THE BELL JAR

This stellar novel by Sylvia Plath spawned me to think about how delicate the human brain is. Sylvia connects suicide with a bell jar. I thought about that...what is a bell jar? If you are trapped under a bell jar, you are doomed...there is no way out unless someone (a psychiatrist or a counselor) relieves the pressure and lifts the patient’s doubt, dejection, and lack of self-confidence out of the jar. Our protagonist in Sylvia’s novel, Esther Greenwood, slowly gets depressed over things that would normally not affect one’s attitude. This novel made me ponder depression more than any other recent novel. Just as Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye (see my review of 11/23/2012) made me imagine...so did Esther Greenwood. Wow, good ole brain exercise! Think back, how many books have you read when days after finishing, you were still mulling it over. Not many. Maybe Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see my review of 12/9/2012) hit a nerve. It also occurred to me that maybe some people are predetermined to have mental problems. In this novel, nothing that happened to Esther Greenwood should have been powerful enough to shake her confidence as it did. Are these the same morale problems that our author, Sylvia Plath had? The pundits say yes. It seems that as self-doubt and ego dissipate, suicide seeps into the mind and locks the bell jar down forever. No way out. Asylums seldom cure... only lock up. And yes, as you will find in this novel, electric shock treatments to the brain don’t help. BTW, this author has a way with words that would make any literature teacher applaud. 

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read in the papers-goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.” So that’s the first paragraph of the novel. Bingo! Right away I knew the direction of the story and I had a taste of the writer’s prose. Esther Greenwood was a junior in college (somewhere in Massachusetts, never disclosed) on a summer work program at Ladies Day magazine in NYC. She was a straight-A student who didn’t have confidence in herself. She constantly questions her ability to write even though she won a grant to be where she was...she is always debriefing her sexual desires...should I stay a virgin or not. “I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.” Long-term relations with anyone are a no-no. She prefers to see everyone as a hypocrite. When her summer job is over and she goes home, she is blindsided by her mother, “I think I should tell you right away, you didn’t make that writing course.” The air punched out of my stomach. “All through June, the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve…”

If you want to find out what happens next, you will have to buy your own copy. My lips are sealed. Oh, I also forgot to mention the wonderful side characters, such as Doreen, Jay Cee, Betsey, Buddy, and Joan. It reads like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest, but out of the asylum. The following is the last taste of Sylvia’s prose, only because I can remember my first run down a ski slope (1976) without useful lessons: “The interior voice nagging me not to be a fool-to save my skin and take off my skis and walk down...fled like a disconsolate mosquito. The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower. I measured the distance to Buddy (who was waiting at the bottom for her) with my eye. I aimed straight down. I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts…” After she crashed at the bottom, she bravely told Buddy, “I’m going to do it again.” Buddy said, “No, you’re not, your leg’s broken in two places.” HaHa.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: In London on 2/11/1963, Sylvia Plath blocked the bottoms of all the doors in her kitchen with tape, towels, and cloths, stuck her head in the oven, and turned on the gas. She was only 30 years old. 

She didn’t live to be famous. She died one month after The Bell Jar was published in the United Kingdom. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1982 for The Collected Poems.

A famous quote from Sylvia is: “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid.”

‘Nuff said.