The Last Chapter of The Bell Jar...Lots of questions, with few answers

"'We'll take up where we left off, Esther'

...

'We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.' A bad dream."

(Plath 237)

Ronald Reagan would be elected approximately 6 years after this speech.

Is it a bad dream? Everything? Can all 6 months of Esther's harrowing journey be as fleeting, as ethereal, as...intangible...as a dream? 

In the future of Esther's life, how will she see the events of The Bell Jar? What will it mean to her? How will it tangibly affect her?

What happens to the past?

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Is it starting where you left off?

    Esther speaks to this idea of "starting, after a six months' lapse, where I had so vehemently left off" (Plath 236), and we know that her mother definitely wants Esther to do that, forgetting about the past and continuing with your life. Pretend that the past six months never happened, and move on down the path which you were originally on. 

    Yet, we know that can never really happen, as much as some may want to believe. Life lessons don't get drawn from nowhere. Memories of the past are always there, as fleeting as they are. And most importantly, the world is not the same as it was 6 months ago. Those you know are not the same as they were 6 months ago. And you are not the same as you were 6 months ago.

What is different, then?

    What can we point at within Esther's new persona, and clearly show as an example of how she has changed in the past 6 months? Sometimes, these changes are opaque and inscrutable. Sometimes, they are obvious.

    A good place to start would be how different the nature of the last chapter of the book is from the first. Take for instance, Esther's interactions with Buddy. She no longer has the vehement veiled hostility, which she described him at the beginning, signaling some form of change in attitude. In some way, being 6 months removed from Buddy has dampened any emotions related to him. Hence, we have the detached, almost awkward interaction with Buddy. Even the false friendliness between Esther and Buddy is gone. Buddy is aware that he won't be marrying Esther, and much of the conversation between Esther is about how her stay in the asylum affects their relationship. Buddy even thinks her breakdown is partly his fault (as a symbol of patriarchy, it actually kind of is Buddy's fault).  

    The past 6 months have also served to further entrench already nascent developments in her core identity. For example, Esther leans in on her aversion to marriage and childbearing in many ways in the last parts of the novel. She takes birth control, and then haves a one-night stand with a man, who she breaks contact with in the last chapter. Esther is presumably still going to college, meaning that the problem of her post-college future is still up in the air. With the experience of having burnt out over the summer, her career is even more uncertain than before. 

    

Does Lifting the Bell Jar Only Put You Under a Larger Bell Jar?

    Yet, for all that has changed, so much more remains unresolved. The metaphorical Bell Jar that trapped Esther is not simply that bout of mental breakdown, but all that feels wrong in her life. The patriarchal society that Esther lives in stifles her, no matter if it coincides with mental breakdown or not. No matter the circumstances, the same core issues still plague Esther. Esther even realizes this, musing that the "girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college...sat under bell jars of a sort" (Plath 238). So, if the prerequisites for her breakdown, to an extent, still exist, is the novel's resolution a true new beginning, or merely a respite, like the eye of a hurricane? As Esther puts it, "How did I know that someday---at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--- the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" (Plath 241). 

What Will Esther Make of this Memory?

    

     In another few months or years, when Esther moves on to a new life, having emerged out of her 6-month debacle, what will the memory of those events in The Bell Jar mean to her? In what way do they become her landscape? 

    Plath makes this question deliberately open-ended, providing few concrete examples to work off of. It's not like we can see into the future past the end of the book and cite a time where she recalls the memory of, say, Doreen, and adjusts her behaviors to learn from this lessons. But we can at least understand the concept of how it could change her. In a bid to avoid the worst parts of her past, she could be a bit more cautious here, or a bit more decisive there. She knows slightly more about what to do, where to go, and what not to do, where not to go, if she ever found herself in a situation like the one she once faced. Feel the worst kind of déjà vu. 

    Yet, for all that can be said about how her experiences may come back in the real world, maybe the most important element of memory remains in the ethereal world of the mind, drifting in and out of focus, a stark reminder of days which were worse (or maybe even better), of days lost, and what could've been, had everything never happened.