Perceived Burdensomeness and Thwarted Belongingness: A Case Study of
Plath’s Bell Jar and Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides: A Review Study
Sepideh Jafari 1 and Vida Rahiminezhad2*
1
2
English Department, Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch, Karaj, Iran
Research Institute for Education, Organization for Educational Research and Planning, Iran, Iranian Association
for Sociology of Education
*Corresponding author: Rahiminezhad V.
Özet
İntihar belki davranışlardan en paradoksal olduğunu. Marangoz intihar davranışı ve intihar tanımı konusunda
belirsizlikler olduğunu belirtiyor. Bu makalede, Sylvia Plath'ın Çan Jar ve İntihar Marangoz interpersonalpsikolojik teorisi ile Jeffrey Eugenides 'Virgin Suicides analiz etmeyi amaçlamaktadır. İki kişilerarası devletlerburdensomeness ve bertaraf aidiyet yakınsama gelen intihar arzusu sonuçları. Metodolojisi nitel araştırma tabanlı
kütüphane-olduğunu. Yalnızlık, sosyal izolasyon ve bertaraf etkinlik heroines akut ağrı verdiren zihinsel
durumlardır.
Anahtar Sözcükler: İntihar Kişilerarası teorisi, intihar arzusu, bertaraf aidiyet, algılanan burdensomeness
Abstract
Suicide is perhaps the most paradoxical of behaviors. Joiner states that there are ambiguities regarding the definition
of suicidal behavior and suicide. This article aims to analyze Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar and Jeffrey Eugenides’ the
Virgin Suicides with Joiner’s interpersonal- psychological theory of Suicide. Suicidal desire results from the
convergence of two interpersonal states—burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. The methodology is librarybased qualitative research. Loneliness, social isolation, and thwarted effectiveness are the mental states that have
inflicted an acute pain on the heroines.
Key words: Interpersonal theory of suicide, suicidal desire, thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness
Introduction
The Interpersonal-Psychological Theory of Suicide states that a person will not die by suicide
unless he or she has both the desire to die and the acquired capability to do so. Desire to die,
arises from two specific psychological states: perceived burdensomeness (the view that one’s
existence burdens family, friends or society) and thwarted belongingness (alienation from
others), and the acquired capability for suicide involves a fearlessness of death and high
tolerance for self-inflicted pain learned through repeatedly experiencing painful and otherwise
provocative events (e.g., past suicide attempts, non-suicidal self-injury, combat exposure,
numerous physical fights, etc.) (Capron & Jesse, 2012). Painful and provocative events are an
occurrence that exposes an individual to pain and/or fear (e.g., physical abuse, tattoos,
intravenous drug use, nonsuicidal self-injury). The theory proposes that the habituation process
occurs via mechanisms outlined by Solomon's opponent process theory. Solomon argued that
with repeated exposure, the effects of previously noxious or provocative stimuli (e.g., fear of
death and the pain of inflicting self-injury) may recede. Meanwhile, with this repetition, the
opposite effect of the stimuli (e.g., a sense of relief rather than fear) also becomes strengthened
and amplified (Bender, Gordon & Joiner, 2011).
The desire for death by suicide results from the confluence of two interpersonal states: perceived
burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. Perceived burdensomeness refers to the potentially
dangerous misperception that the self is so incompetent that one’s existence is a burden on
friends, family members, and/or society. The feeling of being a burden on others may lead to the
potentially dangerous belief that one’s death is worth more than one’s life. Relatedly, feeling
alienated from friends, family, or other valued social circles, Thwarted belongingness also is a
risk factor for developing the desire for suicide. Although both states independently are
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associated with elevated risk for developing the desire for suicide, risk is greatest when both
states are experienced concurrently (Rebeiro & Joiner, 2009).
In order to emphasize the power of the theory I compare it with two of the famous theories: the
theory of Durkheim and Shneidman. Emile Durkheim is now taken for granted as one of the
founding fathers of sociology, his theory is the last major theoretical statement appeared in 1990,
and a century-old theory still has a lot of influence (Platt, 1995). In Durkheim’s theory, the
common denominator in all suicides is disturbed regulation of the individual by society. He was
concerned with two kinds of regulation: social integration and moral regulation, too much or too
little integration are both bad things, according to Durkheim. Low integration leads to an
increase in a type of suicide that Durkheim labeled egoistic. His idea was that we need
something that transcends us, and he felt that the only thing that is transcendent enough is human
society. When it breaks down, people feel purposeless and become desperate, and suicide rates
go up. Too much integration, according to Durkheim, is also associated with more suicide, but of
a different type, namely “altruistic” suicides. Excessive societal integration leads people to lose
themselves and to commit to a larger goal. Self-sacrifice is a defining aspect of this kind of
suicide. In Durkheim’s view, when individuals are so integrated into a social group that
individuality fades, they become willing to sacrifice themselves to the group’s interests.
Regarding moral regulation, “anomic” suicide is caused by sudden changes in the social position
of an individual, mainly as a result of economic upheavals. The idea is that any abrupt change in
the regulatory function of society or its institutions on people’s behavior is likely to increase
suicide rates. Because society loses its scale, people’s ambitions are unleashed but cannot all be
satisfied, leaving a lot of unhappy people. Durkheim contrasted anomic suicide to “fatalistic”
suicide, which occurs among those with overregulated, unrewarding lives, such as slaves. One of
Durkheim’s goals was to study social forces, often to the exclusion of other factors, of which he
was at times dismissive. He did not deny, however, that individual conditions like mental
disorders are relevant to suicide (Joiner, 2005).
Self-sacrifice or altruistic suicide bears some similarities to the concept of perceived
burdensomeness, which is emphasized in the interpersonal theory of suicide. Low integration
which leads to an increase in a type of suicide that Durkheim labeled egoistic is referred to as
low belongingness in the mentioned theory.
Edwin S. Shneidman is the founder of the American Association of Suicidology and former
Chief of the Center for the Study of Suicide Prevention at the National Institute of Mental
Health. Shneidman’s views on suicide can be described as centering on thwarted psychological
needs . Shneidman articulated a theory of suicide focused on individual factors, with psych
ache—psychological and emotional pain that reaches intolerable intensity –as the primary factor
causing suicide. David Lester in his article summarized Shneidman’s theory of suicide in the
following statements: The person focuses on his/her unbearable pain and how to escape from it,
The person has experienced adult trauma (such as poor health or rejection by the spouse),
Cessation ( death or eternal sleep) provides the solution for the person, permitting him/her to
resolve the unbearable state of disturbance and isolation, The person wishes for an end to all
conscious experience and tries to achieve this goal, The person is very disturbed, feeling
rejected, unsuccessful, and hopeless, The person is ambivalent, with contradictory feelings,
desires, and attitudes, The person is intoxicated or drugged by his/her intense emotions and
constricted logic and perception, The person wants to egress, that is, to leave the scene, to get
away, to be gone, not to be, The person shows patterns of behavior which diminish his/her life,
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shorten it, or reduce its scope, The person’s communications appear to have unconscious
psychodynamic implications (Lester, 1998).
Joiner argues that of all the people who experience psych ache, we might then ask, why do only a
minority die by suicide? This suggests that psych ache is necessary but not sufficient for suicide.
There must be an additional factor, The additional factor, according to Shneidman, is lethality
What constitutes lethality and how it develops are subjects that has been addressed in the theory.
Psych ache is viewed as a generalized form of perceived burdensomeness and failed
belongingness (Joiner, 2005).
“The Separative self in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar” is an article written by
Dian. S Bonds. In the article she believes that Plath's novel The Bell Jar dramatizes the collusion
between the notion of a separate and separative self (or bounded, Autonomous subject) and the
cultural forces that have oppressed women. The Pervasive imagery of dismemberment conveys
the alienation and self-alienation leading to Esther Greenwood's breakdown and suicide attempt;
the recovery which Plath constructs for her heroine merely reenacts the dismemberments
obsessively imaged in the first half of the novel. This "recovery" denies the rationality of the self
and leaves Esther to define herself unwittingly and unwillingly in relation to culturally-ingrained
stereotypes of women. (Bonds, 1990).
Smith in his article called “Metaphors for mental distress as an aid to empathy: looking through
the bell Jar” makes a case for the value of using metaphors when attempting to describe and
understand extreme mental states. Examples of metaphors are given from practice, literature,
myth and the visual arts and, in particular, a close reading of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
Commentary on and criticism of The Bell Jar are cited that highlight the value of this work as an
aid to insight into how those in mental distress might feel (smith, 2012).
Madsen explain the relation of Freud's theory The Uncanny with events and characters in
Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides. The Uncanny arises in the sphere of the familiar and the
unfamiliar. He argues that in the novel, there is something oddly familiar about the setting and
the characters, but an unknown and unfamiliar element threatens the safe haven that is suburbia.
The Lisbon girls are presented as symbols of the American Dream of a Promised Land, but end
up representing an American Nightmare (Madsen, 2014).
Dines in his article entitled “Suburban Gothic and the Ethnic Uncanny in Jeffrey Eugenides’ the
Virgin Suicides” argues that Eugenides’ novel undermines easy assumptions about the suburbs’
atemporality. The novel’s various gothic motifs suggests the difficulty of Abandoning European
pasts in order to adopt the white American identities required for a life in the suburbs; repressed
ethnic difference haunts the suburban landscape. Yet Eugenides’ suburban gothic also
complicates the process of remembering such acts of forgetting: the difficulty of explicating
suburban pasts, the novel insists, is precisely a measure of their having become historical. The
drive to present comforting, codified narratives of the suburbs is shown to be part of a move –
which always fails – to disassociate the present from these sites of conflict and trauma (Dines,
2012).
Thwarted belongingness
Thwarted belongingness is feeling alienated from friends, family, or other valued social circles.
Social isolation is one of the strongest and most reliable predictors of suicidal ideation, attempts,
and lethal suicidal behavior across the lifespan. Social isolation can be conceptualized as
measuring one facet of the higher order construct of social connectedness (or social integration.
other facets of social connectedness (e.g., loneliness and loss of a spouse) are also predictive of
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lethal suicidal behavior. social connectedness variables are associated with suicide because they
are observable indicators that a fundamental human psychological need is unmet, need to belong.
According to the theory, when this need is unmet—thwarted belongingness—a desire for death
develops (Van orden & et al, 2012).
Belongingness, the need to belong involves a combination of frequent interaction plus persistent
caring. Thus, there are two components of a fully satisfied need to belong: interactions with
others and a feeling of being cared about. In order to meet the need to belong, the interactions an
individual has must be frequent and positive. Interactions within a stable relationship will more
fully satisfy the need to belong than interactions with a changing cast of relationship partners
(e.g., relationships that are unpleasant, unstable, infrequent, or without proximity) or may not
feel connected to others and cared about (Joiner, 2005). Esther Greenwood- the Bell Jar main
character- is a bright nineteen-year-old working as an editorial intern at a popular women's
magazine in New York City.
She mentions generally that her dates with men as “blind dates” (Plath, 1995), the relationships
that go nowhere and above all do not satisfy the need to belong. Once the man that Esther seems
to like him, exhibits immediate interest in Doreen-Esther’s friend- she describes her sense of
growing severe belongingness and isolation through the repetition of the words “smaller and
lonelier:
“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about
each other…..It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite
direction—every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting
smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that
excitement at about a million miles an hour” (Plath, 1995: 25).
Esther’s loss of love made her to feel always loneliness—first with the loss of her father at nine
and second at the time her boyfriend, Buddy Willard, after a long relation cheats on her. Not
having anyone to be cared by causes the sense of alienation in her and ruins her life:
“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I
was nine years old” (Plath, 1995: 72). …... “I had a great yearning, lately, to pay my father back
for all the years of neglect, and start tending his grave. I h ad always been my father’s favorite,
and it seemed fitting I should take on a mourning my mother had never bothered with” (Plath,
1995: 161).
The Bell jar is an autobiographical novel under a pseudonym, In why people die by suicide
Joiner mentions the author: “Sylvia Plath, the poet who died by suicide at the age of thirty,
wrote, “So daddy, I’m finally through, The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t
worm through.” these lines convey that thwarted belongingness is more than just loneliness;
rather, it is the sense that sustaining connections are obliterated (“off at the root”). These lines
also conflate belongingness and death (voices worming), in which imminently suicidal people
fuse death and life” (Joiner 2005). The novel is obviously filled with this mixture of life and
death. She sees death as a “soothing hand” (Plath, 1995: 109), and the mattress like a
“tombstone” (Plath, 1995: 119).
As Joiner mentions the truly suicidal individual is the one that, whose belongingness is so
thwarted that she or he does not feel connected to humanity, and who feels that living life, not
dying, degrades humanity (Joiner 2005). The narrator portrays such sense of degradation of
humanity through these words: “I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended
it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to” (Plath,
1995).
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One of the elements brought the sense of thwarted belongingness in Lisbons in the Virgin
Suicides is the feeling of not being cared about through unstable and unpleasant interaction with
men. Almost all five sisters have loved a boy that has not responded to their love and has left
them alone. Apparently, In the case of Cecilia, the youngest sister, it is Dominic Palazzola. When
the narrators of the story read her diary understand that she had a one-sided love to a boy named
Dominic Palazzolo. The week before Cecilia’s suicide attempt, Dominic Palazzolo’s family had
called him to New Mexico. The narrator notes, “Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath,
Amy Schraff said that because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable,
and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize
that it was she who loved him” (Eugenides, 1991:16).And some pages further states: “She spoke
only rarely and had no real friends” (Eugenides, 1991:24).
Lux, the other Lisbon girl, gradually is drawn to her extreme sense of loneliness and isolation by
Trip Fontaine as the result of having unstable affairs with him and the sense of loneliness caused
by his departure. This strong sense of thwarted belongingness along with thwarted effectiveness
has been two causes of her death by suicide according to theory, we can see thwarted
effectiveness as she states while sobbing, “I always screw things up. I always do” (Eugenides,
1991:60).
After Cecilia commits suicide the Lisbon family becomes isolated and totally ruins: “Day by
day, the girls ostracized themselves” (Eugenides, 1991:46) that is why they were left alone and
finally forgotten
Dr. Hornicker, the one who put an emphasize on Lisbon’s isolation from society in his article, is
aware of the love and the pleasant relationship that is thwarted from the girls, from the strict
mother, from the effeminate father who is completely cowed by his domineering wife, deferring
to her decisions almost automatically, from their lovers and finally the mental pain that Cecelia’s
suicide has inflicted on them:
“The bereavement process of adolescents who have lost a sibling by suicide, It’s not unusual, for
the sibling of an A.L.S. [adolescent lost to suicide] to act out suicidal behavior in an attempt to
come to grips with their grief. There is a high incidence of repetitive suicide in single families”
(Eugenides, 1991:67).
Perceived burdensomeness
Perceived burdensomeness refers to the potentially dangerous misperception that the self is so
incompetent that one’s existence is a burden on friends, family members, and/or society. The
feeling of being a burden on others may lead to the potentially dangerous belief that one’s death
is worth more than one’s life. Family conflict, unemployment, and physical illness are three of
the risk factors for suicide with the most robust support for their association with suicide. These
three factors are all types of negative life events; why might these three types of negative life
events be particularly associated with suicide? One form of family conflict that has been shown
to be associated with lethal suicidal behavior is perceptions that one is a burden on family
members. The elevated likelihood of developing perceptions of burdensomeness on others is the
common thread between family conflict, unemployment, and physical illness that can account for
the associations with suicide. Perceptions of burdensomeness on family are also the key factor in
Sabbath’s (1969) family systems theory of adolescent suicidal behavior. The theory emphasizes
adolescents’ perceptions that they are expendable members of the family. The causal factors
leading to adolescent suicidal behavior, according to the theory, are pathogenic parental attitudes
toward the adolescent that are interpreted by the adolescent that he/she is not needed in the
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family, and in fact, that the family would be better off if the adolescent were dead. It is noted that
perceived burdensomeness comprises two dimensions of interpersonal functioning – beliefs that
the self is so flawed as to be a liability on others, and affectively-laden cognitions of self-hatred.
An individual experiencing the mental state of perceived burdensomeness might express the
liability component of the construct by stating, “I make things worse for the people in my life,”
while someone expressing self-hatred might directly state, “I hate myself” or “I am
useless.”(Van orden & et al, 2010). The fact of self-hatred is portrayed in Bell Jar several times.
Some examples are: at the time Doreen’s body lying in the pool of vomit and Esther perceiving
it as “an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature.” (Plath, 1963: 31) To show the
intensity of her self-hatred, she addresses herself as “bad mannered, poorly brought up” (Plath,
1963: 14), and “paralyzed and too stupid to do a thing” (Plath, 1963:34).
Apart from other elements that brought mind pain to Esther at the time she could conceive
herself to be a useless person through the repetition of “You’ll never get anywhere like that…
you’ve got the perfect setup of a true neurotic” (Plath, 1963:142), she makes herself ready for
suicide. She thinks that her mental illness is incurable and she is a problem for her family,
financially and emotionally, and if she dies they would be better without her:
“I thought of how my mother and brother and friends would visit me, day after day, hoping I
would be better. Then their visits would slacken off, and they would give up hope. They would
grow old. They would forget me. They would be poor, too” (Plath, 1963:155).
The Interpersonal Psychological Theory of Suicide proposes that suicide ideation is caused by
the interaction of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, in which each predict
or amplifies the harm of the other (Cero & Sifters, 2013). Esther prepares herself by ideating
death and suicide over and over. When ideating of the Japanese suicides, disemboweling
themselves when anything went wrong, (Plath, 1963), she describes it as a very brave act. Esther
visualizes hanging, unleashing her blood in hot water; but in the end she decides to take an
overdose by drugs.
The dreadful family conflicts in terms of family abuse and the pathogenic parental attitudes in
The Virgin Suicides are the points that brought up the concept of perceived burdensomeness for
the daughters in Lisbon’s family. Mrs. Lisbon as a restrict mother checks each daughter for
signs of makeup before allowing her to get in the car, it makes no difference which pattern they
choose for their clothes, “Mrs. Lisbon adds an inch to the bust lines and two inches to the waists
and hems, and the dresses come out as four identical shapeless sacks” (Eugenides, 1991:52).
Daughters have no right to date, to dance, to go to proms as other teenagers: “Inside their house
they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone to
save them” (Eugenides, 1991:83), And the only party is taken by Mrs. Lisbon is not really a
party: “As the night of the party approached, we watched the house for signs of decorating or
other preparations, but saw none. The yellow bricks retained their look of a church-run
orphanage and the silence of the lawn was absolute. The curtains didn’t rustle, nor did a van
deliver six-foot submarine sandwiches or drums of potato chips.” (Eugenides, 1991:18).
Dr. Hornicker mentions family abuse in his paper :
“It was the combination of many factors. With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette.
Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family
abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable
momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn’t mean the chambers
were empty” (Eugenides, 1991:101).
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Conclusion
According to the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicide developed by Thomas Joiner and
his followers an individual will die by suicide if he or she has both the desire for suicide and
capability to act on that desire. Suicidal desire results from the convergence of two interpersonal
states: perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. The need to belong, which is
totally thwarted from the major characters of the novels, is one of the basic psychological needs
for human beings. Loneliness, social isolation, thwarted effectiveness are the mental states that
have inflicted an acute pain on the heroines. Their need of love is met neither by their parents nor
their lovers, even the society has forgotten them. Feeling alone and isolated makes them ready to
die. Such a severe mental pain has plagued them that prepares the bed for physical pain
tolerance, so they can hurt themselves in order to escape from psych ache and intolerable pain.
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