The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath

Before picking up a book, like any bibliophile, I have a run at the myriad book reviews, not just any one, go-to book reviewer, but any number of them. After reading the blurb, getting an idea of the premise of the book, and the general hoo-haa around it, finally feeling satiated that it ticks all the checkboxes in my "must read" checklist, I place the order, wait with bated breath, in fervid anticipation of the arrival, imagining the moment I'll be holding the paperback in my hands, feeling the extent of the expansive written world in front of me, wishing with all my heart that it was endless, pining for a second of freedom to be prised away from the relentless, exhaustive mundane chores, aching to be invisible, and like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, just slip into my world of fiction, get lost in it forever.

As I go through that painstaking process of "vetting" a book, judging if it's worth my precious time, and assiduously calculating if it deserves a spot in my already crammed book shelf, I make the decision to go for the kill and get the book.

The Bell Jar, though most worshipped book of the most ardent Plath fan, went through the same rigorous vetting process, and finally, reached me. No where in my thorough digging, written and video, did I imagine the profound impact it'd have on me as a reader, and as a fellow human being.

Going straight for it. The review.

The Bell Jar has a very special place in my heart, a unique, sacred place. Note, how I am not using adjectives like "my most favourite" or "one of my favourite" books. It was nothing like I expected it to be. The reviews online touted the book as the "ultimate mental health guide".

Well, although I don't completely disagree, I feel calling it just a "guide" or a "journal on mental health" is pigeon-holing a remarkable piece of literature, relegating it to one genre, confining its expansive scope to a very limited, stifling "mental health" box.

To me, the book was a very personal invitation into Sylvia's thoughts, her inner world; the reader is privy to her most private thoughts. Now, like all humans, not all her thoughts are pleasant and delectable, some are judgemental, some baleful, some very uncharitable.

Nonetheless, it's her thoughts, very original, and honest. And all she expects in return is for the reader to view her world with a non-judgemental eye.

The reader is taken through a journey of her struggles, dilemmas, desperations, typical of a woman in a patriarchal world; that seems to stifle her with its lop-sided, parochial expectations, reservations, sometimes with blatant cruelty.

In the very first page, the narrator, Esther, alludes to the electrocution of a couple. Although, it seems as a stand alone mention, towards the end, the spine-chilling connection of this incident to her own life, emerges.

In the initial few pages, a lot of run-of-the-mill incidents are narrated, that leaves the reader questioning whether the writer has any real direction or story at all, but a patient reader is rewarded in the end. None of those "mundane" incidents were purposeless.

THE HUMOR IN THE PROSE

Another very surprising factor, that I least expected from a Sylvia Plath book, least of all from a book touted by many as a "mental health journal" is sarcasm, her unmistakable penchant for humour.

She deftly weaves some very well-placed witty, sardonic remarks in the story. These statements or anecdotes sit so innocuously in between a very ordinary paragraph, that it takes an invested reader to discern it.

The part where she narrates about her "unsettling experience trying to tip people in New York" is a case in point. Hilarious to the core.

RELATIONSHIP WITH HER PARENTS

Intermittently, she alludes to her father. The loss of her father at the tender age of 9, leaves Esther distraught and broken.

When Esther's mother, worried sick for her daughter's sleeplessness, and abysmal socialising skills, suggests taking her to a psychiatrist, Esther complies, almost never resisting.

Though she shudders at the thought of getting locked up at an asylum, and the threat of shock treatments scared her thoroughly, she never once protests.

Why? Did she think her family was embarrassed of her?

"The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you."

In one episode where Esther visits her father's grave after so many years, she is instantly moved to tears at the very sight of his grave lying in complete neglect.

How she thought of paying back her father for all the years of neglect by tending to his grave.

How she finally breaks down sitting beside his graveyard, and "howled her loss into the cold salt rain."

All leaves one wondering at how complicated Esther's relationship with her meagre family is portrayed in the book, with very slim chances of redemption, what with a dead father, long gone, and a mother who speaks a very different language than Esther.

FEMINISM IN THE BELL JAR

Esther makes some honest revelations like

"I hate the idea of serving men in any way,"

how a life of cooking eggs and bacon, washing dirty dishes was a waste of life for

"A girl with 15 years of straight A's"

immortalizing Sylvia Plath with the dyed-in-the wool-feminist brush.

She brings the reader's attention to a particular article, ostensibly speaking for the women folk, and written by a women, is still woefully failing to address the main issue at hand, and that is how the article fails spectacularly to explore "how a girl felt".

And how when Buddy Willard, her first, stable boyfriend very matter-of-factly remarks that he is absolutely ok with her penchant for reading and writing because he firmly believed that she wouldn't "want" to write poems once she had had children.

She deliberates her options, comparing her prospects of marriage and children or a life of successful career as a writer, or an editor, to that of figs hanging in a huge tree and how in her torturous dilemma to choose any one fig, only at the risk of losing all else, laments how a women has to forgo all her ambitions and aspirations of a full-fledged career if she is to have a family or vice versa.

And one stops to wonder, should one really relegate her arguments to mere lamentations of a feminist?

Shouldn't one deliberate on the subject, especially, given that despite seven decades passing since this book was first published, the 21st century women are still stuck in the same quandary.

Being a woman myself, I found a small voice within myself, chiming in complete consonance with Sylvia Plath when she wrote:

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

[caveat: women haters come in all genders, shapes, and sizes.]

ON SELF-HARM

Repetitively, she alludes to death. Sometimes, poetically, as in the unmissable suggestion that when Esther's vexed mind birthed the idea of self-harm, it came so naturally to her,

"as coolly as a tree or a flower."

Sometimes, very poetically, like in expressing her wish to

"melt into a passing cloud"

or more morbidly when she wrote:

"The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom. "

THE BELL JAR REFERENCES

"The air in the bell jar waded around me, and I couldn't stir."

"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream."

I am leaving the explanations to these references as a food for thought for all my dear book-lovers here, to go and research, maybe read the book, and derive your own conclusions.

Wrapping up...

The book ends with a smidgeon of hope that Esther is "cured". But the very fact that Sylvia Plath killed herself in the most gruesome manner, almost a month after completing this book evinces a bitter truth.

When Esther narrates about her second experience of electro therapy, she tries to convince her readers about the calm she felt, much unlike her first shock treatment experience.

When the brilliant, enigmatic, remarkably talented, prodigious Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven, was it her desperate attempt to achieve that calm, by trying to silence her perpetually chattering mind?

Thanks for reading it till here, patient reader.

Much appreciated. Like someone wise once said writing is its own reward. No likes or appreciations anticipated. So everything is a bonus.

"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 a kitchen mat."