The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 20:00 on 2 November 2017
faber and faber, 2005, 238 p. First published 1963.
It is very difficult to read this without an awareness of the troubled life of its author, who, like her protagonist, Esther Greenwood, lost her father in early life and on reaching young adulthood developed mental health issues. As it did with Plath herself, the shadow of madness, or at least disturbance, lies heavily over the book’s second half.
Esther, a nineteen year-old from a provincial background has won a fashion magazine contest to jaunt about New York. The early part of the novel describes her experiences there and some of her fellow winners, one of whom wears, in a beautiful phrase, “dressing gowns the colour of sin”.
Esther is somewhat naïve as well as still a virgin. “When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue.” Magazines told her, “The best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren’t pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex.” Her would-be husband Buddy Willard is, “the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for,” and when she finds he isn’t so fine and clean himself she rejects him and reflects staying pure may not be all it’s cracked up to be. But she “wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself.” It’s a conflict she finds difficult to resolve.
In this first half the book is feminist in an early 1960s kind of way but it soon drives off on a darker tangent as Esther’s behaviour becomes more erratic.
The novel’s first sentence sets it in the summer the Rosenbergs were to be electrocuted. This is something that clearly preoccupies Esther as it perhaps did Plath. In an exchange which illustrates Esther is perhaps more humane than some “normal” people Esther as narrator tells us, “I said, ‘Isn’t it awful about the Rosenbergs?’ ‘Yes’ Hilda said. ‘It’s awful such people should be alive.’” Electrocution is a fate Esther suffered as a child due to a faulty lamp – and will again as she is trundled through a succession of mental hospitals and subjected to electro-convulsive shock therapy of varying degrees of intensity. How much this helped or hindered is difficult to assess. Plath’s fate suggests the latter. Esther does describe madness as being like inside a bell jar which lifts – temporarily? – after the milder shock treatment she receives from a (slightly) more careful practitioner than her first.
There is a particularly horrific scene in the aftermath of Esther losing her virginity. Put together with the emphasis on pureness from Esther’s early life such an outcome seems like a punishment. It is possible from this to argue that one of the book’s purposes was to suggest that sexual naivety consequent on the insistence of the purity of women before marriage is at the least detrimental to well-being, maybe even a major contributor to madness.
It would be tempting to think that this book gives some insight into Plath’s later life but as an account of the onset of mental problems and its inadequate treatment it doesn’t really.
All I’d read about this – and its author – suggested that it would be a difficult book but it is in fact extremely easy to read. It may be autobiographical (or at least semi-autobiographical) and there is her poetry to take into account but from the perspective of a reader of novels it is a pity Plath never wrote (or perhaps never had the time to write) another one.
Pedant’s corner:- sewed (USianism, I prefer sewn,) the women (it was one person, so woman,) “why couldn’t I just got to the classes?” (just go to,) “I was my last night” (It was,) a missing start quote mark, “with pinks tips” (pink.)
