Is Joan Esther's mirror?

 After reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, I struggled to find Joan's place in the book. What role does she play in Esther's life? Since her first appearance in chapter 5, Esther has described her with searing adjectives such as "tombstone teeth" and "pebble-colored eyes." She obviously has quite the disdain for her. However, also since chapter 5, Joan appears to have an oddly similar life as Esther. They both date Buddy and they end up in the same mental hospital; however, Joan seems to have a very different experience--according to Esther. For example, Joan likes Buddy's mom while Esther practically hated her. Joan has many friends at the mental hospital while Esther does not. 

Something else I noticed, though, was this quote in chapter 18: "Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose." This last part of the quote sums up how Esther and Joan experience similar things but experience them in different ways. The first part, however, has got me wondering. "Sometimes I wonder if I had made Joan up." I mean Esther isn't the happiest person, maybe she is taking out her self-loathing on Joan. I think she also could just hate how similar they are. On the other hand, did she actually make Joan up? Could this horse-sized, breathy-voiced girl really be Esther's view of herself? Joan seems mostly happy on the outside--she has good relations with other people and even gets out of the mental hospital a lot earlier than Esther (which makes her super jealous). But she also ends up committing suicide before Esther gets the chance to. I think Esther could be living out versions of her future through Joan. No matter if Joan is a real person, I think Esther could be using her to project her true emotions toward herself onto Joan which changes our perspective on Joan entirely. I think, in that way, Joan could be made up in Esther's head. I'm not sure what level of "real" Joan is in this story; however, I don't think it really matters. I think Esther's depiction of her is what's most important because it gives us a real insight into what's happening in her head. Even though it doesn't matter to this story, I wonder what Joan was like without Esther's perspective--if she was real that is. 

Comments

  1. MitchellMarch 26, 2021 at 9:16 AM

    There's also an additional "meta" level to these questions: the "I" in the passage you cite is both the fictional Esther Greenwood referring to her experience in the mental ward, wondering if at the time she was "making up" aspects of Joan's character and its uncanny echoes of her own experience. But as the author/narrator of a book (a *novel*, framed as fiction), when a narrator speculates about what they may or may not have "made up," we get into a different kind of territory: is it possible that Joan is "real" as an important element of the fiction, a "foil" for Esther's character, but is not reflective of an actual person Sylvia Plath has known? Is she (possibly) a literary device? Or is Esther/Plath maybe using the "raw materials" of an actual person to create a convenient foil/ironic mirror for Esther? It makes for good novel-writing, but life doesn't usually provide us with such neat literary devices like this.

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