This novel is the retrospective viewpoint of Esther Greenwood's (a thinly disguised Plath) mental breakdown. The narrative voice is lucid, yet disembodied. As Esther says in the opening paragraphs "I knew something was wrong with me that summer"...."I was supposed to be having the time of my life". It is as if the characher is saying 'this is what happened to me but it feels as if it happened to someone else' - a totally dislocating and disembodying experience.
The novel has a poignant poetic quality and I know we shouldn't read it with the author's biography in mind, but somehow I can't separate out her poetry from her life and from the novel.
The imagery of Esther discarding her useless clothes, (which she describes as "hanging limp as fish in my closet"), to the wind, across a New York skyline, is one example of what I perceive as as a disembodied experience. This is made explicit by Esther's observation that it was like scattering "a loved one's ashes". It is almost like an out-of -body experience, as if she had already died, or some part of her that she could not come to terms with had died. The same kind of disembodied experience is framed in Esther's swimming out to sea, where she imagines her shoes will be found on the beach,pointing like a soul compass towards her destiny. This is a staging of events:
"The whole landscape - beach and headland and sea and rock - quavered in front of my eyes like a stage backcloth".
All the best poets have a melancholic frame of mind and their work is, thus, infused. Plath's work epitomises this dark, descending, cloud of depression and frames it for us in the stale air of The Bell Jar.
Wonderful stuff!
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