I decided to read The Bell Jar because I was sad. Not just sad: gloomy. It was like a non-specific cloud of melancholy hanging over every aspect of my life. My relationship with my boyfriend is tense. I started feeling uncomfortable at two of my three jobs. All my free time was spent rehearsing a theater piece designed to be "action based" but it just wasn't to my taste. I miss my college friends. I feel bitter and jealous of social media acquaintances who seem to have huge Twitter followings and live glamorous, artistic lives.
In short, there is no problem. Not really. I was loved and employed, in good health, and involved in some vague artistic activity. all is well. This makes me even sadder: I don’t have the right to be sad, especially when there are people in the world with real problems. So I decided to dig in and start reading Sylvia Plath, the author we culturally elect as the sad girl in chief (the same week I decided to watch the movie Heathers while , while drinking in the bathtub, laptop on the toilet)).
So I decided to dig in and start reading Sylvia Plath, the author we culturally elect as Sad Girl in Chief.
I think the bell jar is great for wallowing. It’s about a whiny privileged girl breaking down, right? "The Catcher in the Rye " for girls? Moody's dogmatic assertion that it all means nothing?
So I bought a copy (the one with the feet and the author's name on the cover). I started reading. By the first page, I realized I had gotten the bell jar completely wrong.
First of all, it's fun. very interesting. Esther Greenwood is a scholarship girl interning at a prestigious New York magazine who, as she puts it, "should have the happiest time of my life." Only she isn't.
It was like Sylvia Plath was broadcasting every thought I had between my freshman year and my junior year in college, only with a better grasp of poetic imagery. After all, the book is based on Plath’s real-life experiences as an intern at Mademoiselle magazine. Like Esther in the book, Plath once ate an entire table of caviar by herself.
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It was like Sylvia Plath was broadcasting every thought I had between my freshman year and my junior year in college, only with a better grasp of poetic imagery.
Esther doesn't just eat all the caviar, she spends two full pages detailing her anxiety about whether eating all the caviar is a social faux pas. She then waxes poetic about avocado halves stuffed with crabmeat while trying to avoid conversation with the other interns.
Esther loved to eat. When she goes out with her cool friends, she feels "very sensible and cynical." She was 5 feet 10 inches tall, awkward, and frustrated that all the boys seemed shorter than her. She had to leave the apartment in a hurry when her friends started making out sloppily in front of her. She's just so relatable. Arrogance and insecurity, angst and humour, sarcasm and a love of snacks are all mixed together, a personality trait that characterizes almost every twenty-something girl.
I kept waiting to find myself annoyed with Esther, to find her questions insignificant, her voice flat. Or at least, find her grief tragic and romantic, an operatic ode to melancholy. But it wasn’t: every page just gave me a deeper understanding of a very real young woman’s struggle with depression. After all, in the darkest moments of our full-blown quarter-life crisis, who among us couldn’t identify with that famous “fig tree” quote?
I saw my life unfolding before me, like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a better future beckons and winks. One fig is a husband, a happy family and children, another fig is a famous poet, another fig is a brilliant professor, another fig is Iggy, an amazing editor, Another fig is Europe, Africa and South America, another fig is Constantine, Socrates and Attila and a bunch of other lovers with strange names and alternative careers, another fig is the Olympic women's team champion, in Beyond and above these figs were more figs that I could not see clearly. I saw myself sitting in the fork of this fig tree, starving to death just because I couldn't decide which fig to choose. I wanted every one, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs started to wrinkle and turn black, and then, one by one, they plopped to the ground. my feet.
coin. A little too close to home. Too bad though, this quote always appears without context on the next page, when Esther sits down to dinner with her disappointingly brief date:
I don't know what I ate, but I felt better after the first bite. It suddenly occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the ground were probably rising from the depths of empty space.
Aside from the occasional cringe-worthy commentary about race and some outdated mental health treatments, "The Bell Jar" could have been written today. Before it was fashionable, Esther was a sad, anxious young person. Before we knew much about mental disorders, a brilliant, well-educated scholarship student struggled with depression. Even Esther's love life, and her label-free relationship with boyfriend Buddy, could easily feed into millennial dissatisfaction.
When Buddy takes her mental illness all out on him and visits Esther in the mental hospital to ask if he's the one "driving her crazy," the reader, like Esther, can only laugh. A lot has changed since Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar in 1963 (she wrote the book in just 70 days, I might add). But insensitive boys are eternal.
A lot has changed since Sylvia Plath wrote "The Bell Jar" in 1963. But insensitive fuckboys are timeless.
Of course, Esther does attempt suicide in the book. Her sadness was worse than the general malaise of twenty-somethings. But there is no glamor, no romance in her mental illness or suicide attempts. Plath's writing ranges from dry and witty to harrowing and staccato - an almost dreamlike retelling of a story that was rescued from the brink of death and treated in an institution. But even so, it wasn't the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest horror story I was expecting.
The Bell Jar is more than just a book about depression. It's about recovering from depression.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide shortly after The Bell Jar was published. This tragic fact overshadows her actual writing, her life, her philosophy. We turned her illness into a romantic affair. Sylvia Plath has become a dark reflection of the manic pixie dream girl: a "sexy tragic muse," as some call it.
Before I read "The Bell Jar," I bought that picture of Plath. I was ready to put on heavy eyeliner and listen to "It's a Mad World" on repeat, but I was wrong. The bell jar is a classic with a reputation that inspires even more joy. Yes, this is an unflinching look at mental illness. But it ends in hope, not despair.
The bell jar is a classic with a reputation that inspires even more joy. Yes, this is an unwavering view of mental illness. But it ends in hope, not despair.
After all ( spoiler alert ), Esther doesn't stay inside the titular "bell jar," numb to the world outside. She recovered. She learns to live again. Of course, it's not perfect; she doesn't exactly ride off into the sunset. Her boyfriend turns out to be a jerk (wasn't he always like this). Her future remains in doubt, but her red wool suit is "as gorgeous as her plans."
On the novel's final page, Esther is about to enter her final psychological evaluation to determine whether she is well enough to be released from the institution. She sees it as a kind of rebirth: “I think there should be a ritual of rebirth – patching, renovating and getting approved for the road…”
The Bell Jar failed completely when it came to helping me wallow in self-pity. But it succeeds in making us understand that we should not judge books based on hearsay. Although The Bell Jar is considered a "sad book" by "tragedians," it defies its reputation: it is sad, yes, but also deeply funny and challenging. Plath's own fate should not undermine the message of her book: Leaving The Bell Jar is possible. This is not a book about flirting with death, but about preparing for rebirth.
Image: mybookbath/Instagram, Giphy (3), Theo's Little Bot/Wikipedia Commons
