Knowing about the biographical nature of The Bell Jar adds a morbidly chilling realism to Esther’s downward spiral, in her attempt to escape the external pressures that push her towards insanity and suicide. Esther’s fear of losing academic success at the end of college captures a moment that every student, including Sylvia Plath, feels towards the future and what will define us. While most normal people have complex worries and desires for what their identity shall be, Esther’s insecurity is in her idea that she cannot marry and have children while being a professor and a poet. Her lack of vision and motivation to merge these two possible realities lies at the root of her struggle for normalcy. Not to say that the external pressures of her environment do not greatly exacerbate her mental struggle, but it his her mind that cannot find the middle of the road between these two identities she feels needs pursuing. Esther slips into insanity by the happenings in her environment and in her own mind. Esther’s inability to find the motivation to inherit the qualities of both identities is what makes her mental reality skewed and is the answer to why she feels suicide to be the cure for her conflict. Esther feels she must become both to be happy but in her mind it’s one or the other. Killing herself is a rational option because it absolves her from having to deal with her identity paradox. As an audience we see the lunacy in this logic of her trying to save herself by killing herself.
Knowing Plath’s suicidal struggles in her own life; one can only wonder how much of Esther’s insanity she had to create and how much is pulled from her own troubled mind.
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Tim--I think your description of Esther's suicide as a "rational" option is perfect--it does help make sense of the way she approaches killing herself, the detached way in which she approaches not death but her projected manner of dying. Regarding Plath's autobiographical involvement: I would recommend taking the Bell Jar seriously as a work of art. We cannot know precisely what was going on in Plath's mind as she was writing her novel; what we do know is that the events in The Bell Jar are narrated retrospectively, from the perspective of someone who has escaped from the bell jar but knows that it can descend on her again, any time.
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