Now having read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, I am firmly convinced Esther Greenwood is bisexual and half in love with Doreen.
Sorry I don’t know how to add read more on mobile yet lol ;)
So the case:
Esther loves her personality (and fears it), loves how she smells, looks, and relishes compliments and attention from her. She also is clearly jealous and upset when Doreen gets with a man, in my view. But she just couldn’t realize it, not without despair and loathing for herself and Doreen. At least not so far as we see in the story. I honestly have no idea if Plath intended Esther to be attracted to Doreen in subtext. But she is.
This is about analyzing and reflecting on the story itself, the good and the bad, and it is also an indulgent daydream of “what if” Esther did realize. What if Doreen returned her affection and attraction? What if their relationship, however fractured or flawed, developed? Stayed?
What if Esther had been able to write that letter and posted it to West Virginia… What if they had lived together there… What if she began to write, secluded with Doreen, and by degrees relaxed and learned love?
One thing I would like to recognize upfront is the racism displayed by Esther in The Bell Jar. These are period typical but inexcusable attitudes.
While it is a first person narration and not necessarily reflective of the author’s views, I would not say it was handled well. I have wondered how self aware Sylvia Plath was in writing her that way. She is clearly meant as a sympathetic but very flawed character, mired in a horrible culture and not exactly coping with it let alone challenging it. But are the racist themes introduced completed with care or left to sit unexplored? It’s an open question.
Without question, to a person of color the Esther we meet in the books would be unpleasant to know. Missed that on your reads so far? Try another, looking when and how race comes up. Esther is actually very blatantly racist. I will post quotes and discuss it later but suffice it to say she compares her looks to a Chinese woman, conflating that with being ugly, and she disrespects a Black man who is working at the asylum she is in. This is a bad time for her, when she is also very angry and lashing out in general, but it’s pretty clear the tenor of her mean spirit toward this man is racialized and anti-Black. She does not use slurs however. The racial context is present and to me unmistakable but not direct.
The reason I don’t read Doreen as potentially noticeably mixed race herself, based on her description, is that the Esther as characterized in the novel would comment on it, at least in her internal monologue, unfavorably. Still leaves room for a white-passing-to-Esther mixed race Doreen! And of course anything can happen in a full rewrite.
She is deep in the shit with (internalized?) homophobia and internalized misogyny as well. You may want to read for that too — you hopefully have already read it with a fine toothed comb for sexism if you read it in school, but most teaching materials I’ve seen for it oddly miss most of it and do only a little better discussing mental health. They really should include discussing racial dynamics too, but besides women of color speaking up online, I haven’t seen that so far anywhere. I plan to keep looking. Maybe search academic journals or similar where that analysis hopefully exists.
Beyond any critical reading, I was moved by Esther’s story and by the relationship with Doreen that almost was. I tried to let it go but it keeps coming back to my mind, along with an interest in the submerged history of actual lesbian and bisexual women of the time period The Bell Jar is set in. And of the women of any sexuality tied up in neurotic knots by the double-binding sexism of that fast, and unevenly changing time. Career or wife, life is still shit. Try to do both, get double the shit. Sexual women are sinful, sexless women are frigid, and women with woman lovers like Joan…it doesn’t end well. Among the many experiences left untold by The Bell Jar is that of a woman like Joan who made it, who survived and thrived not because she was better but because she had different chances.
Here and Here are some different versions of the whole book online. It’s not copyrighted.
Here is a beautiful stimboard made for my request on the subject of Esther x Doreen.
Here and Here and Here and Here are blogs celebrating all women and same sex love among women. Please share more with me.
I am also putting 30 of my tags on this post so browse away. xx
I thought it was a lovely story, especially the part about the fig tree in winter under the snow and then the fig tree in spring with all the green fruit. I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree.
What’s also weird about this is, though there’s a lot to explore about why or authorial intent for how we read the character or whatever, Esther in The Bell Jar is just straight up racist. It starts very obviously and on the nose right in the first chapter. Arguably, while very believable for a character with her background, it doesn’t really get explored in the work well in the way mental health, sexism and to a lesser degree homophobia is. It just happens, as background. So for someone trying to put up a virtue signal post to contrast with hatred for an author held up as racist on relatively flimsy or sometimes batshit non-evidence… it’s… an odd choice.
