The Bell Jar: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Esther regains consciousness in darkness, to the sound of somebody “moaning,” then crying “mother!” She feels a chisel periodically crack her eyelid to let light in “till the darkness clamped shut on it again.” Next she comes to consciousness on a bed, again in darkness, with “a cheery voice” telling her she’d “marry a nice blind man some day.” Next she comes to consciousness when a man “loosened something” above her eye, and she sees light again. He assures Esther she is not blind as she thinks she is.

Esther wakes up in a hospital bed and receives an unwelcome visit from her distraught mother and brother, home from his summer in Germany. She denies her mother’s claim that Esther called for her. Esther receives another unwelcome visit from George Bakewell, a distant one-time acquaintance who is now a doctor. Feeling George doesn’t care about her but only wants to get a glimpse of an insane person, Esther orders him out of her room.

Later, Esther ignores the nurse’s warning and persuades the nurse to give her a mirror. At first, Esther thinks what she’s handed isn’t a mirror “but a picture” depicting a shaved and bloated head bruised multiple brilliant colors and raw with mouth sores. Esther smiles at the pictured face and the face smiles back. Esther drops the mirror, breaking it and causing commotion among the nurses who scold her and say she’ll get her due “at you-know-where.” Later, Esther is transported by ambulance to the psychiatric ward of the city hospital (the town hospital has no psych ward). Her mother rides with her, saying that, had she not broken the mirror, she might not have been moved.

Later, Esther lies in bed in the city hospital psych ward. In the bed next to her lies an Italian woman who says she got admitted for sticking her tongue out at her mother-in-law. When she hears Esther tried to commit suicide, she stops conversing with Esther. A group of doctors enter to examine the patients and ask Esther how she feels. She says “lousy” and explains she can’t sleep or eat, but the doctors protest that she slept last night and she herself realizes she’s been “eating ravenously” ever since gaining consciousness.

The group of doctors move on to examine the Italian woman and Esther hears them call her by an Italian name with many L’s, “like Mrs. Tomolillo.” From this point on, Esther refers to the woman as Mrs. Tomolillo. Mrs. Tomolillo points and whispers to the doctors about Esther and asks the doctors to close the bed-curtain between them, which they do.

Another day, Esther sits on a bench outside the hospital with her mother. She sees Mrs. Tomolillo, sitting nearby, is imitating her mother but every time she tells her mother to turn around to see, Mrs. Tomolillo reverts to normal and Esther’s mother doesn’t believe her. Doctors keep coming up to Esther to introduce themselves. Esther thinks that some of them are too young to be doctors and suspects they are giving her false names. She thinks they are recording her conversation with her mother. She begs her mother to get her out of the hospital and, to Esther’s surprise, her mother agrees, on the condition that Esther promise to “be good” and start cooperating with hospital staff.

Later, in the psychiatric ward’s dining hall, Esther watches another patient, Mrs. Mole, get sent to her room for dumping a tureen of beans on her plate. Esther watches the new attendant gawk at them all, “his first crazy people.” He tries to clear away some of the patients’ plates before they’ve been served, and Esther tells him to wait. He mockingly calls her “Miss Mucky-Muck” under his breath. On her way out of the dining hall, Esther kicks him hard, saying “That’s what you get.”

Another day, as the nurse reads the thermometer she uses to take Esther’s temperature each day, Esther asks why they keep taking her temperature when it’s “normal.” Esther thinks, but doesn’t say, that she wishes something were wrong with her body: “I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head.” But she finds the idea too “wearisome” to articulate.

Seeing the nurse’s tray of thermometers propped on the covers over her feet, Esther slyly kicks the tray off and the thermometers shatter. The nurse is furious and doesn’t believe Esther’s claim that it was an accident. Esther manages to scoop up a ball of mercury before being hurried off and locked up in Mrs. Mole’s old room. The new attendant grins at her through the locked door. Esther ignores him and plays with her mercury. “If I dropped it, it would break into a million little replicas of itself,” she thinks, “and if I pushed them near each other, they would fuse, without a crack, into one whole again.” Esther doesn’t know what’s been done with Mrs. Mole.