We see Esther at the end of the novel going into the board meeting at the mental hospital. She is scared, and she feels unsure of herself. This is not the right place for her to be. "I stepped into the room," she says. The point is this: it is "the room." Plath never found her room, as in the phrase "a room of one's own" (from Virginia Woolf's long essay). Esther has progressed from her own bell jar to the board room, but it is "a place," a room in an institution that is too insensitive, too unimaginative, too rule-bound, and too traditional for Esther to feel relaxed. We know now why she retreated to the bell jar. There, she was herself at least. There, she had authenticity. And there, she found a kind of comfort that the world's rooms never gave her.
In conclusion, Plath's narcissism was two-edged. She created and enjoyed it, but she never found a workroom which she was comfortable in, and enjoyed, and the world never showed her a better place to be. Plath herself, it should be noted, never pressured the world's institutions to serve her and to help her. We regret that that never happened and that Sylvia Plath didn't find a "room" for herself where she could breathe freely and feel that Yes, this was her place, her role, her room.
