Boston

Boston is a city of thresholds in The Bell Jar: Esther Greenwood moves through its streets, garden, transit tunnels, and hospitals as she tries to understand where she can go and what kind of help she can trust. The city’s open spaces offer room to wander, but its institutions also contain her; in the later biographical narrative, Boston becomes the setting of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s financially precarious attempt to make a life devoted to writing.

Streets, Transit, and the Garden

After leaving Doctor Gordon’s office, Esther crosses Commonwealth Avenue toward her mother’s gray Chevrolet. Elms shade the yellow and red brick fronts, and a trolley threads its way toward Boston along a silver track. Her mother watches anxiously through the windshield and asks what the doctor said; Esther answers that he will see her the following week. The scene sets everyday movement against the uncertainty of treatment, with the appointment’s cost—twenty-five dollars an hour—another concrete measure of the burden borne by her family.

Elsewhere in the city, Boston Common is crowded with sailors. Esther notices them emerging from a recruiting house and sees blue-and-white “Join the Navy” posters on its billboards and walls. She adopts the name Elly Higginbottom when a sailor asks who she is and where she comes from, answering that she is from Chicago. The encounter lets her move briefly through the city under an assumed identity, while the recruiting signs give the Common a public, institutional presence quite different from the private distress that shadows her.

The Public Garden offers a slower route through Boston. Esther circles it over a bridge and beneath blue-green monuments, passing an American-flag flowerbed and a booth where visitors can have their picture taken for twenty-five cents. She reads the names of trees and singles out the Weeping Scholar Tree, which she imagines must come from Japan because, in her view, people there understand matters of the spirit. This attentive inventory of landmarks gives her a moment of purposeful wandering, though the garden also opens onto childhood recollection: she sees herself and her younger brother as small children climbing aboard a swanboat after a visit to the dentist. The remembered ride makes the adult city momentarily overlap with a childhood world of family rituals and reward.

Routes Toward Escape

Esther considers leaving Boston for Chicago, but escape immediately becomes a practical problem. She does not know the fare and is afraid to withdraw all her money at once, imagining that Doctor Gordon may have warned the bank clerk to stop her. Hitchhiking seems possible, yet she cannot work out which road leads west. Maps offer directions, but not the confidence to orient herself when she is actually in an unfamiliar place; cloudy skies, nighttime, and her difficulty reading the stars leave her feeling helpless.

She decides to walk to the bus terminal and ask about fares, planning to withdraw only the exact amount she needs. At the terminal, browsing colored tour leaflets and schedules, she realizes that the bank in her hometown will already be closed. She cannot get the money until the next day, while her appointment at Walton is set for ten o’clock. Boston thus becomes the starting point of an intended departure whose timing is constrained by ordinary logistics: the bus schedule, the bank’s hours, and the next morning’s appointment.

The city’s underground passages shape another journey, this time toward a family grave. In the artificially lit tunnels beneath Scollay Square, people shove past Esther as trains rumble through. She is trying to reach her father’s grave, and her tears begin to break through as she asks for help. A ticket-booth attendant consults a diagram and directs her to a train for Orient Heights, followed by a bus marked The Point that will take her to the prison gate. The directions turn grief into a route through the city’s transit system, whose tunnels are at once a means of passage and an image of confinement.

Hospitals, Treatment, and Trust

Boston’s medical world is represented through distinct experiences, not a single, consistent form of care. At Doctor Gordon’s house, Esther is taken to a bare room with barred windows and locks on doors, closets, and drawers. A nurse removes her watch and hairpins while Doctor Gordon brings in a machine on a wheeled table and the nurse applies grease to her temples. Metal plates are strapped to either side of Esther’s head, a wire is placed between her teeth, and the treatment comes as a violent jolt accompanied by blue flashes and a shrill sound. The severity of what she experiences is underscored by what follows: when she speaks to Doctor Nolan about the machine, the flashes, the jolting, and the noise, Doctor Nolan listens closely and says that it was a mistake and was not supposed to happen that way.

Later, Doctor Nolan accompanies Esther to another electrotherapy treatment through basement corridors linking the hospital buildings. Bright white lavatory tile, bare bulbs, pipes, stretchers, and wheelchairs make the passage feel both functional and forbidding. At a green door marked Electrotherapy, Esther hesitates; Doctor Nolan waits until she says she is ready to get it over with. Inside, Miss Huey helps Esther lie down, speaks soothingly, applies salve to her temples, and fits small electric buttons to either side of her head. Esther asks her to keep talking, bites down on the object placed on her tongue, and loses consciousness. The contrast with Doctor Gordon’s earlier treatment rests not simply on the machine but on the different handling around it: Esther is accompanied, spoken to, and allowed to pause before entering.

Boston in Plath’s Writing Life

The later biographical account returns to Boston with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s move to a small Beacon Hill apartment. They live on a shoestring for a year while trying to see what they can make of their writing. Plath gives up teaching, a profession for which she had been prepared since childhood, and sets aside an academic plan in the hope of having more time to write. This choice trades a comparatively established course for a less certain livelihood, and the uncertainty becomes sharper as her poetry is submitted and rejected.

The account preserves Plath’s frustration with the gap between writing and publication: she describes unpublished work as a pile that stinks, while acknowledging that she still wants to see her writing ritualized in print. Her experience in Boston therefore joins creative ambition to material pressure rather than presenting writing as a purely private pursuit. The city holds both the hope of time for work and the strain of trying to sustain that work without the security of teaching.

Boston’s narrative significance lies in these overlapping passages. Esther crosses its avenues and garden paths, plans a departure from its bus terminal, and moves through its underground routes toward a place of mourning; she also encounters medical institutions whose practices affect whether treatment can be trusted. In the later life narrative, the city marks a deliberate but financially precarious choice in favor of writing. Across both strands, Boston is not merely a backdrop: its streets, routes, hospitals, and domestic setting give physical form to movement between constraint and possibility.