Jun 30, 2008 - 04:06:00 CDT
Title: "The Bell Jar"Author: Sylvia Plath
Pages: 244
Available: Online and booksellers
It was with some trepidation that I began reading "The Bell Jar," for a blurb on the cover warned me that it was "a heartbreaking story of a talented young woman who descends into madness."
Thus, I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't a depressing, dark account of sadness. Rather I found the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, to be an idealistic young college woman who was searching for people she was comfortable with and was trying to find out who she was.
She wondered what to do with her life. Was she choosing the right career? Should she ever get married? Because it is so believable, the story carried me back to my own thoughts as I finished college and moved on to adulthood.
Since Esther worked hard in school and carried straight A's, she was hired by a prominent magazine in New York along with 11 other young women as junior editors for one month. In New York, Esther was dazzled with exquisite parties and ballets, designer clothes, access to hair stylists, celebrity companionship and a society that was in stark contrast from her middle-class upbringing.
Her future loomed as a large question mark. While she wanted to be an author, she felt hampered by her lack of experience. She felt "very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel."
Esther described her life as being controlled by a glass bell jar. Wikipedia defines a bell jar as "a bell-shaped glass cover used to protect and display delicate objects or to cover scientific apparatus or to contain gases."
Sometimes her bell jar was so close that she languished in her own sour air. At other times, it was suspended high enough above her that she was "open to circulating air."
On the last night of her stay in New York, Esther climbed to the roof of her hotel and let her entire wardrobe, except for a housecoat, fly into the night breeze. Then she dragged herself home to Boston, where she found she had been rejected from a famous author's workshop she had been hoping to attend.
From there, Esther was on a downhill spiral, where she couldn't get up in the morning and didn't take a shower or wash her clothes, because it took too much energy and it would just have to be done again. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't eat. Fantasizing about different ways to kill herself, she half-heartedly practiced them.
Finally, her mother, realizing this was not just a phase that would pass, took her to a psychiatrist. Esther delighted in keeping things from him, hoping that he would discover that she wasn't being open with him.
He decided to administer electric shock treatments to her at his private hospital. She was totally unprepared for the treatment, and on the way home, she announced to her mother that she would not go back to that doctor. Her mother seemed relieved and said, "I knew you'd decide to be all right again." But, of course, she wasn't.
The book points out how little the general public knows about mental illness and the cutting and unsupportive things we say to people who are struggling with depression. Published for the first time in 1963, the book shows us the popular forms of treatment used at that time.
Written in the first person, the book gives us a personal glimpse of thoughts which reflect mild feelings of inadequacy, and then escalate to disabling, imprisoning thoughts. Throughout it all, we have Esther's innocent narrative of the people she interacts with.
In chapter after chapter of the book, I was impressed with the simple yet colorful metaphors. When she couldn't sleep: "I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue."
Plath committed suicide a month after her book was published. She had published many poetry books before this one novel. The book paralleled her own life in many ways, and so it is considered semi-autobiographical.
To protect the people she knew, she published under a pseudonym. She had been married to poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had two children, but they were separated at the time of her death.
Plath was very open and convincing in her portrayal of Esther Greenwood. So much, that I felt I was receiving a first-hand account by a very honest, sensitive individual. She died when she was just 31 years old, still looking for her place in society.
It is a great time to read "The Bell Jar." Not only has it become a literary classic in America, according to Internet sources, Julia Stiles has confirmed that she will be starring in a movie version, which began production early this year.
(Rita Greff grew up the oldest of eight children in a family that valued reading, particularly fiction. She taught fifth and sixth grades for 34 years.)
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