What The Bell Jar gives us, finally, is a rather compelling story of a young girl who has, for a lack of a better way to say it, "a mental problem," a quite moving and probably very accurate account of mental health treatment in the 1950s. Beyond that, Plath has failed us somewhat in not coming to terms with the underlying problems. The thinness of wisdom is regrettable. It is to be questioned again why Plath published the book under the name of Victoria Lucas. Did she finish it too quickly and could it have been made into a better book with more time? Would her next novel have been better? Would it have had more depth? Perhaps later criticism can at least help put the book in different perspectives. The writer Tillie Olsen, in Silences, has said that this book is the only important novel that we have about the portrait of a young woman as an artist. In that light, perhaps the book deserves more credit.
And indeed, as it is, The Bell Jar is a wonderful document. But it, like so many of its characters, needs more dimension. Like Esther's "figs," we have just the several selves of Esther/Sylvia — Elly and Elaine. But where is the ethical dimension, where the courageous existential level? Where, finally, is the real, gritty self-questioning?
