Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-2024
Publication Title
Environmental Humanities
Abstract
Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar chronicles prize-winning college student Esther Greenwood’s descent into melancholy and attempted suicide. An emerging writer, Esther sees clearly the paths available to her under 1950s US patriarchy: homemaker or eccentric intellectual. Each on its own is untenable, and choosing one precludes the other. The bell jar metaphor conjures a sense of confinement and suffocation, but this essay offers a multispecies reading that shows why such an interpretation is too narrow. The essay looks carefully at the bell jar, its function within her story, and the context within which Plath encountered it, namely, as a student of botany at Smith College conducting lab exercises on photosynthesis using the South African silverleaf geranium (Pelargonium sidoides). Through archival research on Plath and botanical instruction at the college, the essay shows that the bell jars Plath used were not tools of oppression. Rather, they were tools for growing plants from faraway places that require higher atmospheric humidity: technologies for making dislocated life possible. Plath’s cross-species encounters with exotic plants at the conservatory were critical to her conception of life as a woman under patriarchy—like the silverleaf geranium, living in a world not built for her.
Keywords
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, botany, interspecies encounter, glasshouses
Volume
16
Issue
1
DOI
10.1215/22011919-10943097
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Rights
© 2024 Colin Hoag
Recommended Citation
Hoag, Colin, "The Bell Jars: Smith College, Pelargonium sidoides, and Sylvia Plath's Botanical Imagination" (2024). Anthropology: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/ant_facpubs/16
Comments
Archived as published.