The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
This post is part of Commonplace Classics, wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love.
Sylvia Plath was an American poet whose only novel, The Bell Jar, was published pseudonymously in January 1963. Plath killed herself a few weeks later, aged 30, leaving behind two children and one husband, the English poet Ted Hughes1. Plath's star continued to rise after her death, particularly with the publication of the collection Ariel in 1965, and in subsequent decades she has become a literary figure of enduring tragic appeal rivalled only by Virginia Woolf and Emily Brontë.
As with much of Plath's writing, The Bell Jar is heavily autobiographical, and critics have inevitably focused on this aspect. I am going to avoid doing that, which won't be hard because I know very little about Plath's life and I refuse on principle to do any research2. So apologies if you've landed on my little review hoping for speculation about the connection between Sylvia Plath's life and The Bell Jar. You will have to content yourself with everything else ever written about it.
The Bell Jar follows the travails of nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood, high achieving daughter of a solid and suffocating middle-class Boston family. The initial setting is New York City, where Esther has joined a group of girls who have won a month's internship at a women's magazine. Bright lights, big city: what an opportunity! But this is 1953, and the expectation is that most, if not all, of the interns will soon be married and having babies. Esther has ambitions of becoming a writer - a poet, an independent woman - but that's not the kind of future she's been set up for.
Esther is a chatty, personable narrator, and her voice lends a dry comic edge to her adventures. Still, her mental state is far from robust. As the internship grinds haphazardly on, she becomes increasingly withdrawn and anhedonic, morbidly focused on the decay and deformation of the human body - extending, unfortunately, to a preoccupation with stereotyped racial characteristics3. The internship ends and Esther returns to Boston, where she lives in a peculiar arrangement with her overbearing mother. (For one thing, they appear to share a bedroom.) Her mental health declines rapidly, she becomes intensely suicidal and ultimately overdoses on sleeping tablets and is hospitalised.
I had put off reading The Bell Jar for years - decades - because I assumed it would be harrowing, maybe even distressing. Like many people, I have known mental illness, and I tend to avoid depictions of it that I anticipate may cut too close to the bone. I don't actively avoid fiction "about" mental illness, but it is rare to find work that treats the subject frankly and honestly, without romanticising or exploiting it. Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing and Miriam Toews All My Puny Sorrows are good examples; The Bell Jar turns out to be another.
The depiction of Esther's mental deterioration is subtle and plausible. The illness creeps slowly, insidiously, into the narrative, as the rickety foundations of Esther's sense of self give way. And ok, some of what occurs next is harrowing. 1950s mental health care was rife with pseudoscience - lobotomies, insulin shock treatment - and inherently stigmatising. As Esther notes, "The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you". Even in treatment - especially in treatment - Esther's life remains circumscribed by what and who she is.
Despite it's heavy subject, The Bell Jar is highly readable. Plath's poetic language is precise and resonant: "A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife." Esther remains an appealing narrator through even the bleakest chapters. She is genuinely funny: "I hated the very idea of the 18th century with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason". Even at her most morbid she can be blackly amusing, like an especially self-serious Adrian Mole holding a razor blade to his carotid: "they understood things of the spirit in [feudal] Japan. They disembowelled themselves when anything went wrong."
I know some readers find Esther difficult to sympathise with, and that's fine, there's no law against being heartless. For all her flaws - not least her unthinking privilege - I finished the novel very much on Esther's side, wanting her to succeed on her own terms, despite everything. It's difficult to avoid having Plath's fate in mind as you witness Esther emerging from the asylum, listening to "the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
*
The next Commonplace Classic is something a bit lighter: H.G. Wells's 1896 novel about cutting up animals and sticking them back together any which way, The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Hughes is often seen as the villain of the Plath story, a perception that stems from all of the horrible things he did.↩
The principle is that I've already read a whole book and I'm tired.↩
Esther's flagrant racism is impossible to ignore. Oddly, the sicker she becomes, the less racist she is - the inverse of what we've come to expect in the age of micro-celebrities attempting to excuse their offensive outbursts by alluding to unspecified "mental health struggles".↩