The Bell Jar 3

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath profiles Esther Greenwood’s sinking into an anxious and depressed state as she tries to make her way in the world as a young woman in the early 20th century. As we’ve seen through the first three-quarters of the book, we’ve discovered how dense and complex Esther’s story and Plath’s writing really is, so it was helpful for me, personally, to delve into intertextual codes in an attempt to explore the text on more thorough levels.

The hermeneutic code, as Silverman explains as a code that “inscribes the desire for closure and truth,” seemed like the best to tackle first for The Bell Jar (Silverman 257). Figuring out how we can apply the hermeneutic code to Plath’s novel will hopefully open up doors for other intertextual codes.

The hermeneutic code is all about breaking down a mystery into “morphemes,” which, in turn, creates a “hermeneutic sentence” (257). The Bell Jar in its entirety is a mystery, but I wanted to try to apply the hermeneutic code to Esther’s being depressed specifically. This choice is probably still a bit too generic, but there is still a lot of other stuff going on in the novel, particularly in the beginning.

I decided on this topic because many people treat Esther as if she has no reason to be depressed or as if it is a conscious choice she is making to act and feel the way she does. Backtracking a little bit, the thematization would be that Esther is kind of an odd and different girl (and everyone treats her as such). According to Silverman, the thematization “involves a quite complex operation, in which the semic code plays an important role” (258). We know that the semic code involves the repetition of things, semes, around a proper noun. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but could we argue that Plath does a lot of work to prove and repeat Esther’s differences? We see it in her struggle to fit in at her job, relate to her peers, and more.

This thematization opens up the proposal of the enigma: Esther is depressed and anxious, but why? To be honest, the thematization and proposal of the enigma, at least in this story, seem to overlap a bit. The formulation of the enigma appears when we learn about some of Esther’s symptoms, like how she “hadn’t slept for fourteen nights and how [she] couldn’t read or write or swallow very well” (Plath 135). Esther is suffering through some pretty serious symptoms, yet she is still being belittled and ignored by her own doctor and mother.

Doctor Gordon prescribes Esther shock therapy as the treatment for her issue (or, a request for an answer), and “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. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done” (143). This scene is pretty devastating – Esther is now blaming herself for something she can’t control, and she is suffering extreme pain. It’s no surprise that this shock therapy didn’t work, failing to solve the enigma, which is called jamming in the hermeneutic morpheme. We see a snare before her shock treatment when Esther considers running, and we see a snare after the treatment when we witness Esther’s suicidal thoughts and practice for her future suicide attempt. Silverman says, “The snare represents the most intricate of the hermeneutic morphemes, and the one richest in possible variations” (Silverman 260). Esther tries to literally evade the possible answer to her problem by running away from her treatment appointment. Afterward, she considers trying to evade her enigma literally by ending her life altogether.

At this point in the novel, we haven’t quite come across the suspended or partial answers or the disclosure of the enigma. We still have another quarter of the book to go, and I have a feeling Plath will keep us on our toes until the very last page.

 

Esther needs a friend like Ferris.