The Bell Jar

I find it interesting that Plath uses a bell jar to symbolize being trapped by insanity. For even in Belsize "Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort." So although she sees the covering by a bell jar as something that traps one I believe she also feels somewhat free for she does say just a page before this: "To a person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream." Through this thought one can believe that Esther could have been trapping herself in so that she may not have to deal with all that is bad about the world. At the same time however, another passage makes it seem as if she is not in control of her actions. "But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday... the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again? Through this she Plath exposes to the reader that Esther does not in fact feel she is in control of everything she does. I cannot find many places paralleling this thought. I do wonder, however, how exactly this Bell Jar distorts reality. How does Esther's mind blur what is real?
As if Plath wasn't sure the reader would pick up on the birth/rebirth theme during her attempted suicide through sleeping pills under the house she made it very clear at the end of the book that a rebirth was in fact what Esther was undergoing. "There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road..." Esther in fact does undergo her own little rebirth ritual and this is where the book ends, this is where she steps into the office to regain full control of her life.

----Aaron Abel