The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

‘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’

Like so many women before me, I read The Bell Jar in my twenties. I thought it was ‘cool’. Sylvia Plath’s mystic was part of the allure. Forty years later, and with plenty of life experience under my belt, I responded to the book quite differently.

Esther Greenwood comes across as a cynical young woman, out to get as much from life as possible, with as little effort as possible: ‘I felt wise and cynical as hell’. She is totally self-absorbed with little to no empathy for others’ feelings. She is particularly cynical about marriage and men: ‘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’. Later in the novel, after seeing two women kissing, Esther asks her doctor ‘What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?’ And the doctor replies, ‘Tenderness’.

Esther spirals into depression; suicidal thoughts are followed by an attempt to end her life. Time spent in an asylum follows, where she is treated with electrotherapy (remember, this is set in the 1950s).

This is not a jolly read. Esther surrenders to her fate: she lets her mother and other figures of authority take control of her life. I wanted to shake her awake and tell her to take back her control.

Plath’s prose is sometimes quite flat, which adds to the sense of depression and hopelessness that Esther is feeling. But then she writes a paragraph like this: ‘When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies’ Day offices, the streets were grey and fuming with rain. It wasn’t the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete’.

How to describe depression? Plath describes it like this: ‘I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.’ She uses the metaphor of being trapped in a bell jar ‘stewing in her own sour air’ to illustrate her sense of isolation and alienation from the rest of society. Much of the novel is said to be based on Plath’s own experiences, and this is reflected in the raw honesty of the book.

Reviewed by Gaby Meares
Murder on a Monday Reading Group