiguous ending tragically prophetic.