Exploring the Surrealist Elements of The Bell Jar
Surrealism in The Bell Jar
by Linden Peters
When I was reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, it's safe to say I sometimes felt confused. I wasn't sure if it was something in text or mid-February brain fog, but some passages felt hypnotic and unreal. After further analysis, I realized that implementing surrealist elements was likely an intentional decision made to put the reader closer to Esther's mental state. Merriam webster defines surrealism as "the principles, ideals, or practice of producing fantastic or incongruous imagery or effects in art, literature, film, or theater by means of unnatural or irrational juxtapositions and combinations". In the case of The Bell Jar, these techniques are often used to show alienation with the world and make the reader understand how mental disorder affects reasoning.
Chapter 9 is the perfect example of this trippy style, where one scene fades into another like a slideshow to illustrate all the hellish elements about her last day in New York. The chapter opens with "'I'm so glad they're going to die'" repeated out of context. If this was a movie, I could imagine the sentence being echoed out loud as the scene fades in. Later, we see the context about the Rosenbergs, the subject of the opening of the book. She is hoping to find solidarity with Hilda about the tragedy of people being executed, but she instead affirms the cold, brutal views of the world saying, "I'm so glad they're going to die". The repetition of the sentence shows its significance to Esther, and the echo is reminiscent of dark, intrusive thoughts. Also, the way the scene ends with providing context shows the lack of chronological order in her accounts, illustrating the fragmentation of her thoughts.
The use of the dybbuk in this scene is also intriguing. She compares Hilda's voice to that of an evil monster from the play she watched the night before (once again showing how this passage is like a chronological collage). But then, she takes it to another level saying, "'She yawned then, and her pale orange mouth opened on a large darkness. Fascinated, I stared at the blind cave behind her face until the two lips met and moved and the dybbuk spoke out of its hiding place, 'I'm so glad they're going to die'" (100). The line between imagination and reality is very thin here. Out of nowhere, she makes a full-on description of Hilda turning into a monster to accentuate her inhuman perception of the world.
Another interesting moment is the passage on the end of page 131-beginning of page 132. For context, she had just finished the scene with Doctor Gordon:
I pulled the car door shut. It didn't catch. I pushed it out and drew it in again with a dull slam.
'He said he'll see me again next week.'
My mother sighed. Doctor Gordon cost twenty-five dollars an hour.
'Hi there, what's your name?'
'Elly Higginbottom'
The sailor fell into step beside me, and I smiled."
When I read this scene for the first time, I thought I missed something and read it again. But there was no transition, just straight to the dialogue in the next scene. Again, there is a similar cinematic effect of opening with dialogue and then establishing context. The whole scene feels strange: after a concerning account of her downward spiral, she somehow ends up flirting with a random stranger and fabricating an entire fake personality. Once again, the line between reality and fiction is hard to see here: she claims to see Mrs. Willard and panics, only to find that it is a random woman. It is hard to tell whether this scene is real or a dream. Afterwards, we are taken right back to Dr. Gordon dialogue from the next week, setting the Boston Common scene as some sort of dream or interlude during her downward spiral with clinical depression.
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar uses the fantastical to describe the real. By incorporating surrealist elements and a cinematic style that induces confusion, the reader can get a better understanding of Esther's growing defamiliarization with the world.
Hi Linden! I really enjoyed your insightful discussion of surrealism in The Bell Jar. I love how you highlight the dybbuk depiction of Hilda, showing how Esther’s psychological turmoil transforms ordinary interactions into moments of intense instability. Adding on to your strong example regarding the scene jump on pages 131-132, I think her introduction as Elly Higginbottom also blurs reality and perception in regards to her identity. Good post!
ReplyDeleteWe start to see more and more of these apparently disconnected "episodes" following one after the other with no clear context or transition as Esther's illness progresses, and there's probably some intention reflected here--she is no longer as capable of ordering her days into coherent shape, or something like that. Esther's experience has her drifting from one incident to the next without a larger plan or sense of purpose, something like that.
ReplyDeleteBut this disconnectedness is only part of the "surreal" style you describe in this novel. I would cite the Hilda scene as one of the most prominent and freaky examples, and indeed it reflects a moment when Esther's disorder is starting to accelerate at an alarming rate. There are so many such moments throughout the New York chapters (including the darker and more sinister kind of dreamlike state created by Marco's predatory "dancing," followed by the similarly surreal images of Esther's expensive clothes floating slowly out over the cityscape in the early morning hours), but then once she's in the suburbs it's almost ALL surrealistic dream-life (think of the image of Dodo Conway as a smaller egg on top of a larger egg pushing a stroller with an indeterminate number of children circling her). The familiar is made strange, and the effect is unsettling: there's no sense in which Esther is "enjoying" this trippy surrealism. Nightmares are often surreal, in other words, and when the surrealistic elements of nightmares penetrate our waking life, it could be quite terrifying and disorienting, which is what we see throughout Esther's experience.
Hello Linden. I now see surrealist elements in The Bell Jar. I think they could have been written to represent Esthers deteriorating mental state or how the author writes. Esther's descriptions are extraordinary with the way she describes eyes. The Hilda scene could represent society in a way. Esther thought it was awful that they got executed and when she thought Hilda was agreeing with her it's kind of like society itself doesn't agree with Esther.
ReplyDelete