The Bell Jar

"It’s a wonderful novel, one that’s been very important to a vast audience. It also speaks to our age with particular urgency owing to its interest in women’s rights, the sexual double-standard, and so on. The Bell Jar is the first complete demonstration of a myth that runs throughout so much of Plath’s great poetry: the myth of death and rebirth. That’s set out very clearly in the novel: Esther has a kind of symbolic death; she goes through a suicide attempt, and subsequently struggles to be reborn into something glorious, new and vibrant. At the end of the novel, her recovery is rather tentative. The extent to which she has come out the other side and escaped from her depression and trauma is unclear. “The only problem with rebirth, of course, is that you have to die first” What’s interesting in this respect are three or four moments in the novel where Esther refers to the fact that she now has a baby. For example, she tells us early on, “last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sun-glasses case for the baby to play with.” Somehow, between the end of the novel’s events and the time of Esther writing it, she has accomplished the very thing which she insists throughout the novel she can’t or won’t do; that is, settle down, have a baby, and (potentially, at least) be in a secure, stable relationship with a man. It’s a sign that Esther’s recovery may have been more complete than the novel elsewhere wants us to accept. There is also, of course, the name ‘Esther Greenwood’ itself. It highlights through homonyms the presence of this myth: ‘Esther’ evoking ‘Easter’, and ‘Greenwood’ the symbol of spring. (And Plath published The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas—Victory of Light.) So, in prose, Plath begins to explore a myth which we catch over and over again in Christianity and paganism, and which will go on to dominate the poetry she writes in 1962. The only problem with rebirth, of course, is that you have to die first. And it’s worth remembering that she wrote it at a very happy time in her marriage. I think something of that comes across in the book. If The Bell Jar is a study of Plath’s own past, she writes from the security of having survived it. In a late letter to her mother, she says that what the suffering individual wants “is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst , just what it is like.” She’s able to write her witness account because of her current circumstance as someone who, as she sees it, has come through. So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together. That’s right. It’s a great moment of resistance in the novel too, isn’t it? This isn’t the adoring, doe-eyed girlfriend, looking up admiringly at this hunky medical student—it’s someone who’s prepared to overturn the traditional gender roles. Someone who’s prepared to fight for art against a rather philistine science, in this case. “ The Bell Jar is viciously funny” When we made the BBC documentary on The Bell Jar recently, the director, Teresa Griffiths, tracked down these amazing octogenarians who’d been friends or boyfriends of Plath. The theme they all kept coming back to, even 60 years after the fact, was the continuing impact of Plath on their lives. Here was a woman with an extraordinary energy and vitality. You get a taste of it in The Bell Jar : even in her depression, Esther has a lasting effect on everyone she encounters, and she’s certainly more than a match for Buddy. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing. You’re absolutely right to stress its comedy. So much of Plath’s work is funny. Despite its subject matter, The Bell Jar is often a very funny novel. Even its idiom is comic: “steering New York like her own private car”; “anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion.” Perhaps we miss it because the pall of Plath’s biography descends across the whole work and reputation. But The Bell Jar is viciously funny. There are people still alive today who won’t talk about it because they were so badly hurt by Plath’s portrayal of them. I always recall Esther’s reaction when her mother is encouraging her to learn shorthand so that she can become a secretary (for a man, of course): “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.” Clearly, for its time The Bell Jar is a radical feminist text in that regard. The caveat is that it’s hard to find a woman in the novel who’s entirely admirable. Esther is constantly looking around for a role model and failing to come up with one. It’s a feminist crisis, in a way, but it’s a crisis for Esther on a purely personal level, too. She has some idea of what she wants to be, but she has more of an idea of what she doesn’t want to be. And she is paralyzed by choice: choosing one path means turning away from all the others. So it’s a novel partly about having choice to an extent that previous generations of women mostly didn’t have, but at the same time, not having as much choice as the men. Exactly. When Letters Home came out, a lot of people were dismayed by Plath’s persona in those letters to her mother: very conventional, very conformist, very submissive to gender stereotypes. One answer to that is to say, ’Well, this isn’t the real Sylvia Plath—this is Sylvia performing for a particular audience, in this case her own mother.’ But these gender roles form an important part of Plath’s identity that she comes back to again and again in the Journals , The Bell Jar , and sometimes in her poetry as well. She’s not simply rejecting convention—those gender roles are vital to her and to her identity, but they’re not in themselves sufficient. She can’t accept them, but they’re necessarily part of who she is."

"I know. You can’t have five books about depression and not mention The Bell Jar . I first read it when I was a teenager. As a teenage girl, you have to read The Bell Jar. It’s a rite of passage. I was about 16 or 17. I thought I was really cool, multilayered. It’s the seminal novel about depression, isn’t it? It is literally about that feeling: of being stuck underneath a bell jar. The really fascinating thing about The Bell Jar is the way that mental illness used to be treated. Well, it still is treated with electroconvulsive therapy. That is quite shocking to read about. But there is also an undercurrent about the patriarchy — she doesn’t just want to be a housewife or a mum. She wants to be more expressive than that. There’s so many layers to it. Behind it of course is the tragedy of what happened to Sylvia Plath. I called my book Mad Girl partly for her poem ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, which is also the inscription: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I do remember as teenager reading it, that description of what it feels like to be depressed, which is probably the first time I’d read something and thought, oh, hang on. Obviously I wasn’t in a mental institution, having electroconvulsive therapy, but it was around that time I started having any kind of awareness that perhaps something wasn’t quite right. And an awareness that perhaps this was something other people went through as well. I don’t think it glamorises it. She ends up committing suicide. What your teacher said about ‘girls’: it’s a way of boxing us up again, isn’t it? What I think is that she [Plath] made it very clear to girls like us that you didn’t just have to be good girls who became wives, and that it was normal to have all of these feelings. You summed it up perfectly there: “girls like you.” Most women are girls like us. I think it gives voice to that. I don’t think it glamorises it at all, do you? Yes. I don’t think anyone who has gone through that—who has had the bell jar there on top of them—would think there is anything glamorous about that. As you say, it is incredibly bleak. People always say that she was incredibly witty, a bon vivant , gregarious. That is what it is to be mentally ill. You aren’t just moping in the fucking corner, about to put your head in the oven. The portrayal of mental illness is very much of someone rocking back and forth, in a padded cell, but no — it’s me, it’s you, it’s everyone."