The Bell Jar Journal Entries

15 October 2007
Journal Entry #1
Page 3
"(I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.)"
Esther is apparently very depressed even though she is living the dream life in New York. The readers have not yet found out why Esther is depressed, it might be from a man, her past, or her family. She hides her feelings well though because no one seems to notice that she feels so insignificant. Comparing herself to the eye of a tornado is interesting because it is still and probably looks unreal while the outside world is full of commotion and moving fast.

15 October 2007
Journal Entry #2
Page 7
"Buddy Willard went to Yale, but now I thought of it, what was wrong with him was that he was stupid. Oh, he'd managed to get good marks all right, and to have an affair with some awful waitress on the Cape by the name of Gladys, but he didn't have one speck of intuition."
Esther must be thinking back to one of her old boyfriends, or maybe even fiancee who cheated on her. She probably developed a small hatred towards men because of Buddy's actions. She does not say exactly but the likely reason why she says that he has no intuition is because he was carless about his affair and figured that Esther would never find out.

16 October 2007
Journal Entry #3
Page 16
"I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground."
Esther always explains how she feels in an apathetic and depressing way, she seems as though she is never happy, and never will be. She feels insignificant because she isn't as pretty as the other girls, especially Doreen. She wants to be good and successful but it is hard for her because she doesn't think like the other girls do, she is too advanced.

16 October 2007
Journal Entry #4
Page 22
"I made a decision about Doreen that night. I decided I would watch her and listen to what she said, but deep down I would have nothing at all to do with her. Deep down, I would be loyal to Betsy and her innocent friends. It was Betsy I resembled at heart."
I'm not quite sure if this is the first time that Esther is being a hypocrit but it most likely won't be the last. It was Esther's idea in the first place to go to the bar with Lenny so she is not like Betsy and her friends because she likes to take chances. Although she is being hypocritical because she is not innocent, she has many deep and scary thoughts that Betsy and her friends have probably never felt.

17 October 2007
Journal Entry #5
Page 26
"It was a joke because I never intended to get married..."
Esther has decided this at a somewhat young age, she's also at a prime age to start looking for a husband since men and women got married younger back in the day. Being a woman and not getting married was something that just didn't happen unless you were a school teacher, which I can't figure out why the wouldn't, maybe too much work. But Esther doesn't even know what she's going to do with the rest of her life and her being unmarried is so unheard during those times she would be looked upon questionably. But the underlying question is why doesn't she intend to get married?

17 October 2007
Journal Entry #6
Page 29
"After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race."
Esther is giving up on herself and for aiming at being the best. She seems like she's had enough of trying and wants to see what it's like to just not care. Maybe it's easier, but either way if she drops out of the race as she describes it, then she'll probably never get back in.

18 October 2007
Journal Entry #7
Page 39
"My own mother wasn't much help. My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn't trust life insurance salesmen."
This is only the readers second implications of Esther's mother. This is important since a girl's mother plays a very important role in her life. Apparently she disregards her mother because she never amounted to anything more than a shorthand teacher. Esther must not care much about her mother if she never mentions her. Maybe her mother is the cause of Esther's depression and drive to study a lot and to work all the time.

18 October 2007
Journal Entry #8
Page 48
"'Caviar nothing! It was the crabmeat. They did tests on it and it was chock-full of ptomaine.'"
Esther getting poisoned was a total surprise, I mean who would think a sophisticated and trusting, until that day, company like Ladies Day would poison a bunch of young ladies. It's also ironic because Esther thought she was the most polite and all knowing about eating the caviar and stuffed pears and the result was throwing it all up.

19 October 2007
Journal Entry #9
Page 55
"It seemed to me Buddy Willard and I were like that Jewish man and that nun, although of course we weren't Jewish or Catholic but Unitarian. We had met together under our own imaginary fig tree, and what we had seen wasn't a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our seperate ways."
Out of all the religious beliefs in the world both Buddy and Esther are Unitarian, which to me seems very odd because in the fifties it was harder to espress your beliefs that didn't fit into the standards of society. Whos baby, that's what I'm wondering, was it Esther's and then the baby died, maybe that's the something awful that happened. It would be understandable if they went their seperate ways after the baby died, maybe it was too much for two young kids to deal with the death. Maybe that's why Esther is so depressed.

19 October 2007
Journal Entry #10
Page 59
"If you expect nothing from somebody you are never dissapointed."
I totally agree with this quote but I'm not entirely sure if anybody in general can take a stand and say that they do this all the time. Expecting something from someone is just a natural thing, sure as humans we develop into independent individuals but that dependency shines through alot during our childhood and on and off during our adult hoods. Maybe people do expect too much from others, it's really ignorant though, I mean everyone's expected something from someone and gotten dissapointed but what do they do right after that? They continually expect more and more and just keep getting let down. You would think that people would learn from their mistakes.

20 October 2007
Journal Entry #11
Page 69
"Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed."
What is their deal, they're hella awkward. I mean how are you just going to pull down your pants and act all casual about it and then tell the other person to take their clothes off and then them say "some other time" ? That's just weird. Esther must have been really uncomfortable since she'd never seen a guy naked but they're both so calm about it I don't undestand. Why is she feeling depressed? I can't seem to figure that out.

20 October 2007
Journal Entry #12
Page 71
"What I couldn't stand was Buddy's pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure, when all the time he'd been having an affair with that tarty waitress and must have felt like laughing in my face."
Okay she is officially crazy in my book, she's freaking out over an event, or number of events, that happened that summer which I can understand how she would be upset about it but to full on end it with him seems unreasonable. I understand that she feels stupid, used, and let on but that's not the way he meant it and she can't seem to realize it. Plus, an affair is when you cheat on your significant other with another person and from what the readers know he wasn't with anyone, especially Esther. So she is blowing this way out of proportion. She needs to understand that men do things that women would regularly not do, even if they are very rich and sophisticated and going to medical school. She needs to realize that people make mistakes and that life goes on, live in the present not the past.
21 October 2007
Journal Entry #13
Page 76
"The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way."
Esther has continous problems with men. She foes not want to get married which is a highly rare and anti society decision. She now does not want to serve any man in general and wants to be independant which is questionable now because she doesn't know what to do with her life and atleast a husband would support her. Maybe because of her father's death she doesn't want to get married, the dramatic events of her mother going through so much onve her father died etched her brain into believing that she can live without and a man and that they are useless.
21 October 2007
Journal Entry #14
Page 80
"I knew I might have a baby, but that thought hung far and dim in the distance and didn't trouble me at all."
This is another conflict with a man than Esther encounters, she is deciding on whether to have sex with Constantin because of Buddy Willard. She is doing it to somehow get back at Buddy for having sex with another woman, even though Esther and him weren't dating at the time. She's ignorant and childish because she is trying to get back at Buddy by having sex and taking the chance of having a baby even though she is not in love with Constantin and has no intentions of dating him anymore. If she did not care about Buddy at all then she would never try adn have sex with other men to get even.
22 October 2007
Journal Entry #15
Page 93
"'And you," I continued with a sudden force, "laughed and said I had the perfect setup of a true neurotic and that that question came from some questionaire you'd had in psychology class that week?'"
Esther really doesn't like Buddy too much but still continues to see him and has a small love for him. Buddy is right though, Esther is a neurotic but doesn't realize it. If Buddy is commenting on how Esther is saying things like a neurotic then it's hinting to the readers she's just going to get worse. She doesn't really like to be criticized and has sudden but mild angry outbursts.
22 October 2007
Journal Entry #16
Page 97
"A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery-air,mountains,trees,people. I thought, "'This is what it is to be happy.'"
Esther seems happy to be doing something that gives her a rush and that seems to be the only way to do it. She is not happy otherwise and it must be because she is risking her life and she might die on the way down to Buddy. She is very stubborn because she won't give up on going down the mountain even though she might die, and all of this is to show up Buddy. Only excitement can make her happy.
23 October 2007
Journal Entry #17
Page 107
"I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chockfull of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one."
Marcos is a woman-hater because he treats women badly yet leads them on. Atleast that's what I think Esther must think of woman-haters. Comparing them to gods is a good analogy because gods are in control of certain parts of the Earth but not all are nice and innocent. What was hella weird was that he grabbed Esther and left her a mark on her arm. What kind of man does that and what kind of woman takes that, especially from someone whom she just meant. I mean hello people shouldn't this be a warning sign?
23 October 2007
Journal Entry #18
Page 111
"Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wond, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York."
Wow talk about crazy, Esther has reached a critical point in her neurotic life because no sane person would throw their clothes out the window, especially expensive ones. Maybe it's Esther's near rape experience with that Peruvian man Marcos. It's something like that that can scare a woman into doing insane things. Maybe the fact that she is going home with her mother plays a part in her anxiety and depression.
24 October 2007
Journal Entry #19
Page 117
"Children made me sick."
Esther just goes against everything that a woman is supposed act like,think, and even her goals are out of the ordinary. Children were a very important subject back in the day and whatever job you did it either involved a kid or you had some of your own. To not like them at all is odd because most women back in the 50's had many children and even if they didn't have many, they atleast had one or two.
24 October 2007
Journal Entry #20
Page 119
"I snatched up a pencil and crossed out Buddy's message. Then I turned the letter paper over and on the opposite side wrote that I was engaged to a simultaneuos interpreter and never wanted to see Buddy again as I did not want to give my children a hypocrite for a father."
She is lying to Buddy because she is scared of telling him that she doesn't love him anymore and that he is not what she wants. She might also be hesitant from marrying Buddy because he is what society claims as perfect except for the TB and Esther doesn't want to intermix with the perfectness of society.
25 October 2007
Journal Entry #21
Page 127
"I hadn't washed my hair for three weeks, either.
I hadn't slept for seven nights."
Esther is really going downhill, the attempted rape by Marcos,the return to her hometown, and her letter from college that said she didn't make the course must have triggered an opening to a door deep in her mind that let her depression take over. She does not care about life anymore which is different from the Esther we were introduced to in the beginning. She is facing many obstacles in life and she seems to let them overpower her and does not try and overcome them.
25 October 2007
Journal Entry #22
Page 130
"But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew."

Esther can't write because she is very depressed and she compares her writing to a childs because it is all over the place. Maybe the fact that she hasn't slept for about seven nights has something to do with her not being able to write. She must be very weak if she can't even write a letter.

26 October 2007

Journal Entry #23

Page 141

"Then I saw that some of the people were indeed moving, but with such small, birdlike gestures I had not at first discerned them."

Those people are crazy and Esther is not as crazy as them. Who would ever go through with a shock treatment after seeing all those crazy people moving so slowly and calm and acting like 1 year olds. It's unbelievable that that was even legal then and that people paid for that. Esther went through with it because she thought it would help her get better, but it didn't. She must have thought that the shock would bring her back to a happy mood.

26 October 2007

Journal Entry #24

Page 147

"I had locked myself in the bathroom, and run a tub full of warm water, and taken out a Gillette blade."

She is now considering suicide and wants to run away from all her problems. But she is too weak to kill herself, she can't do it no matter what way she attempts to kill herself. She's probably doing it to scare herself, because she has nothing else to do and because she's a manic depressive. Or atleast some kind of depressive. It's hard to think why she just didn't do it, nothing is going right in her life at the time and that seems like her only option. Maybe deep down inside she knows there's a way out.

27 October 2007

Journal Entry #25

Page 158

"That morning I had tried to hang myself."

Esther attempts to commit suicide alot and never seems to go through with it. She must be scared to kill herself. Maybe the fact that she had no permanent father figure in her childhood scarred her ability to trust men,which is one of the main reasons she's in this state.

27 October 2007

Journal Entry #26

Page 169

"The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down."

Esther Has finally gone through with what she has been playing with for a long time; suicide. She wasn't fooling around Esther or else she would have put her body in a more apparent place so someone could find her once she past out. If she does survive then she will definately have some after effects and still have psychological problems.

28 October 2007

Journal Entry #27

Page 176

"I turned her my full face, with the bulging purple and green eye."I tried to kill mself.'"

Esther's looks must have changed dramatically since her face is in different shades of green and purples compared to her nice complextion before her suicide attempt. She is so blunt with telling people about how she tried to commit suicide. She seems so aware of sick she is, why doesn't she try and think twice about her sickness and try and fight it? Esther's probably doing it to partly get back at her mother.

28 October 2007

Journal Entry #28

Page 179

"'I've got to ger out of here," I told her meaningfuly."You get me out."

Esther sends her mother on a lot of guild trips and has a lot of hate built up against her. This might be because of her mother not caring about her husbands death and her choice to be a house wife. Her mother is also very gullible and expects Esther to snap out of her depression and Esther uses this trust as a technique.

29 October 2007

Journal Entry #29

Page 185

"I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

This is the first reference towards the bell jar that Esther mentions. She feels like she is being suffocated and trapped in a glass display case that is sut off from the outside world. When she is trapped in the bell jar she cannot get out and can't feel anything about anyone. Her being trapped represents her sanity, when the bell jar is not trapping her she is okay, not sick.

29 October 2007

Journal Entry #30

Page 194

"'Joan?" I said tentatively, then "Joan!" In confusion and disbelief.

Joan beamed, revealing her large, gleaming, unmistakable teeth.

"It's really me. I thought you'd be surprised.'"

I bet Esther is questioning intensively about why Joan was at the asylum, she probably doesn't believe that Joan needs help. It's quite a coincedence that Joan had arrived at the asylum around the same time that Esther is. Atleast Esther has someone she vaguely knows to keep her company, they'll probably become friends.

30 October 2007

Journal Entry #31

Page 202

"I thought if they left me alone I might have some peace."

Esther has become quite secluded and must be self consience of her weight and other outer characteristics. This is quite a change from her skinny figure that she was proud of while she was still in New York. She must want peace particularily from her mother who is one part of her breakdown.

30 October 2007

Journal Entry #32

Page 203

"'I hate her," I said, and waited for the blow to fall.

But Doctor Nolan only smile at me as if something had pleased her very, very much, and said, "I suppose you do.'"

Esther has finally admitted the hate she has for her mother. Doctor Nolan must be happy aout this because it shows progress in Esther's recovery. Maybe Esther wants her mother to not bother her about Esther being sick. Esther must like the fact that her being sick burts her mother and must love the fact that she blames herself for everything.

31 October 2007

Journal Entry #33

Page 204

"After the nurse left, I tried to puzzle out this new move on Doctor Nolan's part. What was she trying to prove? I dan't changed. Nothing changed. And Belsize was the best house of all. From Belsize people went back to work and back to school and back to their homes."

Esther is improving but doesn't relize it because she is scares and can't anticipate her improvement. I think she's scared to go back to the real world, which put her in the hospital in the first place. When Esther talks about the people going back to the outside world she is realizing that she is getting closer and closer to her own release back to work, school, and home.

31 October 2007

Journal Entry #34

Page 211

"It wasn't the chock treatment that struck me, so much as the bare-faced treachery of Doctor Nolan. I liked Doctor Nolan, I loved her, I had given her my trust on a platter and told her everything, and she had promised, faithfully, to warn me ahead of time if ever I had to have another shock treatment."

Esther feels betrade by Doctor Nolan who failed in telling her ahead of time that Esther had to have shock treatment. Esther's previous shock treatments has scarred her emotionally and probably doesn't want to go through that especially since she has been lied to. Esther has put a lot of trust upon Doctor Nolan and not it seems as though the only person she trusts has betrayed her.

1 November 2007

Journal Entry #35

Page 215

"All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt suprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circultaing air."

It's crazy how one shock treatment could have released Esther from her captivity in the bell jar. I don't believe that Esther is fully cured though, she still has a long way to go because she still has all those emotions inside of her. The bell jar is suspended above Esther and most likely always be above her, one wrong situation and it could come back down on her.

1 November 2007

Journal Entry #36

Page 223

"'I was my own woman.

The next step was to find the prper sort of man."

Esther is still fighting her relationship with men. From the looks of it she's going to go out and find a random guy to do things with. I think she got birth control or something from the doctor because she seems quite suspicious about what's in the paper bag. Plus she says that she's her own woman which means she's free to do what she wants and her not having protection limits her freedom.

2 November 2007

Journal Entry #37

Page 226

"It was only after seeing Irwin's study that I decided to seduce him."

Here is an example of Esther's struggle with men and her virginity that she has kept for so long. Esther had wanted experience for her stories and she has found her oppurtunity to lose it and gain knowledge of the world. She is stupid though because why would she wnat to have a one night stand with a man who might have STD's or who could get her pregnant.

2 November 2007

Journal Entry #38

Page 235

"'I though you should know," Doctor Quinn said, "Joan has been found."

Doctor Quinn's use of the passive slowed my blood.

"Where?"

"In the woods, by the frozen ponds...."

I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

"One of the orderlies found her," Doctor Quinn convinced, "Just now coming to work...."

"She's not...."

"Dead" said Doctor Quinn. "I'm afraid she's hanged herself."

Esther must feel horrible about Joan commiting suicide. Esther have hurt Joan by telling her that she didn't like her to the point where she took her life. She must feel that it' all her fault and will probably extend her stay at the asylum. Esther must feel that apart of her has gone becasue she always said that Joan was like apart of her and that they were opposites but the same.

3 November 2007

Journal Entry #39

Page 237

"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

A bad dream.

I remembered everything."

She compares herself to a dead baby because she is naive about the world which is apparently not a bad dream like Esther's mother considers it. Esther considers her breakdown reality and blames the world itself for everything that is happening to her. She remembers everything that has affected her life and it's not comparable to a bad dream because it's real.

3 November 2007

Journal Entry #40

Page 244

"The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magicial thread, I stepped into the room."

Esther still seems sick, considering she just lost Joan, who to Esther seemed like another part of her. Esther's plan all along was to get out of the hospital and out into the world, atleast in the beginning. She has definately recovered alot since her arrival at the hospitals but seems as though she'll always be sick.