Book Review: The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar was written by Sylvia Plath and published under a pseudonym in 1963, a month before she committed suicide. I read the paperback version published by Bantam Books in 1972, the year of my birth. The front cover tag line sensationalizes what the book is about, "The heartbreaking story of a talented young woman who descends into madness", but the quote from the New York Times book review printed on the back cover is much more matter-of-fact, "The Bell Jar is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath's twentieth year; about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue."

I heard about The Bell Jar in high school or in my early college years, talked about like a rumor in the girls' locker room. I got the impression it was good to admire the writing, but not the writer. Plath wrote things about which most young women could relate, but you didn't want to relate too much to her writing - as if doing so would damn you to the same suicidal fate. I found the book at a used book sale last March (before the book diet). For 16 months the book sat in the closet of the bedroom I hope to one day turn into my study. Every once in a while I'd look in on it - and the other 6 or 7 books I bought that day - promising to lay my eyes on the pages inside. A writer friend suggested I read Sylvia Plath poems for inspiration, but I put it off. Then I took one of those infamous Facebook quizzes "Who Is Your Inner Crazy Bitch?" and voilá she turned out to be Sylvia Plath. Of course, this revelation was what prompted me to finally pick the book up off the floor.

What I absolutely love about this book and Plath's writing is her description of emotions in a way that is accessible intellectually, visually, tangibly, as well as emotionally. The reader follows Esther Greenwood's slow and steady descent into the depths of depression, but her feelings and thoughts seem not much different from feelings and thoughts of anyone else, including my own. Here are a few to illustrate:

Photo shoot during Esther's summer internship at the magazine:
"I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full."

Esther's first visit to her first psychiatrist, the "perfect", Dr. Gordon:
"I hated him the minute I walked in through the door. I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying 'Ah!' in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find the words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed father and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out."

What I found most pleasantly surprising about the book was the portrayal of young women coming of age in the early 1950's, before the ideas of women's liberation and equality became fixtures of the American mindset. These women grew up trying to keep up with the Joneses, went to college or worked until they got their Mrs. degrees, were taught to do what was practical and expected of them, and thought they were happiest when their actions were approved by others.

Esther's description of the other young women at the summer internship
"These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil."

Describing her feelings when people visited her in the mental health facility
"I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded."

Esther's character questions and fights against societal expectations - from her interactions with the other young women during the internship, to her refusal to consider marriage proposal, to her resentment of the electric shock treatment prescribed by of her male psychiatrist, to losing her virginity to someone she did not love - and at the same time cannot seem to find her way out of the societal restrictions placed on her. In this way, Esther's feelings of being trapped under a "bell jar" not only describes her mental state, but the expectations of society at that time as well.