It's a bad time to get depressed

Esther’s character in this novel is strongly shaped by her profound depression. How society views her depression and mental illness in general is reflected in the novel. Mr. Willard displays a particularly uniformed and potentially harmful attitude toward illness. When dropping Esther off at the tuberculosis sanatorium, he is visibly agitated, Esther observes, and soon he leaves her with Buddy. Buddy explains that his father “couldn’t stand the sight of sickness… because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will.” This strikes us as an antiquated philosophy to hold toward illness.

Esther’s mother displays a subtler, and thus more dangerous, misconception of illness. In this case, she doesn’t understand her daughter’s mental illness at all. When Esther tells her mother she doesn’t want to see Doctor Gordon again, her mother smiles and says, “I knew my baby wasn’t like that… I knew you’d decide to be all right again.” These two characters, as adults and parents, seem to stand in as some of the novel’s representatives of New England society in general, which, as we discussed in class, seems to have a great degree of preoccupation with constructing and maintaining a pristine public image. The idea that a mental disorder—something so esoteric as a severe serotonin imbalance in her brain—could preclude a New England from successfully engaging in that society and playing her predefined social role.

These two characters offer a glimpse of the harsh stigma that isolates Esther, who as a consequence of her depression already isolates herself. Plath’s title is apt; a bell jar is used almost exclusively as an illustrative tool, to demonstrate to science classes the effects of a vacuum on various experiments, like exploding marshmallows or listening to a ringing alarm clock fade into silence. Since the quality of vacuum they produce is low, they can be used for virtually nothing else but to display scientific curiosities. Especially when visited by George Bakewell, Ester feels like she is on exhibit, like “some exciting new zoo animal.” She sees that he “just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.” And Bakewell is supposed to be a medical student, yet he still displays an unfortunately unprofessional attitude. Esther was living in a very difficult time to suffer from mental disorders, highly misunderstood as they were.