The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Source of book: I own this.

 

This book was this month’s selection for The Literary Lush Book Club, our monthly gathering of friends to discuss books. It is difficult to believe, but I think I have been part of this club for seven years? It has been a wonderful experience because of the great people who are part of it. 

 

This book has an interesting back story within our club. Typically, we nominate books for a three-month period, then vote. Top three win, and we read those. The fourth most popular book gets renominated for December - our “second chance” month. 

 

This cycle, one of the books that won was nominated by a friend. It looked interesting to me, and apparently enough of us agreed. 

 

The problem was, nobody noticed that it wouldn’t actually be published until….December. So much for that. This meant kind of a last minute pivot. We picked The Bell Jar because it came in fourth and because it was easy to obtain quickly. I myself found a cheap paperback to add to my library. 

I wanted to find a less depressing picture of Plath - she was more than her illness and suicide.

I was surprised at this book, honestly. I expected it to be really dark and depressing. It isn’t. It is actually full of humor and positivity, and brilliant writing. Sure, it is about a descent into mental illness and attempted suicide, but it is about a lot of other things as well. 

 

The tragedy of Plath’s life is well known, of course. She committed suicide at age 30, during a time of incredible stress. Her life choices were, more than anything else, catastrophic for a person like herself - but they were made largely in response to societal pressures and expectations. One wonders if she had been born in the 1980s rather than the 1930s, if she would have felt free to eschew marriage and motherhood, as well as found better help for her mental health. If only…

 

The book does have its flaws. Most notably, the kind of casual racism that is unfortunately common in white writers of the 20th Century. And also, a lot of casual homophobia and gay stereotyping that has aged terribly. At least in the case of the latter, she has the excuse that the science hadn’t caught up with reality yet, and she died six years before Stonewall brought gay rights to the attention of the mainstream. 

 

I would also say that the book has some uneven writing, as one would expect for a first novel by a young writer. When the writing is good, it is really good, but there are some clunky spots too. 

 

As with any semi-autobiographical work, it is difficult to tell where Plath’s reality ends and fiction begins. She didn’t want the book published in the United States, because she knew people would recognize themselves in the book. Her mother was a bit traumatized, which is too bad, because I felt that it was a rather sympathetic portrayal. Anyone who thinks the mother is the villain in this book has missed the point. 

 

For many of us in the book club, we saw ourselves in Plath’s protagonist, Esther. For me, the feeling of being good at school, but not at life, reminds me SO MUCH of my early 20s. I have always had Imposter Syndrome, so Esther’s struggles really resonated for me. 

 

Another club member pointed out that he felt the core of the book was Esther’s metaphor of the fig tree. She sits on a branch, unable to decide which fig to eat, and while she fails to decide, they wither and rot and she starves. 

 

This too is real. Trying to choose a life path is tough, and sometimes all those choices can be paralyzing. 

 

Given the social pressures Esther is under: growing up poor due to her father’s untimely death, her constant pressure to excel so she can get scholarships, the competing pressure to marry money and stability, her difficulty in social situations that the rich girls thrive in - it actually feels perfectly natural that she goes crazy. From inside Esther’s head, a mental breakdown and suicide feel perfectly logical. That is the power of the book, bringing all that to life. 

 

But amidst this are so many humorous observations. Esther’s takedown of the fashion industry in New York City, the incident where the young women all get violently ill from food poisoning, the petty politics in mental institutions, and so many more, are laugh out loud funny. Again, I was not expecting that. 

 

I ended up writing down a bunch of lines that I loved in the book, for various reasons. 

 

I’ll start with a fun legal thing from the introduction. The book was first published in England, but Plath didn’t want it published in the United States. The problem wasn’t merely that copies could be - and indeed were - smuggled in. The law at the time (“Ad Interim”) was that any book by an American citizen and first published abroad had to be published in the US within 6 months, or it became public domain. 

 

Yikes! 

 

So, American publishers figured out really quick that they could simply publish it without paying royalties. This put Plath’s estate in a bind, and it had to agree to release the US rights and publish the book, so they could could get paid - it was going to be published either way. 

 

The book starts with Esther’s trip to New York, for an internship of sorts. She and the other young women were expected to enjoy the city, but Esther can’t seem to do so. 

 

I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react.

 

This really sets the stage for her eventual breakdown. It is a classic symptom of depression or a depressive episode. 

 

The one thing that does seem to break through for her is a hot bath. Her description is amazing. 

 

I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath. I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

 

I also loved her bit about how to survive an upscale dinner. 

 

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty. 

 

She recalls an earlier incident, when she made a pretty hilarious mistake. 

 

That was where I saw my first fingerbowl. The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done. 

 

One line that got a lot of discussion at our club was the passage where Esther recounts all of the things she can’t do. 

 

I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. 

 

That’s where the fig tree story comes in.

 

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 Contantin 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. 

 

That’s just brilliant. Looking back from nearly a half century old, I can certainly see how each decision has foreclosed many others. Some of these decisions I made myself, and I generally think I made the choices I would take again. Others were made for me, sometimes against my will, by my parents, and those are the ones I “regret” the most, although there is always the question of if I had been, for example, in a position to marry my wife if we hadn’t gone down the cult route. So it’s complicated. 

 

“Constantin,” by the way, is a vaguely foreign guy Esther goes out with. She ends up a bit disappointed that he isn’t interested in being her first sexual partner. But the food, though, that’s another matter. 

 

Constantin’s restaurant smelt of herbs and spices and sour cream. All the time I had been in New York I had never found such a restaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, where they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.

To reach this sort of restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar. 

 

My travel advice for everyone: wherever you go, no matter where you are, find this kind of restaurant. 

 

The book is also very much about sex, and coming-of-age, and especially about the double standard. When Esther finds out that Buddy, the local boy she thinks she is going to marry, has had a month’s long fling with a waitress, she decides that keeping herself “pure” is overrated, and seeks throughout the book to toss her virginity to….someone. Whoever she can get. 

 

There are multiple flashbacks in the book, often involving boys she knew. She mentions Eric, a southern boy at Yale, who she considers sleeping with, until he tells how he lost his virginity in a brothel. It wasn’t a thrilling experience. 

 

It was boring as going to the toilet. I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldn’t seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. 

 

Yeesh. That’s pretty sad too. I for one think that sex with a woman you love isn’t close to boring, but maybe your mileage might vary. 

 

This episode led to a recollection of one of those “purity culture” articles Esther read, that claimed that the best men were virgins on the wedding night, and even if they weren’t, they would want to be the ones to teach their virgin wives about sex. And how men lose all respect for a woman who will sleep with them (or others) and yada yada yada. (Been there, heard that a few thousand times…) Esther has a different perspective. 

 

Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt. 

It might be nice to be pure and then to marry a pure man, but what if he suddenly confessed he wasn’t pure after we were married, the way Buddy Willard had? I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a pure single life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not. 

 

Esther is right, of course. The whole point of the sexual double standard has always been to keep men from having to raise children that aren’t biologically theirs. It is solely from the male perspective, addresses male concerns, and really expects male ownership of women. 

 

Also, as an attorney who has done family law for a couple decades, I can attest that sexual experience is actually not related to success or failure of a marriage. (Unless someone chooses to make it an issue.) I have seen two-virgin marriages come apart viciously, and I have seen excellent and lasting marriages between two people who had prior spouses and partners. If you are going to focus on anything, find a spouse who matches you in their approach to financial matters - and who is willing to be an equal breadwinner. Trust me on this - egalitarian marriages with financial compatibility are the most lasting statistically. 

 

Whether or not Esther is justified in despising Buddy for his fling, what is clear is that she does not love him anyway, and he is a bit of a prick - a normal prick for the 1950s white culture - but still a prick. 

 

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 any more. 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.

 

Unfortunately, that was the reality for too many women in that era. And even our own. There is still definitely that expectation in some subcultures. My parents fully expected that after having children, my wife would “feel differently” about her career. When it turned out she didn’t feel differently, and went back to work after each birth, they felt obliged to despise and denigrate her (particularly my mother.) 

 

In Plath’s actual life, she married poet Ted Hughes, who was abusive, but even more than that, entitled. Sure, she wanted to write and all, but he still expected her to do all the child care, all the housework, all the cooking. 

 

I think she would have been far happier had she felt free to be childless. But at least he could have helped out equally. More on this later. 

 

There is another passage where she talks about a certain incompatibility with Buddy that sounded very familiar. To be clear here: no two people are completely “compatible” and if they could be, things would likely be boring. 

 

I found it hard to imagine Buddy lying quietly. His whole philosophy of life was to be up and doing every second. Even when we went to the beach in the summer he never lay down to drowse in the sun the way I did. He ran back and forth or played ball or did a little series of rapid pushups to use the time.

 

This is me and my wife at times. I am the one who likes to vacation hard, to be doing stuff. She likes to rest and relax. We compromise on this like we do on other things, and we actually do enjoy vacationing with each other. But we have different natural styles, which is why we also vacation separately from time to time. (I camp, she chills at the beach…) 

 

Esther’s first real shot at sex comes when a friend of her friend’s current flame takes her out to a party, and eventually tries to rape her. This is one incident where there is some unfortunate homophobia on display. 

 

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Women-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one. 

 

While in its most obvious sense, she means he is a misogynist - and he is. But it is also implied that he swings the other way, so to speak. Again, this is a dated and inaccurate stereotype about gay men: that they are irresistible to women, and that they hate women, leading to rape. Ouch. 

 

Later in the book, after Buddy is sent to a sanitarium for tuberculosis, and falls in love with a nurse, that nurse has a mental break and ends up in the same mental hospital as Esther. It is strongly implied that Joan, is at least bisexual. She is caught in a compromising position with another woman, and she goes on and on about Buddy’s mother. 

 

I think there is also the implication that Joan has the hots for Esther, and, after Esther finally does have sex, relapses and commits suicide. Yeah, kind of some bad “lesbian dies at the end” vibes there. 

 

There is also this:

 

I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.

 

Esther, for her part, can’t bond with anyone, so she pushes Joan away. This passage is fascinating for its depiction of how mental illness alienates. 

 

I looked at Joan. In spite of the creepy feelings, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own. 

 

There is a fascinating scene after Joan’s death, when Buddy shows up to visit Esther, and notes that both women he has wanted to marry have attempted suicide. He wonders if it is him, or them. 

 

Many many years later, after Ted Hughes’ longtime partner committed suicide, he wondered the same thing. Was he seeing himself in The Bell Jar? 

 

I also liked the description of the psychiatrist’s office. She skewers psychiatrists throughout the book, and it hits home because there still is a lot of god-complex and condescension in the profession. 

 

Doctor Gordon’s waiting room was hushed and beige. The walls were beige, and the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. 

 

Here we are in the 21st Century and the era of beige has returned…

 

As the book comes to a close, there are a lot of further musings about marriage and sex and children. Some of these come when she is being fitted with a diaphragm. 

 

She also makes the mistake of looking through an issue of Baby Talk, and the babies all nauseate her. Nope, she should not have had children. 

 

“What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,” I had told Doctor Nolan. “A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.” 

 

And also:

 

I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: “I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless…” 

 

This really is the great freedom that contraception has brought: the freedom to not get stuck. I have long wondered about the risk women take when marrying, particularly without sexual experience. A man is pretty guaranteed to be able to orgasm, but if statistics are any indication, a hell of a lot of men can’t find a clitoris with a map. If nothing else, a little experience can determine if a man is willing to learn or not, if they make female pleasure a priority. 

 

Just one of many things that I have reconsidered over the last few decades. So many things have their roots in either racism or misogyny, and finding an ethical way forward often means reconsidering things that I was taught were right and wrong, whether female subservience, or human sexuality. 

 

Anyway, I enjoyed this book, found it better than expected, and can see why it is considered an essential classic of the mid-20th Century.