Emancipation through Suicide in Plath's The Bell Jar

Abstract

The Bell Jar(1963), a confessional and autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath, depicts the adventures of a young woman in a male–dominated society that doesnot let her true potential burgeon. Plath's alter ego, Esther, begins her career as a scholarship student at a prestigious women's college and works at an internship for ladies' Day Magazine in New York city. In course of development of this novel she faces a sense of anxiety and depression due to her ambitious revolutionary and independent nature. The society is gender-biased in which women are suppressed and confined. Esther's pain and despair grows deeper when she fails to reconcile the conflicts withinher. This leads to her mental breakdown, and she has to undergo electroshock therapy in front of indifferent and unkind doctors. At the end of the novel, though she seems to be transformed, she cannot resolve the problem she faces within and outside and attempts to commit suicide several times. Her suicide does not perish herself, and is not taken as annihilation but as rejuvenation, resurrection and transcendence to the world where she finds her liberation. As such, Esther undergoes liberating transformation through suicide.