Plath, Sylvia 1932–1963: Critical Essay by Stan Smith

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses the psychological alienation of the heroine, Esther Greenwood, to reinforce … aesthetic alienation. Esther's 'madness' offers her an increasingly 'objective', exterior view of the 'eating customs, jurisprudence, and love life' [in Bertolt Brecht's words] of the culture she has inherited. 'Manners', provide an important motif of the book. Using the finger-bowl at a special lunch, Esther, for example, 'thought what a long way [she] had come' …, and recalls that in her first encounter with a finger-bowl, she drank the water and the cherry blossoms in it because 'I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup'. Esther's 'oddity' is here revealed as, in origin, no more than a social disjunction, between her own learnt expectations and the codes of manners within which she comes increasingly to move. A clue to the process at work is revealed in her memory of a poet who in 'do[ing] something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance', 'made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do'…. The poet, significantly, had been talking about 'the antithesis of nature and art'. Esther's perception of the fictive nature of 'manners' spills over into an attitude which evacuated the world of all spontaneous content. There are no such things as 'natural' responses, no intrinsic values in things, all are equally arbitrary and artificial, and all are viewed with the same cynical-naïve eye. Collapsing the 'antithesis of nature and art', Esther comes to view her own life as an aesthetic construct, a perpetual self-manipulation…. (p. 248)

Esther's paranoia penetrates the bland benevolent surfaces of other people's motives to discover their inner and unconscious significance. The first psychiatrist she visits, for example, is far less perceptive about her than she is about him…. What Esther observes here—and it is a recurring note throughout the book—is the artificiality, the artifice, of Dr. Gordon's identity. He is an image presented to the world, acting a conventional role. (p. 249)

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