The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Book review, fiction
If you’ve ever looked at the world through a piece of thick glass, you know how the glass distorts the image, hides nuance and detail, even obscures that which can be seen.
I never read Sylvia Plath in school, but when I set out to curate a list of books to read while penning my novel, The Bell Jar came up. Twice. Once for the theme of “identity;” once for “coming of age.” Two thematic links later and this book made it into my library bag and into my home, where I devoured it like a fine meal.
Despite being 60 years old and written before American women could even open bank accounts without signatures from their husbands or fathers, The Bell Jar persists in the literary zietgeist for a reason. Because while the description in The Storygraph says The Bell Jar is “a realistic and emotional look at a woman who falls into the grips of insanity,” the novel has little to do with insanity or the descent into madness.
Instead, The Bell Jar provides a powerful testament for the continued need for feminism and support of women who are not insane but who are having very real and normal responses to abnormal or traumatic life events, including the denial of self as a form of personal protection and social conformity.
Several quotes from The Bell Jar bounced around my noodler collecting all kinds of bullshit on which I shall expound.
“He kept staring at her the way people stare at the great white macaw in the zoo, waiting for it to say something human.”
In this part of the story, the protagonist—Esther Greenwood—watches the way a man looks at her friend, a woman very different than she, bolder than she, more promiscuous. Reflecting on the title of the book, the man looks at the friend as if through a bell jar, distored, like she’s something less than a person, less than human. As if she’s an animal.
It’s not hard to see why feminism is still so critical for development when men literally look at women as if they’re intelligent animals. Something to gawk at. Something to feed treats to when they do interesting things. Something to leave behind when the fun is over and it’s time to go home.
In my novel-in-progress, Evelyn (MC) feels very much like an animal being observed by her partner, the vocalist in an up-and-coming rock band. As a partner, she’s never felt understood by her head-in-the-clouds fiance, despite the fact that they’ve known each other since their school years. Small towns will do that to you, make you feel like you know someone when you have no idea what goes on at home.
For all the love displayed for audiences, Reggie isn’t exactly full of sunshine and rainbows when the music is done. He expects to be cared for, taken care of, adored, even, but he’s not forthcoming with his own affections.
As his band achieves success, Reggie begins distancing himself from Evelyn, and she feels the tension of the blow she knows is coming but isn’t brave enough to address.
She hopes those feelings will go away once the initial taste of fame has passed.
Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?”
“No, what?” I would say.
“A piece of dust.”
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, “So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.”
There are many folks dismissive of the arts as viable pursuits, folks who will tell their children, “You can be anything you want to be!” and then, without recognizing their own hypocrisy, will squash their childrens’ creative dreams and encourage them to “get real jobs” instead. Obviously, this kind of hypocrisy is damaging and unwarranted and has served to breed apathy in the current cultural landscape.
To be without art is to be without humanity.
I recently saw something on social media, might have been a screenshot of someone’s tweet, to get rid of all television, all books, all audiocasts, all videos, all paintings, all photographs, all ceramics and pottery, all art supplies broadly and then ask whether average people value art when art is suddenly unavailable. While this kind of thought experiment is a good idea for artists, most average folks don’t put that much thought into what they consume, or why.
But from the art perspective, a great piece of art losts a helluva lot longer than the best surgical maneuvering ever can. STEM fields are promoted all over the place, while folks tell artists to get those realer jobs, to great folly and devaluation of humanity as a whole. Without art, there can be no progress, because it is through art that folks value progress.
For my novel-in-progress, Evelyn has been beat down on the professional playing field. She’s had to close her business due to insolvency and was forced to move back to her hometown where rentals were cheap enough and she had space to lick her wounds. But she’s embarrassed, considers herself a failure, and this is a major hurdle she’ll need to overcome.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a gate engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
Similar to the quote about poems and cadavers before, this passage is about giving up on one’s dreams to follow a predetermined path, even if the path looks nothing like you thought it would.
In my novel-in-progress, Evelyn feels like her glory days are over, that her failed business means more than that her business failed. For her, it means she failed, as an artist, as a human being. She feels very much like she’s hung up her little gold cup as an old dream left over from another time, and she will need to learn that dreams don’t really ever die. They merely transform as we learn and grow.
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.
The visual captured in this passage is stunning. This is why feminism continues to be needed because despite being 60 years old, The Bell Jar communicates a fundamental fact about the currentl cultural zeitgeist: Women (still) don’t matter.
They are objects to be acquired, kills to be hunted, a sex to be bested, impregnated, and controlled. It took roughly six months of my marriage to understand that my ex-husband really wanted a doormat and a housekeeper, not a partner; that he desired to move from his mother’s security to a wife’s security; that he expected his ideas and dreams to be validated but refused to offer the same validation in return.
There’s a reason my partner and I are not now and never plan to be married.
Evelyn believes she wants the wedding, the home, the picket fence, the stability, the relative boredom of the average whitewashed day-to-day life. She wants to be pregnant, become a mom. But what she really wants is to want all those things. Yet, despite her best efforts, her ennui is real, as is her apathy. Like Plath before her, Evelyn wants to want the prescribed life, but the pill is bitter and refuses to go down.
Problem is, Evelyn has never taken the time to really figure out what she does want and how to get that want for herself.
I didn’t think I was going to like The Bell Jar, but I do like research and accepted the challenge. Turns out, I found the book to be wonderful if vastly different than accepted.
Maybe it’s because I’m a misunderstood woman—a person who follows the terrain-theory of disease rather than the culturally accepted germ theory, a person who radically is building work for myself rather than accepting employment, a person who can’t even discuss current American politics because most others are asking and answering the wrong questions from a philosophical perspective—but I identified with Esther Greenwood right away, understood her concerns and fears, and knew just what she meant when she indicated she didn’t want the average, boring life.
Esther Greenwood isn’t crazy. Far from it.
She’s a fantastic example of a modern woman living in a world that hates women.
Have you read The Bell Jar? If so but years ago, have you re-read it recently, especially in context of Dr. Jessica Taylor’s anti-pathology work, or against non-fiction books like Barbara Taylor’s memoir, The Last Asylum, or Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain?
Because once you see that most labels of ‘crazy’ are merely deviations from the old white norm, I suspect you won’t be able to unsee how that label is used to discredit women.
♥ Fal
P.S. Want to know what I’m reading next? I’m on The Storygraph.
P.P.S. Epstein didn’t kill himself. Probably Diddy didn’t
After reading this, I really want to read The Bell Jar! Thank you. :)