The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

 "To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream."

One of my Back to the Classics challenge categories this year was to read a classic from the 20th century. One of my Popsugar challenge categories was to read a book about an interesting woman. Together, these two directives presented the perfect opportunity to finally read The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical story of a young woman enduring a nervous breakdown is a mainstay on feminist fiction lists, and is a novel that I had always meant to get around to reading.

Now that I'm on the other side of it, I barely know what to write. The Bell Jar pulled me into its darkly engaging plot from page one. It touched on so many frustrations that I've felt in my own life that I quickly became emotionally involved in the story, and felt quite drained upon finishing. This was a book that spoke to me deeply, and as is the case with books that lodge themselves firmly into one's brain, I raced through it and finished reading it in just a few days. It's left me tired, a little melancholy, and very quiet. This is one read I won't be forgetting for a while.

The novel tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a talented young student whom we first meet while she is working for a month at a fashion magazine in New York. The temporary job is a prize for a writing contest she won; school, scholarships, and contests are areas where Esther shines and sets herself apart from others with her writing skills. However, despite her numerous successes, Esther feels a sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction. She describes her ambivalence towards choosing a path in life using beautiful analogy to a fig tree:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

As her month in New York draws to an end, she begins a slow descent towards a mental breakdown, culminating in a suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization.

The novel is told from Esther's perspective, a technique which plunges the reader into her shoes and allows for total immersion in the story. As the narrator's mental state deteriorates, so do the quality of the details in the narrative. Time skips around, new stories pop up from the middle of nowhere, and erratic behavior is presented as normal. Plath's style here is artful, and makes the reader feel like they are losing their own grip on reality. It was jarring to read.

Punctuating Esther's decline are the worries that many young women struggle with as they begin transitioning into adulthood. Uncertainty as to one's place in the world, frustration towards sexism, and worries about how marriage and motherhood might transform a woman fill the pages, distorted through the lens of Esther's mental illness - an effect she describes as "living under a bell jar." Her thoughts on these topics have been my thoughts, and most likely, the thoughts of thousands of other women. Particularly striking to me was this passage:

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat...

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.      

Plath's words rang so true to my heart that I felt even closer to Esther as the story went on. The Bell Jar surely deserves its place on feminist reading book lists for daring to voice what so many women privately wonder about, even today.

The back of my copy of this novel contained some autobiographical information on Sylvia Plath, which I read after finishing the story. In this section, I learned that this work is a very thinly veiled version of Plath's own mental breakdown. In fact, the resemblance between Plath's life and situations and people from the novel was so obvious that Plath did not ever want The Bell Jar published in the United States, for fear of offending her friends and family. She published it in England under a pen name. It didn't come out in the U.S. until after her death. Sadly, Plath committed suicide in 1963.

It wasn't surprising to learn that Plath struggled with these issues in her real life, because the writing in The Bell Jar felt so authentic. It reminded me of It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini, another novel about mental illness written by an author who was, himself, mentally ill. It seems that writing from a place of experience when it comes to depression and suicide can make for some extremely moving work.

The Bell Jar is my first five-star read of 2017, and it has become one of my new favorite classics. Most of my other favorite classic novels, like The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men feel like museum exhibits of the past - endlessly interesting to examine, but separated from me by a velvet rope. The Bell Jar isn't like that at all. It's a window that I can lean into and get a good look around, or a door I can open and walk inside of, touching everything I come across. It feels real and important, and speaks to me as a woman. It's a truly great novel.


Challenge Tally
Back to the Classics: (20th Century Classic) 3/12
Classics Club: (#8 on my list) 3/100
Popsugar Challenge: (A book about an interesting woman) 8/40 
Mount TBR: previously owned 8/60