The Bell Jar

I am lucky to have read The Bell Jar by choice, borrowing a copy from a friend who also loved the book, rather than having to read it for school and I think these different approaches significantly influence how people feel about Plath's semi-autobiographical novel. At the very beginning I was reminded of Rona Jaffe's The Best Of Everything which was written around the same time and also examines the lives of young women in New York. However it is Plath's rejection of society's restricted expectations for women which, for me, made The Bell Jar an interesting novel and The Best Of Everything seem somewhat vacuous.

I was surprised at Plath's matter-of-fact language, especially when describing some of the horrors of what passed for mental health care in 1950s America. I think it is this removal from herself which was the strongest symptom of her breakdown, but it made it difficult for me to get under the skin of her writing. I am used to more overt emotion. I found myself wondering how much of The Bell Jar was actually fiction and how much truth. Being always aware that Plath did commit suicide shortly after the book was first published coloured my reading of it, especially in scenes where Esther feels herself blocked from following her dreams due to her gender and where the opposite applies and she meets role model career women - writers, doctors, psychiatrists - but does not recognise the potential of their example, locked away as she is in her metaphorical bell jar.

There was a lot I really enjoyed about this book. I think if I hadn’t known multiple people with depression, I’d be more annoyed by this book. I used to be far more impatient with depression, like most uninformed people are. I think Esther could easily be frustrating to read and unlikeable without some context.

One of the main problems with this book is some racism. I didn’t expect it, though I should have. It’s random, not constant, but it’s there. She’ll use other races or ethnicities as ways to describe ugliness or sickliness, unfortunately.

Esther has an interesting journey. It’s a slow descent, brought on I think by some quarter life crisis thoughts. She notes that she expected to not get into this writing course, which her future goals depended on. You get the sense that she told herself she was going to get in, was planning for it, but perhaps deep down felt it was unlikely and didn’t want to face that. But as her time in NYC passes, she has to start thinking about it.

I related to her feelings about doing well in school. I was a straight A student in undergrad. Once I got to grad school I had a realization that straight As don’t matter. No one’s going to care. My effort dropped. But in my case it was more a relief, less pressure on myself as I moved toward the finish line. In Esther’s case, it leads to her questioning whether anything matters. She’s sort of awakening to the emptiness of her goals, or the difficulty in achieving them, and it takes her on a downward spiral.

I was glad to read her come back out of it. She’s not suddenly a wonderful person

Esther Greenwood is a young woman from Boston who gains an internship at a prominent women’s magazine in New York City. We follow her personal life and her decline into depression, attempting suicide to being committed into an asylum. We see the bad treatment as well as the good, all the way up to her attempt to re-enter the world.

This is the seminal semi-autobiographical novel of Sylvia Plath and I’m so glad that I’ve finally read The Bell Jar. I want to say she is the female version of Charles Bukowski (even though I’ve only read Factotum); there are differences but I feel like the voice and style feel very similar. Originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas to protect identities of characters she took liberties with, but more the fact it parallels Plath’s own experiences.

A bell jar is an inverted glass jar that is normally air tight used to display objects for observation, normally for scientific curiosity. For Esther the bell jar is a symbol of madness, when gripped with depression she feels like she is stuck in a jar with no real perspective to the outside world. It prevents her from making any real connections with people and sometimes she feels like she is on display (especially when she was hospitalised and received all those visitors).

What was interesting for me is that to me it never really felt like Esther Greenwood suffered from depression to begin with. I’m not saying she wasn’t really suffering but for me I think the idea was forced on her by everyone else, just because her thoughts were a little macabre and she was a little different. Almost like she was forced into her descent, because she was a little different to the norm.

Esther has an obsession with death; we get that from the very start with her fascination of newspaper headlines about executions, suicide and death. There is also the blood motif throughout the book; blood normally represents life but the constant bleeding would point towards death. When she starts to think about killing herself she talks about it at great lengths and even practices slashing her own wrists.

I think this is a novel about the regression into madness, the life experiences that normally have a positive on a person’s live, but for Esther these were partly responsible of her descent. Romance, success in education, finding work and Marriage proposals tend to upset or disorient her and in the end instead of finding reasons to live she finds how different she is to others and this cements her choice to die.

Then the book looks into the world of treating mental illness, the good and the bad. This is where the book moves into the territory similar to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in particular a look at 1950 psychiatric treatments. In this part there seems to be three treatment types used within the book; talking, injections of insulin and then the dreaded electroshock therapy. The treatment is meant to clear the mind entirely and after her first electroshock treatment Esther was unable to think about knives. The treatment was doing more damage than good, especially to her intellect.

I went into this book thinking there might have been some psychological elements but that this was mainly a novel about feminism. It is to some extent but what I got was so much more; I was really impressed with this novel and really enjoyed the journey it took me. I feel like kicking myself for not reading this sooner. A novel about a protagonist slipping into depression is normally right up my alley but I’m a little perplexed about the ending. Overall this is a masterpiece and well worth reading.

This review originally appeared on my blog; www.knowledgelost.org/random/regular-segments/book-of-the-month/book-of-the-month-the-bell-jar/