51 pages • 1 hour read
Sylvia PlathThe Bell Jar
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1963A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Esther joins Jody and her boyfriend Mark at the beach. Mark has brought along a friend for Esther, a boy named Cal. Esther can’t tell if her old self would have liked Cal or not. Her mind feels completely empty. Esther and Cal discuss a play in which a mother contemplates killing her son, and Esther asks Cal how he would kill himself if he were going to do it. She is disappointed when he replies that he’d use a gun and thinks it’s typical of a man. Esther enters the water and swims toward a large rock, planning to exhaust herself and drown.
In the morning, she’d tried to hang herself, but there was nothing on the ceiling to hang from so instead she tried to strangle herself with the cord of her mother’s bathrobe. Each time she got the cord tight enough, her hands would slacken; she realized that her body had many ways of saving itself.
Esther realizes that if she swims to the rock her body will again betray her by climbing out of the water, so she tries to drown herself in the middle of the ocean. Again and again, she dives under but floats back up to the surface. Defeated, Esther swims back to shore.
Esther’s mother thinks that helping others is “the cure for thinking too much about yourself,” (161) so she signs Esther up to volunteer at a local hospital. Esther is in charge of delivering flowers on the maternity ward, but she mixes up the bouquets and flees the hospital when the patients get angry. She visits the local graveyard and cries at her father’s grave—it’s the first time she’s ever cried over his death.
Later that day Esther decides how she will commit suicide. She steals a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills and takes them into the cellar, where she crawls into a gap under the breezeway and covers the entrance with old logs. She swallows the entire bottle of pills and drops off into unconsciousness.
Chapter 14 Summary
Esther wakes into partial consciousness. A voice in her head cries out for her mother. She can’t see anything and convinces herself she’s gone blind until someone lifts the bandages covering her eyes. She’s lying in a hospital bed. Her mother and brother visit her, followed by a man named George Bakewell, an acquaintance from church who Esther doesn’t recognize. Bakewell says he is the hospital’s houseman, but Esther doesn’t believe him and tells him to get out of her room.
Esther demands to see a mirror. The attending nurse is reluctant, telling her she doesn’t look very attractive, but eventually gives in to the demand. Esther initially doesn’t understand the problem, because she’s not looking at a mirror but a picture. The person in the picture is grotesque-looking, with a shaved head and bruised face. Upon realizing that she’s looking at her reflection, Esther shatters the mirror. This angers the nurses and Esther is transferred to a special ward at a different hospital—an asylum.
At the new asylum, Esther is placed on a ward with a woman named Mrs. Tomolillo. A group of medical students come in to talk to her and she worries that the news of her hospitalization will get back to Buddy. Esther’s mother visits her, and Esther sees Mrs. Tomolillo imitating her mother’s movements. She is sure that her doctors are using ridiculous fake names like Dr. Syphilis and Dr. Pancreas to hide their real identities. Esther begs her mother to get her out of the hospital, and her mother responds that she’ll try if Esther cooperates with her doctors.
Esther continues to suspect the asylum staff of lying and deliberately messing with her head. One day she is served two kinds of beans at dinner and kicks the server in the leg, certain that he did it on purpose to throw her off. After she kicks a nurse’s thermometer to the ground, she is moved to a new room.
Chapter 15 Summary
Philomena Guinea hears about Esther’s situation. She reveals that she was once institutionalized herself and pays for Esther to be moved to a respected private hospital, even flying to Boston to help Esther make the move. Esther knows she should feel grateful but can’t muster any emotion. She knows that no matter where she is physically, she will be “sitting under the same glass bell jar” cut off from the outside world by her mental illness (185). As Philomena drives Esther to her new residence, Esther thinks about opening the car door and jumping off a bridge but misses her chance.
The private hospital is much nicer than Dr. Gordon’s. Esther’s has her own room and a new psychiatrist, a young woman named Dr. Nolan. After meeting a panel of doctors, she wanders into a lounge and meets a girl named Valerie, who shows no outward signs of mental illness. Dr. Nolan comes to Esther’s room to ask her about her previous treatments. Esther tells her about Dr. Gordon and the electroshock therapy and insists that if it’s performed again she’ll commit suicide. Dr. Nolan says the treatment was performed incorrectly at Dr. Gordon’s hospital and reassures Esther that she will warn her in advance if she is to receive it again.
Esther receives insulin injections three times a day. Valerie tells her that she will have a reaction, but Esther just gains weight. Valerie shows Esther scars on her temples and explains that she’s had a lobotomy and no longer feels angry. She has no desire to ever leave the asylum.
Esther is soon moved to a nicer room in the hospital, indicating a step forward in her recovery. The nurse helping her move tells her that an old friend of Esther’s is moving into the room next door. Esther, confused, goes into the neighboring room to find Joan Gilling sitting by the window.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
In Chapter 13, Esther’s beach outing highlights the extent to which her depression has estranged her from her peers and former self. She is able to recognize that the past version of Esther might have liked the studious Cal, but in her current state all she can think about is suicide and morbidity. Still, her body continues to fight for life. When she tries to drown herself, she continually pops to the surface while her heart beats out a stubborn mantra: “I am I am I am” (158). Despite Esther’s repeated attempts to not be, a part of her remains strong and vital, clinging to life. Esther’s halfhearted suicide attempts come to a head when she makes a serious attempt to take her own life by swallowing her mother’s sleeping pills. Her mental anguish finally outweighs her body’s desire to keep living, but she survives her attempt and is once again denied the rebirth she craves.
Esther’s inability to recognize herself in the mirror at the hospital shows that she is experiencing extreme depersonalization. Her sense of self has always been shaky, but with the worsening of her depression she feels like a stranger in her own body. Her behavior at the hospital also highlights the severity of her mental state, as she suspects her doctors of deception and thinks her fellow patient is named “Mrs. Tomolillo,” a name already associated with trauma from the live birth she witnessed at Yale. Esther is not only severely depressed but experiencing some kind of break with sanity and reality.
Esther witnesses the inhumane conditions and treatment endured by mental hospital patients. She meets Valerie, a friendly but blank woman who has undergone a lobotomy. Lobotomies are a generally abandoned form of psychosurgery which involve severing connections in the prefrontal cortex, often leaving patients with severe complications. Lobotomies were disproportionately performed on women. In the aftermath of her surgery Valerie has been left calm but unable to feel emotions beyond bland pleasantness. She has been transformed into a caricature of the ideal woman, docile and happy. Her story is a reminder of the very real and horrific effects of medical sexism and the stigmatization of mental illness.
Esther is rescued from these deplorable conditions by Philomena Guinea, who reveals that she too once spent time in an asylum. Although Plath doesn’t explore why Esther’s mentor was institutionalized, the revelation that the successful novelist shares this experience with Esther suggests that Esther is not the only ambitious, career-driven woman who struggles with her mental health. Since we spend the entirety of the novel in Esther’s head, following her spiraling hopelessness, this anecdote is an important reminder that all is not lost. If Philomena Guinea went on to recover and become a renowned novelist, then Esther’s dreams of success are still achievable.
Esther uses the novel’s titular symbol for the first time in Chapter 15, describing her depression as an airtight “bell jar” that confines her, closing her off from the world. No matter where she goes, the bell jar moves with her, trapping and suffocating her. It is a potent symbol of Esther’s harrowing isolation.
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By Sylvia Plath
