The Bell Jar

Esther Greenwood arrives in New York on a guest editorship at Ladies' Day magazine, introduces herself and her situation, and meditates on the Rosenberg executions.

Esther watches Doreen navigate New York with effortless seduction, goes to a party with a disc jockey named Lenny Shepherd, and begins retreating from the magazine world's cheerful surface.

A Ladies' Day banquet ends in mass food poisoning. Esther reflects on her relationship with Buddy Willard and introduces the fig tree metaphor that defines her paralysis.

Esther accompanies a UN interpreter named Constantin to a simultaneous interpretation session, considers sleeping with him, and flashes back to learning that Buddy Willard had a summer affair.

Esther accompanies a man named Marco to a country club dance. He attempts to rape her. She smears his blood on her cheeks like war paint and throws all her New York clothes off the hotel roof.

Esther returns to the suburbs, recalls Buddy Willard's marriage proposal during a ski trip, and discovers she has been rejected from the writing course she planned to attend.

Esther cannot sleep, cannot write, cannot read. She makes increasingly futile attempts to outrun her breakdown — learning shorthand, trying to write a novel — as three weeks of insomnia accumulate.

Esther's mother takes her to a psychiatrist named Dr. Gordon. He administers electro-convulsive therapy incorrectly. The experience is traumatic and confirms Esther's growing conviction that institutions want to hurt her.

After stockpiling sleeping pills and making several tentative attempts, Esther swallows the pills in her mother's cellar. She is discovered and survives.

Esther wakes in a city hospital and is moved through a public psychiatric ward. She encounters the medical establishment's bureaucratic indifference and begins her first real conversations about what happened.

Esther is transferred to Belsize, a private psychiatric facility. She meets Dr. Nolan — a woman psychiatrist who is the first person to treat her as a rational adult — and slowly begins to re-engage with the world.

Dr. Nolan arranges a second course of ECT. This time properly administered and with Esther's informed consent, the experience is entirely different. Esther begins to improve.

Esther decides to lose her virginity to a math professor named Irwin. The encounter results in a dangerous hemorrhage. Joan drives her to the emergency room. The cost and comedy of female bodily experience are rendered without sentimentality.

Joan Gilling, who had been making apparent progress at Belsize, hangs herself. Esther attends the funeral and does not cry. The bell jar's arbitrary nature — who survives, who doesn't — is confronted directly.

Esther prepares to face the admissions board that will determine if she is ready to return to the world. The novel ends not with triumph but with the qualified, uncertain hope of someone who knows the bell jar can descend again.