So you've heard of the Bell Jar
So you’ve heard of
the Bell Jar
Author and poet, Sylvia
Plath was a Cambridge Graduate notorious for her revolutionary ideas, expressed
in her collections on poetry. Plath suffered from depression in her life which
she explores in her writings, as well as topics of motherhood, femininity, religion,
and death. Plath tragically committed suicide at the age of thirty, from carbon
monoxide poisoning.
I have learnt all this
about Plath after reading her only novel, The Bell Jar, which was published under
a pseudonym a few weeks before Plath’s death, and is said to be
semi-autobiographical. The Bell Jar is a fictionalised story of Sylvias own
career, embodied in a graduate that interns in a New York magazine who then
falls into a rapid mental health decline.
When I finished the Bell
Jar I had so many questions, that I knew I was not supposed to have an answer
for, but still craved. The book’s structure has a clear shift, which could
arguably represent the authors spiraling health. For the first half of the
novel the author seems, all though narrated in a consistent frantic tone,
relatively sane and healthy. That is until a traumatic event happens to the
author which then, followed by a series of unfortunate events, leads to her
attempts of suicide.
Before I started the Bell
Jar I really had little knowledge of the Author or the books contents, and was
really quite shocked at the late turn it took. For this complete shift in style,
I state Plath as a genius. The complete 180 portrayed in the protagonist’s health
is one of the most realistic portrayals of anxiety and depression I’ve seen,
especially from any 20th century literature.
From reading Plath’s
collected poetry, I feel as though I have understood the book further. There is
a poem in the carol Anne Duffy selected poems of Sylvia Plath, called Daddy,
which, to my understanding discussed Plath’s Relationship with her father. In
the poem, Plath discusses her husband as a father figure, whilst also addressing
her dead father. This male figure shown is shown as a German Nazi and the poem
implies a difficult and strained relationship with this figure. I noticed the link
between the Bell Jar, and Plath’s poem, as in the novel when the main character
shares her aspiration of learning German in the future with her editor, she is told
that she would never be able to amount to anything without first learning a
language such as German. I saw this as one of the first shifts in the tide of Plath’s
self-esteem, it is displayed as Plath losing hope of something she felt so easy
and attainable, as that of learning the language. This may mirror her belief
that she could never amount to the person her father was, himself being, an
esteemed professor of Biology, speaking both German and American.
Themes of Gender are
highly illustrated throughout the novel, with Plath’s voice on feminism shining
brightly through in her writings. The shift between what could be recognised as
the first and second volume of the Bell Jar are distinctive in where Greenwood has
an experience that makes her feel out of control. I see this decent of power
from the character as her mirrored decent into madness. It is as if the experience
steals Plath’s hope in her life amounting to more than a man’s and as She starts
to feel limited and stuck, in societies expectations of her to marry and comply
to the man’s wishes, she stops living altogether.
It is my belief, that
Plath wrote this novel in complete right mind to show how easy it was for a woman
in the 19th century to fall into an almost ineluctable pit of
depression and nerves, simply because of the pressures of society, and experiences
that are now considered to be abuse and rape but were then the side effects of
being a woman.
This book is Plath’s tape of
blame on the world, in her book I believe she pins her unstable health to the
very source of her world and everything in it, as displayed in the quote “To the person in the bell jar, blank and
stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
The Bell Jar speaks for the
generations of woman who deserved more, and her work lives on today as a
reminder of the caging off women.
