50 Years of The Bell Jar

When I was writing about reading Vine Deloria Jr, one of the things that was off-putting was that he is writing currently, but from decades ago. When you are reading history, it knows it is old. Things can still become outdated as information and attitudes change, but there is at least the understanding that this is the past.

Other books feel very much in the moment, only it is an old moment, and that sometimes requires mental adjustments. That has been the case lately with two books. Their respective moments were important, but these books are old. They are more than curiosities for our day though; there is still relevance, and that gives us our subject matter for today and tomorrow.

Today is The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. I had read that this year was the fiftieth anniversary of it's publication a few months ago, and that seemed like a reason to read it. Once I started doing the reading that I am doing now, which has such a strong focus on depression and mental health, well, it was just obvious that it belonged on the list.

The first surprise was how hopeful it was. At the end, the protagonist is feeling better. She is being released from the sanitarium and ready to start again. I had always thought it was something Plath wrote right before she died. Well, she died one month after it was published, but she had lived the experience ten years before and worked on the novel well before publication.

One of the more interesting twists personally is that my sisters have read it too, as long as I had it anyway, so we have been able to discuss it. Otherwise, I have a few thoughts.

A few years ago I read an article that implied Plath may have been faking the attempt and planning on being found before she died, but the intended rescuer was late. At the time I did not think much about it one way or the other, but now I am kind of offended. Suicidal teens get "attention-seeker" thrown at them so much, and it is so not the point. She made a very serious suicide attempt once before, she was going through a difficult period, and even if she had been thinking that person would come over, it could very well have been her plan to have someone find her other than family or someone who would have a hard time with it. While committing suicide tends to be impulsive, it is an impulse that often follows obsessive planning. That may sound contradictory, but it isn't.

With knowing more about suicide and depression, and seeing that optimism in the book, it makes me sad for her. It's not that I would have been happy, but there's this added perspective. If her first attempt had been successful, she never would have published Ariel or had her children, or all of those experiences of the last ten years of her life. She says right there that perhaps the bell jar - the isolated environment she has been mentally trapped in - may come down over her again. So it could have lifted again. If she had been found, or she had resisted the impulse, then there would have been more good times.

She really was an excellent writer. I want to read more of her writings, and more about her, and the letters her mother published.

I don't think her mother comes off that badly. Yes, Esther tells her psychiatrist that she hates her, and the doctor is not surprised, and you certainly get that the mother does not understand and relate to the daughter, but that didn't seem so awful to me. I have kind of a fretful mother who does not understand the things I do either, but it isn't as much of a problem for us. Of course, I say that from 41 instead of 21, which probably helps, but the other part of that relates to feminism, which is where the time warp comes in.

Clearly Esther has a nervous breakdown, there is depression, and the foreword in my edition says there are clear signs of schizophrenia there too, which I would not have recognized, but they could very well be there. There are issues of brain chemistry here, but it is centered around her feelings of inertia. With all of her gifts, it seems impossible for her to imagine finding success and fulfillment. That progresses from a feeling of detachment about her internship and classes, to impulsively throwing all of her clothes out the window, to reaching a point where she can't even imagine bathing for three weeks because she will just have to do it again.

While some of her actions are clearly seen as mental illness, an intelligent and capable young woman finding herself at loose ends in 1953 doesn't seem so crazy. The generation before her expects her to marry and become a homemaker. Her mother feels that getting a degree is useless without a practical skill like shorthand. There are professional women like her psychiatrist and her magazine editor, but Esther is lost in the possibilities, and in questions about her ability to actually manage any of it. She has a mental image of opportunities shriveling away before you can have them.

It's not that modern life is without obstacles for women, or that feminism is no longer need, but it seems that Esther really needed it. And I can totally imagine Esther laughing at one of the other interns earnestly talking about feminism, but it was still what she needed to hear.

Some of her poetry will go into that a bit more I believe, and I will be reading more, so new thoughts will probably erupt, but it just leads back to wishing she had lived.