Bibliofreakblog

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I hate this book.  Back in college I summed it up in a homework assignment (just an assignment, not a paper) as the following:

Blah blah blah, I’m so depressed, blah blah blah, I’m so smart, blah blah blah, I’m so depressed, blah blah blah, I’m so smart, blah blah blah, I’m so depressed, blah blah blah…

Yup.  That’s pretty much it.  If you don’t know the plot, it’s based mostly on Plath’s own life, in which she had an internship at a magazine in NYC.  There, she was depressed.  Then her mom makes her go to a mental hospital.  

After Plath published the Bell Jar, she killed herself, so clearly she was depressed.  I’m not saying that Sylvia Plath didn’t have depression.  What I’m saying is, she could not translate her depression into writing in this book.  Maybe she felt bad about being such a bad writer and that’s why she committed suicide.  Probably not, but who knows what goes through one’s head whence it is stuck in an oven.

Since I know a lot of people really like this book, I checked it out of the library to do this post, so that I might prove to you that Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, has a bad case of ennui and then half-heartedly tries to kill herself, for what seems like no evidenced reason.

Ahem:

I tol Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed.  After Doreen left, I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more.  This made me sad and tired.  The I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and his made me even sadder and more tired.

Yeah, sounds like your average 20-year old on an internship in the Big City to me.  Some days you just wanna stay in bed.  So what?  

Again:

Mr. Willard must have thought I was crying because I was so glad he wanted to be a father to me.

Of course, she is actually crying because she doesn’t want to marry his son, her high school sweetheart, Buddy, for fear that her life will turn into an endless cycle of having babies, cleaning, and cooking.  Understandable.  But not try to kill yourself material.

The first time she tries to kill herself, she doesn’t do a thing.  This makes sense, because she hasn’t set up for it.  She recalls some things people have said to her before that get her down, but that is it.  She ultimately decides that:

It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

This is a beautiful description–and accurate, in my opinion–but that’s as far as she goes.  Depression is a demon that lives inside your chest cavity and sends prank distress calls to your brain, but Plath never writes about any of that.  She never convinces the writer of how she really FEELS.

Look, I want to state, once more, for the record, that clearly Sylvia Plath had depression.  Whether it was Bipolar Disorder or Clinical Depression, the world may never know.  Mainly, I think, because she didn’t leave enough evidence of her symptoms.

I also want to say, that I know something about depression.  I went through years of it as a teenager.  I will spare you the details, because we’re not talking about me here.  The only reason I even mention it is because I don’t want anyone to say that I don’t know what it is like and blah blah blah.

Then there’s the social context arguement that part of why Esther is upset is because she feels that her choices are limited to secretarial work and motherhood.  While that may add anxiety to life, there were many many many people in this same circumstance at the same time who didn’t try to off themselves.

What I know is, what I got from this novel (having read it once on my own in high school and once in Am Lit in college), is that while Sylvia Plath was clearly depressed, Esther Greenwood wasn’t.

If you like this book/author, you might like:

Sylvia Plath: Method & Madness (NF) by Edward Butscher
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (F) by Joanne Greenberg
Girl (F) by Blake Nelson
Catcher in the Rye (F) by J.D. Salinger
Girl, Interrupted (F) by Susanna Kayson
The Virgin Suicides (F) by Jeffrey Eugenides
Prozac Nation (CNF) by Elizabeth Wurtzel
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (F) by Ken Kesey
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depresion (CNF) by Nell Casey (editor)
The Yellow Wallpaper & Other Stories (F) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 
Go Ask Alice (CNF) by Anonymous
Running with Scissors (CNF) by Augusten Burroughs
The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton (P) by Anne Sexton
Everything Sucks (CNF) by Hannah Friedman 

Other works by Sylvia Plath:

The Colossus and Other Poems (P)
Ariel (P)
Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (P)
Crossing the Water (P)
Winter Trees (P)
The Collected Poems (P)
Selected Poems (P)
Plath: Poems (P)
Letters Home (CNF)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (F)
The Journals of Sylvia Plath (CNF)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (CNF)
The Bed Book (F)
The It-Doesn’t-Matter-Suit (F)
Collected Children’s Stories (F)
Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen (F)

The Bell Jar at Amazon