Faced with the inevitability of death, writers throughout history have sought to capture their identity (or another's) in their work as a way of transcending time. Perhaps the greatest example of such literary immortalization may be found in Shakespeare's sonnets, which often revolve around this posterity motif, but countless other writers have responded in their own fashion to the specter of death. The Romantic poets, for instance, obsessed with the fear of loss of self, often viewed their poetry as the only possible container for an otherwise transitory identity. And in the Twentieth Century, William Faulkner spoke of the artist as one who "[tries] to ... [carve] on the wall of oblivion, beyond which he will have to pass, in the tongue of the human spirit, 'Kilroy was here.'"

It is thus not surprising that, in her autobiographical novel THE BELL JAR, Sylvia Plath should likewise desire to eternalize herself in the face of annihilation. Plath goes beyond mere rhetoric, however: THE BELL JAR may be read as a series of attempts, not unlike Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, to find a lasting container for a complex inner reality, culminating in the creation of the novel itself, which becomes the ultimate vessel for that reality. In the words of A. Alvarez, "It is as though [Plath] had decided that, for her [writing] to be valid, it must tackle head-on nothing less serious than her own death."

From the very first sentence of the novel, death looms frighteningly close for Esther Greenwood, Plath's fictional persona: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." As is here intimated, and as we will see clearly later in the novel, Esther is headed for a profound confrontation with her mortality when she undergoes electrotherapy. Following Esther's treatment, in the words of Gordon Lameyer, Esther "[enters] deeper and deeper into this world of death" until she attempts suicide in Chapter Thirteen. Here the parallels between Esther and the author's own life are neatly drawn. Even on an extremely sophisticated level, Plath never lets us forget that "all flesh is grass": "with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant " (italics mine).

What Esther fears in death is homogeneity. For her, mortality is the great equalizer, and her fear of death is closely linked to her fear of the void, of permanent identity loss. Referring to THE BELL JAR, Edward Butsher speaks of Plath's "central obsession with Kierkegaard's 'fear of nothingness.'" It is evident throughout the novel that Esther harbors a similar dread: "I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of the person I'd never seen before in my life." Or later, in Chapter Four: "I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them and the same black shadow on them at back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains" (italics mine). Even Esther's "panic-struck" reaction to physics may be interpreted as an outgrowth of her fear and indignation at what she considers a denial of individuality on the part of this "equalizing" science, which breaks everything down into faceless components and formulae.

Esther feels that she must act or be swallowed by time. But what to do with such a fragile identity? How to fight back against death? In light of these questions, Esther's answer to Jay Cee's "inquisition" concerning her future takes on profoundest significance: "'I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true."

Thus begins the narrator's quest, both for a unified self, as pointed out by such critics as Lameyer and Marjorie Perloff, and for a nonperishable vessel to carry that self into the future. Perloff asserts that "the central action of THE BELL JAR may be described as the attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self system so that a real and viable identity can come into existence." While true, we must add that such a critical approach is limited in that it fails to account for Esther's simultaneous struggle to immortalize her emerging identity.

The "monumental" nature of Esther's struggle is emphasized by the recurrence of various types of symbolic containers. Concerning the primary function of the oft-used image of the mirror, we could remark of Esther what she says of Hilda: "She [stares] at her reflection ... as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she [continues] to exist." The image of the bathtub, which occurs twice in the novel, also recalls Esther's search for a receptacle. Whether "coffin-shaped" and "marble," or simply a good place to lie after slitting one's wrists as Esther imagines it in Chapter Twelve, the bathtub is an unmistakable symbol of containment after death.

The telephone is yet another recurring image in THE BELL JAR. And though, unlike the mirror and the bathtub, it is not a symbolic container, the telephone nevertheless plays an important role, thematically, in Esther's struggle to immortalize her identity. Described as both a "death's head" and as having a "bone-colored cradle," the telephone becomes an image of insistent death, of imminent identity loss, a problem that must be "answered." (Plath appreciates a good pun.) Foreshadowing her ultimate response (i.e., narrating the novel), Esther does give an answer: she "[lifts] the receiver and [speaks] in a husky, receptive voice" (italics mine).

In his essay "The Double in Sylvia Plath's THE BELL JAR," Lameyer, like Perloff, explains the novel in terms of the narrator's search for a distinct identity. According to Lameyer, Esther systematically identifies with another person—Betsy, Doreen, Hilda, then Joan—in an attempt to define herself, before rejecting this "double" as insufficient or bogus. Thus THE BELL JAR becomes a progression toward self-actualization, leading Esther from New York, to and through her would-be suicide, and ultimately beyond her "madness" to the sense of identity and rebirth with which the novel ends. Yet, here again, we must realize that Lameyer's approach, while revealing, is inadequate to describe the full complexity of Esther's struggle: the pure "psychological approach" fails to establish convincing reasons for Esther's rejection of all doubles.

If we keep in mind that Esther's search is not only a quest for self, but also an effort to immortalize that self, then it becomes apparent that her doubles are themselves symbolic containers of identity, each being rejected in turn as she (the double) shows herself to be, in Perloff's words, "essentially a flawed human being." In other words, as Esther struggles to establish her identity, and at the same time a lasting vessel for that identity, she discovers doubles to be insufficient because any double will necessarily share her own human frailty. She cannot locate her identity in a medium as ephemeral as herself. Plath wrote in her college honors thesis: "Often the double becomes an ape or shadow which presages death and destruction."

The most striking examples of the "inadequate" double are Joan, who is likened throughout to a horse, with obvious connotations of strength and vitality; and Doreen, who is described as having "eyes ... hard and polished and just about indestructible" and "blonde hair ... like a halo of gold." Yet both of these seemingly indefatigable doubles are rejected. Esther "[dissociates] [herself] from Joan completely," and Joan later commits suicide. Doreen, similarly rejected, becomes at the very moment of rejection a powerful symbol of Esther's mortality in contrast to the "eternally verdant" carpet on which Doreen lies: "I think I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature."

The psychological approach is also inadequate in that it virtually ignores the literary implications of the text itself. Plath herself once said: "Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing ... I still want to see it finally ritualized in print" (italics mine). This attitude on Plath's part is related to the desire for literary eternalization we discussed in the introduction. As we will see, more than a result of psychosis or neurosis or divided self, THE BELL JAR is in fact the product of the author's need to find an enduring container.

Esther's fear of death, intimately tied to her "fear of nothingness," is also inextricably bound up in her dread of not becoming a great writer, whose work, like Shakespeare's, will transcend death and thereby eternalize the creative identity. This is a key concept to grasp in order to understand the novel. While renouncing doubles; religion ("Of course, I didn't believe in life after death"); and—as we will later demonstrate—sexuality as means of "beating death," Esther turns increasingly to literature for salvation. Thus her "panic" when "darkness [wipes] [her] out like chalk on a blackboard" (italics mine). And thus her crisis and breakdown when, having found no other suitable container for her identity, she discovers that she has not been accepted into the writing course she has looked forward to, as if the course, or rather her writing, were a "safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer," a summer which is "like death."

Clearly, what terrifies Esther here is the wordless "gap" into which, her writing having failed, she ("a body in a white blouse and green skirt") will inevitably "plummet" (italics mine). What to do? At this point, Esther feels that nothing can be done, no container can be found. She believes she has been defeated by oblivion. Her writing, as judged by her creative writing professor, is "factitious, artificial, sham." According to Lameyer, she "recalls all the criticism of her life and writing that anyone ever made and accepts [this] judgment." She has been unsuccessful in finding or creating a container for her emerging identity, and in the ultimate act of despair, she attempts suicide by crawling into a nook in the cellar and swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills.

The irony of this attempted suicide is twofold. First, the act itself—climbing into a tight damp space evocative of a womb and suggestive of Esther's desire to rebecome "the white sweet baby cradled in its mother's belly"—is a symbolic search for a container. The fact that her would-be suicide fails contributes to this irony and produces a second paradox: Esther's attempted suicide is what sparks her recovery; in trying to end herself, she is actually beginning anew her search for identity and immortalization, a search ending in the creation of the novel itself, the fruit of her recovery. Viewed in this manner, even the title takes on great significance. "Bell," pronounced aloud, sounds exactly like the French belle, such as in the phrase "southern belle"; jar comes from the Arabic jarrah, which designates a type of earthen vessel. If there was any doubt before, there can be none now: Plath is looking for a jar in which to put the belle.

Esther's recovery is only a matter of time: THE BELL JAR, like winter, invevitably moves toward a season of rebirth. What has been generally overlooked by critics, however, is that her recovery is tied not only to her emerging sense of identity, as pointed out by the psychological approach, but also to Esther's knowledge that she can and will write again, that she will find a way to immortalize herself in writing. It is no coincidence that in the closing chapter of the novel, Esther experiences in nature something similar to the dissolution of writer's block: "I could hear a musical trickle and drip as the sun thawed icicles and snow crusts." And the mention of "a pure, blank sheet" is rather blunt in its evocation of literary birth.

In the end, Esther's writing, no longer a form of escape from reality as it was when she wrote "villanelles and sonnets" in Mr. Manzi's chemistry class, becomes a way of confronting reality. Her belief, expressed early in the novel, in the power of words to endure beyond other mortal endeavors, triumphs: "People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep."

Esther's solution to the problem of death remains strictly verbal. Plath provides us with certain valuable indications that, though her narrator overcomes her fear of sexuality, marries and has children, her answer to death and loss of self does not lie in progeny. One reason for this, as expressed by Lameyer, is that "birth was inextricably bound up in [Plath's] mind with death." Throughout the text, Esther makes us aware that immortalizing herself through genesis, by creating a type of genetic continuum, is not an option: "Children made me sick." Or her bitter cynicism when Buddy Willard says that "after [Esther] [has] children ... [she] [won't] want to write poems any more." Or, after recounting the story of the nun and the Jew under the fig tree—an obvious symbol of sexuality—Esther's "literary" (and "anti-progeny") impulse to "crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big fig tree" (italics mine). Here again, we find the narrator's desire to contain her individuality in writing, as opposed to seeking refuge in childbearing as a means of continuum.

The final irony in THE BELL JAR, and in our discussion of the novel, is the novel itself: our taking time and energy to examine Plath's attempt to eternalize herself in Esther Greenwood is testimony that she has done so. As long as there is a reader, the author's identity can never be lost; THE BELL JAR becomes Plath's monument to withstand time. Her "I am, I am, I am," an allusion to Samuel Coleridge's concept of the "infinite I am" (itself an allusion to biblical divinity and an assertion that words create the monument), can never fade. To but slightly rephrase Shakespeare's Sonnet #65: THE BELL JAR is Plath's way of saying, "in black ink my [life] may still shine bright."

[Sol Luckman is author of the internationally acclaimed nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the Beginner's Luke Series of novels. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Currently, the author is giving away FREE copies of Beginner's Luke. To take advantage of this special offer, click here.]