The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath (1963)
“A brilliant young woman suffocates under the bell jar of 1950s America — and Sylvia Plath wrote every word from the inside.”
Characters in The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath · 1963 · 7 characters analyzed
Cast: Esther Greenwood, Dr. Nolan, Buddy Willard, Joan Gilling, Mrs. Greenwood, Dr. Gordon, Doreen.
Character Analysis
A twenty-year-old scholarship student from Wellesley, Massachusetts — brilliant, sardonic, and fundamentally unable to perform the femininity her era requires without noticing the performance. Her intelligence is inseparable from her suffering: she sees too clearly to pretend. Her voice is the novel's greatest achievement — simultaneously comic and despairing, self-aware and self-destroying. She is not a symbol of madness; she is a specific person with a specific problem in a specific historical moment.
Formally educated, literarily precise, sardonic. Her intelligence is her most prominent feature and her greatest liability — she sees too clearly to perform cheerfully.