Christian Science Monitor

The Christian Science Monitor is a newspaper whose place in The Bell Jar is defined by two contrasting roles: it is the restrained daily paper delivered to Esther Greenwood’s childhood home, and it is an early publisher of Sylvia Plath’s work. The contrast between what the paper reports and what Esther can bear to read makes it a small but revealing measure of how media shape visibility, attention, and literary beginnings.

Presence in Esther’s Home

At home, the Christian Science Monitor arrives on the doorstep at five o’clock every day except Sunday. Esther recalls it as the paper she saw growing up, one that treated suicides, sex crimes, and airplane crashes as though they did not happen. Its editorial restraint becomes especially significant during her crisis: she finds herself able to read short paragraphs in sensational local papers, while the familiar paper from home offers none of the subjects that hold her attention.

Contrast with Sensational News

Esther’s account sets the Monitor against papers filled with reports of murders, suicides, assaults, and robberies. She reads those brief items because they are short enough not to overwhelm her concentration, and their frank attention to subjects excluded from the home newspaper makes them more immediately readable to her. The contrast is not simply between respectable and sensational journalism; it shows a divide between the reassuring omissions of the paper associated with home and the disturbing material Esther seeks out in the midst of her mental distress.

Publication of Plath’s Early Work

The newspaper also figures in Sylvia Plath’s early writing history. In August 1950, it accepted and published her poem “Bitter Strawberries,” a sardonic comment on war. That publication came in the same month as the appearance of her first short story in Seventeen, after she had submitted forty-five pieces to the magazine. The Monitor therefore appears not only as part of the novel’s domestic media environment but as one of the outlets through which Plath’s writing first reached readers.

Narrative and Literary Significance

These references give the newspaper a deliberately double position. In Esther’s memory, it stands for a form of public reporting that leaves certain kinds of violence and crisis out of view; in Plath’s biography, it is a venue that made room for a young writer’s work. The juxtaposition connects the novel’s concern with what can and cannot be openly acknowledged to the practical history of publication, without making the newspaper itself a cause of Esther’s condition.