The Bell Jar

I'll admit that I did not like Sylvia Plath when we had to study her poems in school. However, times and tastes change and what prompted me to read 'The Bell Jar' was finding that it references 'Finnegans Wake'. They had a copy at my library and so I decided to give it a go.

It's not a 'happy' book but it is an enjoyable read. Plath's writing style seems a bit immature but then the author is supposed to be barely 20 years old. That said, the writing seems natural for the first person and Plath throws in so many great lines seemingly out of nowhere. A favourite: “There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”

The gradual decent of Esther into mental illness is portrayed quite naturally, as you would expect Plath's firsthand experience to allow. She makes it all seem so rational when, as the reader, your viewpoint is entirely contradictory. Yet you are never left wondering 'how?', Plath serves up plenty of justification and so Esther's actions never come across as desperate. Perhaps this is the novel's greatest strength: portraying the path to suicide as something as natural as booking a holiday, complete with decisions to make and obstacles to overcome.

Of the difficulties with the novel, it is hard to relate to the treatments described as so many have been discredited or superseded. Even being committed to an institution is far rarer than in the early 1950s. But given broad public knowledge of such treatments (through other books, movies, etc.) it is not hard to comprehend the experience.

Overall, The Bell Jar is a great book and it really makes one wonder what other novels Plath would have turned out had she lived.

Esther is an interesting but (in my eyes) unsympathetic character. She has a certain manipulative streak that unsettles me. But she makes up for it by being quite humorous at times, intentional or not. Sometimes I can't quite tell if she is self aware enough of herself.

Plath, however, is completely self aware. She inserts humour in unexpected places. She makes acute observations about the characters. She is a little cynical. It's evident that Plath is in a precocious place in her psyche. And she turns it into a beautiful work of art.

It would be remiss to praise Plath but not address her racism in this book. She continuously uses "Chinaman/woman" as descriptor and an insult. She writes a grotesque caricature of a Black man in one scene. It did not wholely take me out of the reading though, since it seems very in line with Esther's character, but it is something that should be taken note of since Esther is practically an avatar for Plath's own psyche.

As for how I felt about this book... I enjoyed it. There were a lot of moments where I inwardly cringed at Esther's behaviour. But I still found her character completely compelling. It was dark, yes. An accurate portrayal of depression, yes. And an interesting look into how mental health and women are treated in the 1950s. I feel like the end kind of went over my head and will need to read this again at one point.