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 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
On the train back to Connecticut, Esther wears a blouse and skirt of Betsy’s. She has not washed Marco’s blood off of her face, thinking that the streaks look “touching, and rather spectacular” (113). Her mother is waiting at the station, and as they get into the car, she tells Esther that Esther was rejected from the writing course. Although Esther expected this result, she is upset. Throughout her miserable time in New York, the prospect of the writing course had kept her going. Now she will have to spend her summer in the suburbs.
Back in her small clapboard house, a bored Esther observes the neighbors from her window. She observes a heavily pregnant woman named Dodo Conway smiling as she pushes a baby carriage down the street with several children in tow. Dodo Conway is a married Catholic whose growing family both fascinates and repulses Esther.
Esther’s old friend Jody calls her from Cambridge to ask when Esther will be moving in with her. Esther tells her she will not be coming to Cambridge after all, having been rejected from the writing course. Jody tells her to come anyway and take a different course, but Esther hears a “hollow voice” insisting that Jody let another girl take her place. As soon as she hangs up she regrets her decision, but she can’t bring herself to call Jody back. Instead she calls the Cambridge summer school and withdraws her admission.
In the dining room Esther finds a letter from Buddy. He’s written that he is falling in love with a nurse at the sanitorium, but if she joins him and his mother at a cabin in the Adirondacks, she might gain back his love. On the back of the same paper, Esther writes that she is engaged to a simultaneous interpreter and never wants to see Buddy again. She decides to spend the summer writing a book. Her heroine will be a girl named Elaine, based on Esther. She writes out the first paragraph but quickly realizes that she doesn’t have enough life experiences to write a novel.
In bed that night, Esther cycles through a series of potential future plans until she grows confused and overwhelmed. She listens to her mother snoring and imagines strangling her into silence. Esther cannot sleep all night. In the morning she tries to read Finnegan’s Wake but cannot make sense of the words. She decides to give up on her thesis and considers withdrawing from her university and attending the city college where her mother teaches but decides against it. None of the future plans she imagines sound appealing to her. Esther calls her doctor Teresa and requests more sleeping pills. Teresa refers her to a psychiatrist.
Chapter 11 Summary
Esther sits in the office of the psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon. She hasn’t slept in a week and hasn’t washed her clothes or hair in three weeks. Everything exhausts her and without sleep she sees the days of the year ahead as a blinding, unbroken stretch of time.
Dr. Gordon is an intensely handsome man, and Esther hates him instantly. Dr. Gordon asks Esther to tell him what she thinks is wrong. She tells him she can’t sleep or eat but does not tell him that she has recently lost the ability to write neatly by hand. Esther expects him to diagnose her on the spot, but after she finishes talking he just asks her what college she attends and tells her he once worked as a doctor at her college’s WAC station.
In the Boston Common, Esther meets a young sailor who flirts with her. She tells him she is Elly Higginbottom, an orphan from Chicago. She thinks she sees Mrs. Willard passing by and tells the sailor to take his hands off her but realizes she’s wrong. The sailor asks what’s wrong and Esther begins to cry, briefly convincing herself that the strange woman was responsible for everything that has gone wrong in her life.
Esther visits Dr. Gordon for a second time. She feels the same as she did the previous week and hasn’t slept for fourteen nights now. She shows him the scraps of a letter she tried to write to Doreen before ripping it up, and Dr. Gordon asks to speak to her mother. Esther leaves his office and waits in the parking lot. When her mother returns she is crying because Dr. Gordon recommended that Esther go to his private hospital in Walton for electroshock therapy.
Esther reads about an attempted suicide in the paper and contemplates how high of a jump you’d have to make to ensure your death. She thinks of Japanese samurais committing seppuku, or stabbing one’s stomach with a sword. She thinks that it’s very brave to die that way. Her treatment at Walton is scheduled for the next morning. She wants to run away to Chicago, but the bank is already closed so she can’t get bus fare.
Chapter 12 Summary
At Dr. Gordon’s hospital, Esther watches patients sitting stock-still in the living room and thinks that they look like mannequins. Dr. Gordon leads her downstairs for her treatment. On the way they pass a woman who is trying to jump out of a barred window, held back by a “walleyed” nurse. In the treatment room, Esther lies down on a bed and Dr. Gordon fits metal plates onto either side of head and gives her a wire to bite down on. The electricity that goes through Esther’s body feels “like the end of the world” (143). She wonders what awful thing she’s done to deserve such a punishment. After the treatment, Dr. Gordon asks Esther how she feels. She feels awful but responds that she is alright. He again asks her about her college and repeats his comment about the WAC station.
Back at home, Esther tells her mother that she’s done with Dr. Gordon. Esther’s mother is relieved—she knew Esther wasn’t like the other mental patients and would “decide to be all right again” (146). Esther hasn’t slept in twenty-one nights.
Later, Esther contemplates suicide again in the local park. She had tried to kill herself that morning by slitting her wrists but couldn’t bring herself to do it and made a small cut in her leg instead. Esther thinks of all of the mean and critical things that have ever been said to her. After a while she decides to board a bus to the Deer Island Prison. She flirts with a young prison guard and imagines that she might be happy if she’d met him earlier, married him, and started a family. She goes to the beach and considers drowning herself, but the shock of the cold water on her feet makes her draw back instinctively and she gives up on the idea.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Esther’s erratic behavior escalates further in this section of the novel, and she grows disconnected from reality. She boards a train with blood smeared on her face, but sincerely cannot understand why people are looking at her strangely. After coming home, she doesn’t shower or change out of her clothes for weeks and is unable to function normally. Although still portrayed through her calm inner voice, Esther’s actions are undeniably concerning and indicative of her deteriorating mental health. As her depression worsens, she continues to fall short of her own high-set standards, leading her further into a mental spiral. Her body acts beyond her control, as if possessed. She stops all personal upkeep, can’t read or sleep, and continues to contemplate suicide with a disturbing casualty. The symptoms the reader has been privy to since the start of the novel finally become noticeable to the outside world and Esther is referred to a psychiatrist.
Esther’s return home brings her complicated relationship with her mother to the forefront. In earlier chapters, Esther has wished that Mrs. Greenwood were a different type of woman, more like Jay Cee. The real Mrs. Greenwood is a woman who has been left traumatized and angry by her husband’s death. Mrs. Greenwood believes in traditional gender roles, but Mr. Greenwood failed to fulfill his part of the equation when he died without leaving behind an inheritance for his family.
Although she loves Esther, Mrs. Greenwood can’t understand her daughter’s suffering. Her comment after Esther tells her she is done with Dr. Gordon—“I knew you’d decide to be alright again”—shows that she does not appreciate the complexity of psychiatric disorders (146). She sees Esther’s depression as a character flaw, not an illness which needs treatment.
Dr. Gordon is supposed to help diagnose and treat Esther, but he barely listens to her description of her symptoms. He is quick to refer her for electroshock treatment, a botched procedure which is tortuous for Esther. Electricity has already been shown to be a punishment through the electrocution of the Rosenbergs. Now Esther is indirectly punished for her failure to fulfill the duties of a normal, happy young woman.
Dr. Gordon’s dismissive comment about the pretty girls at Esther’s college highlights the danger of casual sexism; Dr. Gordon is not equipped to diagnose and treat his female patients. Medicine, both physical and psychiatric, has a long history of doctors dismissing female psychiatric patients as “hysterical” and subjecting them to unnecessary or cruel treatments. Dr. Gordon’s character shows a dark side of the mental healthcare system in the 1950s.
Having alienated herself from her few friends and Buddy, Esther has no one left in her corner. Both her mother and her doctor, two people who are supposed to protect and care for her, fail her. Suicide, which in the past has been a fleeting impulse, begins to feel like her only way out. Still, Esther’s body fights her mind. She is unable to slit her wrists and when she tries to drown herself, her “flesh wince[s], in cowardice, from such a death” (153). Her frustrated search for the “perfect” method of suicide and her continual failure to carry out her attempts betray her desire to live. In her normal state of mind, Esther enjoys inhabiting her body—she likes the idea of rich food, travel, sex, and other physical pleasures. She doesn’t want to die because she hates life, she just wants to be free of her suffocating disorder. Unfortunately, the only way out she can see is to kill the body that houses her disturbed mind.
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