Just for the Hell of It

When Mr. Mitchell commented on the Dante-esque quality of Esther's experience in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar in class today, I was reminded of Stephens shifting perception of Hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Describing a visit from the minister of the Unitarian Church at the asylum, Esther says, "I told him I believed in a hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in a hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died." This line particularly struck me because it resonates with Stephen's disregard for following the Church and "disrespect" for Hell's existence and the consequences of sinning at an early point in the novel. As such, he accepts a sort of  "living death" as he believes himself to already be cursed to Hell after death. While it is clear that at this point -- unlike Esther -- he does believe in a Hell after death, it is partly this belief that contributes to his pain and "living Hell" on earth.

The essence of both Esther and Stephen's living Hell -- even if to different extents -- is their utter isolation and despair towards their ability to understand, connect, or even want to attempt connecting with others. For Esther it is symbolized through the image of a bell jar constantly suffocating and occasionally hovering over her, and with Stephen, his wandering in the streets half-hoping for Mercedes. Perhaps if they were able to perceive this isolation in a solipsistic sense, they would be in less anguish but they are unable to do so. It's not simply that they have resigned themselves into believing their own selves are all that they can understand to exist and embraced the amount of individual agency that comes with that; on the contrary, there remains lurking a constraining, un-articulated force hiding behind the smoke screen restricting and potentially desiring to harm them in their isolation. Because of it, Esther and Stephen cannot even know themselves. What force is it that dictates Esther's reality on earth, even while she believes herself to be able dictate what comes after? What force is it that makes Holden and Esther start to disappear even as they are aware they must have a pure self? And even after Stephen ultimately does believe he can understand his reality in its absolute beauty through isolation, there's still the old man with the red eyes representative of all he has feared that he must perpetually run away from. Like the hovering bell jar after Esther's shock treatment, Hell has not truly let Stephen go.

As Joyce writes early on in the novel, "The terror of sleep fascinated his mind...unseen sleepers filled him with strange dread as though they could harm him." These "unseen sleepers," this un-articulated force continues to haunt him closely even in his utter isolation. At the same time, the "unseen sleepers" and this intangible restrictive force is representative of his isolation. He cannot see the sleepers just as he cannot understand and connect with others. Similarly, Esther thinks, "I didn't see how Doctor Nolan could tell you went to sleep during a shock treatment, if she'd never had a shock treatment herself. How did she know the person didn't just look as if he was asleep, while all the time, inside, he was feeling the blue volts and the noise?" Here Esther/Plath emphasizes how one can never truly know another and their isolated experience and the "blue volts and the noise" that continue to constrain individual agency in one's isolated experience.

This realized suggestion that perhaps one is ultimately powerless in defining and understanding reality -- especially not even being able to trust one's own individual reality and consciousness -- is what interestingly makes Holden spontaneously toy with the idea of becoming a monk, Esther, a nun, and Stephen, accepting the offer to become a priest. In all three of these acts, there is already a defined, concrete reality and understanding that they can embrace, a sort of refutation of the haunting hellish force they cannot articulate. This "hell" is not a hell one can ever completely and permanently ascend from. We know however, that ultimately Stephen comes to believe he can define and understand reality in a very specific way and Holden accepts reality in its mutability and lack of definition.