Plath was alienated. The institutions that she describes in The Bell Jar leave Esther alienated. Plath's father and his academic career gave her the idea that her relationship to society was to be determined by her success in school. And Plath did that — she was academically successful — but it did not make her happy; eventually she abandoned her academic teaching career at Smith. Then there is the portrait of the parents' marriage and the kind of household that her mother was in charge of after the father's death. As a parallel, Esther cannot embrace this role for herself, as she so clearly points out when she is talking about Mrs. Willard. Consider also the emptiness of the Boston suburb; this is what depresses Esther so much before her first suicide attempt. In The Bell Jar, Plath paints a very bitter portrait of her schools — at least the negative side that made her feel out of place.
Later, we encounter Plath's conflicts with institutions — that is, Esther's conflicts with the mental hospitals. Plath did not find a role — not even here. Unlike Joan, Plath did not want to become a female psychiatrist. Perhaps she was happier in England, at Cambridge, and after she married Ted Hughes, but her poem "Daddy" makes us question how right marriage was for Plath.
We see, through her portrayal of Esther and from accounts of Plath's life, that she had a very difficult time finding comfort in traditional social roles, especially roles associated with traditional institutions. Supposedly, according to Plath's mother, there was to be a second novel that would tell the happy side of the same events of The Bell Jar. That novel, of course, was never written, and one reason why it was not written may have been because Plath was too alone in a world where only her poetry gave her relief.
