User:Cecelia.jane97/sandbox

Plot Summary
Esther goes to her aunt’s sister-in-law Teresa, a doctor, to ask for more sleeping pills. Teresa asks why she is having trouble sleeping and prescribes a psychiatrist named Doctor Gordon, described in the novel as “conceited.” Esther “hate[s] him from the minute [she] walk[s] in the door.” The appointment consists of Doctor Gordon asking “what [Esther] thinks is wrong,” Esther telling him about the things she “couldn't do,”and Dr. Gordon asking unrelated questions. After a few more equally unproductive appointments, Doctor Gordon recommends that she go to a hospital where she can go receive shock therapy. She considers running away to Chicago to avoid going, but does not. The hospital is described as “seem[ing] normal,” but Esther is sure that it is “chock full of crazy people." Doctor Gordon gives her shock treatments; Esther’s reaction to it is to feel that “something bent down and took hold of [her] and shook [her] like the end of the world.” The memories of shock therapy stay with her for the rest of her time in treatment and she feels emptier afterwards.  Doctor Gordon recommends a few more shock treatments, expecting improvement. After not sleeping for twenty-one nights, Esther locks herself in the bathroom and tries to cut her wrists and lay in a warm bath to kill herself.  Esther is described as “paralyzed” when it comes to actually cutting her wrists, and cuts her knee instead. The next morning, Esther tries to hang herself.  Her obstacle is that the house has “the wrong kind of ceilings.” A few weeks later, Esther is invited to the beach by her friend Jody, although she suspects her mother called Jody in order to get Esther out of the house. While at the beach, Esther attempts to drown herself, finds that it is difficult, and gives up. Her last attempt is to take a bottle of sleeping pills, go to a small gap behind the oil burner in the cellar, under the breezeway of the house, climb in and swallow the pills. Before long, she faints.

Characters

 * Joan, an old friend of Esther’s, is mentally unstable and eventually commits suicide after living in the asylum with Esther for a while.
 * Mrs. Greenwood, Esther’s mother, is a woman who only wants the best for Esther, but is not always sure how to go about giving her that. While Esther is in the asylum, her mother comes and brings her roses for her birthday.  At this time, Esther is still mentally ill, and gets very angry at her mother, who says later when Esther comes home that “we’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.”
 * Constatin, a simultaneous interpreter with a foreign accent, got Esther’s phone number from Mrs. Willard. They go on a date together and Esther sleeps the night at his apartment.
 * Irwin, a tall but rather ugly young man, is the man to whom Esther loses her virginity, and also causes her to hemorrhage. He is a “very well paid professor of mathematics” and invites Esther to have coffee, which leads to her having sex with him, which leads to Esther having to go to the hospital to have help getting her to stop bleeding.
 * Philomena Guinea, a wealthy elderly lady, is the person who donated the money for Esther’s college scholarship. Esther’s college requires the girls on scholarship to write a letter to their benefactor, thanking them.  Philomena invites Esther to have a meal with her.  At one point, she was also in an asylum herself, and pays for the “upscale” asylum that Esther stays in.

Reception
The Bell Jar received “warily positive reviews." The short time span between the publication of the book and Plath’s suicide resulted in “few innocent readings” of the novel. The majority of early readers focused primarily on autobiographical connections from Plath to the protagonist. In response to autobiographical criticism, Elizabeth Hardwick in her essay on Sylvia Plath urged that readers distinguish between Plath as a writer and Plath as an “event." Robert Scholes for The New York Times praised the novel’s “sharp and uncanny descriptions.” Mason Harris of the West Coast Review complimented the novel as having a “distorted lens of madness [which] give[s] an authentic of a period which exalted the most oppressive ideal of reason and stability.” Howard Moss of The New Yorker gave a mixed review, praising the “black comedy” of the novel, but adding that there was “something girlish in its manner [that] betrays the hand of the amateur novelist.”

Adaptations
The Bell Jar has been adapted into “A film version [which] was released in 1979 [and] sparked a liberal lawsuit that was not settled until the late 1980’s.” According to IMDb, a new film version, to be directed by Nicole Kassell and starring Julia Stiles, is “presently in development,” and is scheduled for release in 2012.

The novel has been translated into nearly a dozen languages

In Popular Culture
The Bell Jar has been referenced by many popular sources in the media including Gilmore Girls and The Simpsons. As Iris Jamahl Dunkle voiced in her article, “often, when the novel appears in American films and television series, it stands as a symbol for teenage angst,” such as in the series Family Guy, when “the teenage daughter, Meg, is seen reading The Bell Jar instead of attending a spring-break party”