If you wonder what it feels like to be inside the mind of a
person who suffers from severe depression, reading
The Bell Jar will help you approach
such a person’s reality. However, stating that this book is about a lady who falls
prey to this disorder undermines the complexity of this fascinating book.
This novel, which is based on true events that
Sylvia Plath fictionalized, unravels the conflicts that trouble a young woman
who struggles to meet the demands of a society that classified people into “losers” and “winners", while she attempts to be loyal to her identity and to unearth her true self.
Esther is willing to figure out how to find her place in the world. At the same time, she tries to
understand the nature of relationships between men and women. In doing so, she
ferrets out the inconsistencies of these relationships, and how the moral code imposed on men and women differs from what happens under the surface. Through different situations, she exposes this reality with humor and irony.
Esther Greenwood, the main character, tells us
her story in a conversational style that is effortless and
captivating--Sylvia Plath knows where to place her metaphors. The raw honesty of
her thoughts bemused me.
How can we fail to
understand what a depressive person feels after we have read the following remark?
“If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe,
or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to
me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris
or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own
sour air.”
Esther sees the
world and her life through the stifling glass of “the bell jar”: her
depression. Before descending to the bottom of her nervous breakdown, she dithers over what she should be doing with her life, what
paths are the ones she should choose.
Her doubts unsettle her. She is
trapped in a snare, caught up by the false belief that she will not make the
right decisions and will lose her chances to accomplish something meaningful.
The metaphor of the tree illustrates her concerns.
“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.”
Her experiences in the asylums are memorable and interesting. It is hard for the reader to forget her acquaintance, Joan, who is almost like a friend to her despite the fact that she had dated the same man: Buddy Willard, a medical student.
The ambiguity of the relationship between Joan and Esther is a recurrent theme. Esther states that she does not like Joan. Yet she also admits that she will always treasure her. "I thought I would always treasure Joan. It was as if we had been forced together by some overwhelming circumstances, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own."
Interestingly, Joan's final decision foreshadows Sylvia Plath's destiny, and one cannot help but wonder about the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality.
Another riveting
aspect of The Bell Jar is revealed to us in the relationships she had with the psychiatrists
who treated her. First, the cold distant encounter with her first psychiatrist,
Dr Gordon. The treatment started by Dr Gordon was unsuccessful. Then with her
second psychiatrist, Dr Nolan, she had a friendly relationship cemented by
trust, and the outcome was different (Dr Nolan was also more knowledgeable). Through precise body language and realistic dialogues, Sylvia makes this relationship jump out of the page.
I think physicians and psychiatrists will
benefit from reading this novel, even though the set of events took place in
1953, when Sylvia Plath was a freshman in college.
Many of the problems
portrayed in this novel are universal. This is a literary classic that I
thoroughly enjoyed, not only because her writing style is impeccable but also
because her reality is as relevant today as it was in 1953.
