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Review

The Bell Jar

Michael Spring

Sylvia Plath
William Heinemann, 1963

If the opening sentence of this novel doesn’t clamp its jaws on your imagination, then I suspect you might not have all your chairs in your house:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

It’s a little less meditative perhaps than the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, but as an opening to get the hairs on the back of your neck standing up, for me, it’s absolutely unrivalled. 

The book is sometimes described as ‘the story of a breakdown’ (in the same way that War and Peace is about ‘some Russians’*), but what makes it so terrifying is the desperate logic of the nineteen-year-old Esther, a girl with intelligence every bit as razor sharp as the Gillette blades she carries, who can’t see or feel anything but a horror of living and the pointlessness of existence.

The Bell Jar is set in the America of the 1950s, the great age of American consumerism. No wonder then, that when Esther gets off the train, ‘the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn-sprinklers and station-wagons and tennis racquets and dogs and babies.’ Everything is as it should be – comfortable, optimistic, settled – and yet everything is so wrong. Esther sees and touches death everywhere.

To be alive for Esther is to be uncomfortable, awkward and humiliated, and no wonder she fights back with lies and deceit. More than that though, for her to live is to be continually appalled and revolted. 

Gradually her concentration slips away from the achievement of winning prizes and scholarships (something which to her is almost effortless) to the achievement of suicide, which turns out to be much more problematic, almost as difficult, in fact, as losing her virginity.

Set against all this, of course, are the efforts of those who are trying to inspire her, give her a sense of purpose, make her ‘well’ in the end, show her that the world is good, and whose efforts point inexorably to the almost medieval remedies available to psychiatric science at the time – electric shock treatments and (more terrifying still) lobotomy.

This is the world of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, brought to the front of the stage. All around her are desperately egocentric, uncaring and powerful madmen who can offer no solace or understanding. Often, as Buddy Willard does when telling her how to ski, they are prepared to propel her, literally, into danger, pain, defeat.

At the very best, the promise of this male-dominated world is the suburbs, childbearing, death. At worst, from the psychiatrist Dr Graham to the psychotic woman-hater Marco, the men share a desire to inflict torture, while they (like the gods of old, perhaps) watch their subjects writhe in agony, under the bell jar. 

In this world, suicide, rather than life, is the logical goal, and when Joan, the previous girlfriend of the emergent doctor, Buddy Willard, finally achieves it, it feels like a victory, as though she has succeeded in escaping, while Esther remains confined, still the subject of a terrible experiment.

The only effective therapy for Esther is writing. (The thing she takes from her month in New York is a book. If she marries and settles down, Buddy tells her, she won’t need to write poetry any more. The failure to make a high-level writing course plunges her into despair.) But even writing can’t hold the desperation at bay forever. In the end, its effect is temporary.

Just a month after this book was published, Sylvia Plath, by then the estranged wife of British poet, Ted Hughes, committed suicide, putting her head in a gas oven in London at the age of thirty.