October 2009

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

Esther Greenwood, seems to have the perfect life. She has received numerous awards for her poetry and writing and is on scholarship at a prestigious women's college. She wind a month long job assignment in New York City for a women's magazine. To the outside world it would seem that she is living a dream life:

dining on sumptuous meals, hobnobbing with celebrities, and being showered with gifts, all courtesy of the magazine. Inside, however, she is wrenched with confusion. She struggles within herself to reconcile her desires to become a writer in a world where women are expected to be perfect housewives and mothers as well as her desires for sexual equality in a world where women are expected to be pure and virginal, but men are free to experiment with sexuality without fear of pregnancies or ruined reputations.

As she returns home for the remainder of the summer, her thoughts turn increasingly melancholy. Her application for a much-coveted summer school writing course is rejected. To ass insult to injury, she learns that her boyfriend is having feelings for another woman and is not a virgin as he has led her to believe. She begins a rapid decent into a deep depression unable to eat, read, or sleep.

Eventually Esther attempts a near-fatal suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. She ends up in an asylum convinced that her case is without hope. From this point forward, we get a fascinating glimpse into just how far the treatment of depression has come in recent decades. Esther's treatment involves insulin injections, psychotherapy (her mother feels guilty that she may have make mistakes during toilet training), and eventually electroshock therapy.

After several months, she is released to return to school. As she recovers, she uses the apt analogy of the distorted view of the world seen from within a bell jar to describe her former condition. Esther states near the end of the book:

How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with it's stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

This quote becomes all the more poignant when one discovers that only a month after "The Bell Jar", her first novel, was published, Sylvia Plath took her own life. One wonders if things would have been different had she lived today.