The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
1963

HarperCollins, 2006

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.


One word: claustrophobic. This is very fitting given the symbolism of the title; enclosed, trapped, restricted, restrained, confined, repressed, oppressed. Reading The Bell Jar, for me, became an exercise of will, and like Esther constrained in her airtight bell jar, I found it a little hard to breathe while being immersed in her stifling world. It's an overwhelming novel, and I admit that reading it for long bouts became nearly impossible. I can usually whiz through a chunky book in an evening or two, but The Bell Jar seemed to stretch on and on and on. This is both criticism and praise.

Courtesy of Karen D. Tregaskin

Oh 1001 books, how you continue to defy easy plot summaries. So instead, I'll just throw out a few pretentious descriptors: roman a clef,  reverse bildungsroman, and arguably kunstlerroman. Our protagonist Esther, oh-so messed up and precariously on edge, teeters on the verge of sanity throughout the novel, and her break is slowly anticipated until it happens - SNAP - and the reader enters a different novel entirely than that of the initially disillusioned academic Esther, ill but functional. Suddenly Esther, once uncomfortably relatable, is now straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, complete with botched electroshock therapy. The novel seems split in three: prior to the break, the break itself, and the recovery. However, this is by no means a linear process, and Plath masterfully depicts the complexity of unhealthy psychology and the myriad of potential causes. The ending is ambiguous as to Esther's recovery, but like Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, I feel a certain pessimism that is influenced by Plath's suicide.

Sylvia Plath, 1957

Now I don't know much about Plath beyond general knowledge and what Wikipedia has just taught me, and my knowledge of her poetry, aside from the much-maligned Daddy, is shoddy at best, but The Bell Jar is decidedly autobiographical, albeit with all the identifiers changed. Characters, settings, and events were plucked from her reality and displayed in the text, which adds to the unsettling atmosphere. This should be stated: truth in literature generally has little impact on me. The most inventive and creative tales can ring just as sincere as any autobiography given the right author. But I must admit that the sickening feeling that spread throughout my stomach while reading The Bell Jar was intensified by the knowledge that this is a real account. The context is just so overwhelmingly honest - traditional gender roles and the societal expectations that they entail, anxiety over life choices and the fear of missing out on potential opportunities, the expression of repressed female sexuality, the hollowness of conventionality - and Esther's descent, while jarring and alienating, is so linked to these issues that the narrative becomes devastatingly painful.

Courtesy of Dave Quiggle

The writing is entrancing, and Plath's poetry is embedded within the prose. Esther's voice is clear and her break is so internally detailed that it starts to seem sort of reasonable and logical to the off-guard reader. This, I think, is the saving grace of The Bell Jar - it depicts an unfamiliar, suspicious, anxious, and totally alien experience, but the reader views it from the inside, and thus is not separated from Esther by a diagnostic third-person narrator. We are privy to Esther's thoughts, perceptions, her increasingly warped view of her surroundings, but this is all anchored in a very articulate and convincing voice. I became very sensitive to the always frustrating unreliable narrator trope as Esther was hospitalized; the writing created a whirling affect of uncertainty, and I am still left curious as to the "factual" side of the story - how much is delusion and paranoia? Plath's scene transitions support this affect, as unrelated scenes, sometimes separated by years, are not clearly demarcated. Rather, they just bleed into one another.

Honestly, the truth of it all: this book made me uncomfortable in the worst sort of way. It hit too close to home; I felt no ease while reading it. Rather, I read paragraph after paragraph on edge, anxiously awaiting the boom, the subtle likenesses to myself that made me close the book and seek solace in something numbing. Turn on the Nicki Minaj. Make a coffee. Boot up Civ V. And forget the churning in my stomach, the nausea caused by Sylvia Plath's swirling universe. This is an affecting novel. Reader beware.

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.

Further Reading
Sylvia Plath - excellent information on her poetry and prose
The Bell Jar - upcoming movie adaptation 
The Bell Jar Tumblr - lots of "I am. I am. I am."