The Bell Jar is, along with Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Carson McCullers’s
The Member of the Wedding, my favourite novel. These three novels have forced me
to think about literature and about life in a different way and they have
transformed my own writing.
The Bell Jar is a novel that quietly and beautifully portrays a woman’s
emotional descent into darkness. That may sound grim, but the way Sylvia Plath
melds humour and pain is remarkable: the unfolding of Esther Greenwood’s
emotional crisis is perfectly handled, and the balance of laughter and tears is
superbly controlled, the former sliding inexorably into the latter, but with
faint echoes remaining throughout, the tracks of hope in a landscape growing
increasingly darker. I suspect it is impossible, now, to extricate the novel
from the history and Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath. After all, it is so
autobiographical that Plath originally felt the need to publish it under a
pseudonym and it didn’t appear under her own name until three years after her
suicide. But it is unfortunate, really, if the novel is submerged beneath the
myth of its author, because it needs no external pathos to give it power.
When we first meet Esther Greenwood, an ingenue from Boston, she is working
as an intern in New York, working on a successful magazine. This is not her
milieu, and while she is not exactly gauche, she is far from assimilated into
New York life. We first get a hint of her dissociation from the activity around
her in the novel’s famous opening line: “It was a queer, sultry summer,
the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing
in New York.” That the Rosenbergs’ electrocution is barely mentioned again in
the novel further establishes her disconnection from reality (although, of
course, this high-tech execution acts as an ominous foreshadow of Esther’s
subsequent, highly traumatic electroconvulsive therapy).
Initially, though, one has little inkling of what will follow.
The early passages, even the darker ones, are shot through with humour. There
is a deftness and lightness to them that is, in retrospect, extraordinarily
skillful. One often hears people say of those around them who attempt suicide
that they had no idea, and this is the case with Esther. She appears a
complicated young woman, certainly, not entirely comfortable in her skin or her
surroundings, but her breakdown, which is precipitated when she returns home to
provincial Massachussetts and is overlooked for a writing course on which she
had set her heart, nonetheless comes as something of a surprise. And just as
people will do in similar circumstances in real life, one retrospectively picks
over the evidence of the past for clues of her distress and indeed they are
there, submerged in the minutiae of daily life.
Esther’s decent into depression and suicidal tendencies progresses through
the summer. Even now, though, there is a lightness to it that beguiles the
readers, lulls them into a false sense of hope. It seems at first like
depression-lite, the manufactured sort of emotions you might get in a soap
opera when a major character’s flirting with the blues is scheduled to last for
so many episodes, after which she will snap out of it and return to normal. Or
perhaps we see Esther as a female McMurphy, the sane one in the asylum ward, and
hope, like we do with McMurphy, that she will prevail against the system. But
we know that McMurphy doesn’t prevail and, in The Bell Jar, we come to realise that
Plath’s lightness of tone masks the growing distress in Esther’s mind, and her
depression is far from superficial. She is a deeply troubled woman and,
finally, we begin to seriously fear for her.
She comes to feel as though she is trapped beneath a bell jar. This is a
horrifying image: trapped, suffocating, no prospect of release, everything outside,
visible but not touchable, out of reach, beyond your world of confinement and
gloom, a distorted vision of normality in which you cannot share. Her suicide
attempts grow more serious. Her first experience of ECT is horrific. Her
second, for entirely different reasons, is more so. The woman she trusts, her
therapist, Dr Nolan, promises her that she will not subject her to further ECT
without warning her. Dr Nolan is true to her word, but it doesn’t feel like it
to the distraught Esther. This scene has a terrible emotional power: if you
want to know how to write, this is a good starting point; and if you want to
understand other human beings, in their distress and fear and hope and need,
likewise this is a piece of emotional treasure trove. Be warned, though:
Esther’s terror is contagious.
The novel grows darker yet, and then lighter. It ends on a note of hope.
All the same, it ends without resolution, as befits the life of a woman in
torment. After all, as we know from the life of the author of this novel, the
only feasible resolution is likely to be the wrong one. But in The Bell Jar, at
least, the reader can imagine, believe, hope that Esther Greenwood lives on and
finds happiness.