The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

So, I read The Bell Jar by Slyvia Plath.

It’s a classic. I am not all for classics, I always thought they were boring and irrelevant and there is absolutely no reason as to why I should dig my nose in them when dystopian novels and indulgent literature exists, until I came across this one. In my quest to read something different, I opened the ‘to-read’ section of my goodreads account and found it to be on the top of that list. Finding the PDF version of it in my laptop already, I began reading it. I have been swooned into books but the writing in this one is ‘immersive’ to a point where it gets dillusional. You simply can’t stop turning pages or ‘clicking to the next one’ like in my case.

Now, there is some air around Slyvia Plath. Since we were kids studying in the school, we all must have come across at least one poem written by her, for me it was ‘daddy’. I remember my teacher before she starded reading out the poem to us, briefing us about how she used to be depressed and there was a series of things falling out in her life, one after another, and also one thing which I triggered as a first memory attached to the name Slvyia Plath was that she commited suicide by putting her head inside of an oven. Now that’s amusing to a fourteen year old. Also outrageous. But that’s not what this blog is going to be about, its about my experience of reading this masterpiece which happens to be her only novel, that too she confessed to not be a ‘serious work’ to be published.

The Bell Jar is about a nineteen year old girl who has come to New York on an esteemed publishing scholarship from North England. Now that draws a few lines in the minds of a reader already. Like yeah, she is young, beautiful, talented and has come to a big city on a paid scholarship so life must be a bed of roses or an adventure, of sorts. In fact, there is even a line in this novel, when Esther, the protagonist, says “I was supposed to be having the time of my life”. What actually happens to her life is a little different. Very different.

The shifts to an adoloscent life were not the smoothest for her. In a perfect life setting where any one could have a time of her life she spills milk and stamps on the whole wet floor with her dirty feet over new experiences and life events of her youth. She has this exciting scholarship but she believes she will not be able to live upto it. She undermines herself greatly. She has this amazing set of friends at New York, the one she even lives with in the hotel, Betty and Doreem but she thinks low and envious of them or find one or the other fault to despise. Half-way through the book you will get an idea that behind her very strong wave of narcissism there lies something supressed which sours basically her whole life from there on. She is really muddled in her head, for instance, she had this lover in her college, Buddy williard who has a very strong role to play in the story. She messes it up, too.

Buddy Williard respected her poetic sensibilities and thought of her an an intelligent women. Esther too thought well of him and grew so fond of him that she thought she could give up his poetic career and bear kids with him. But all that changed on one day, when Buddy confessed to have slept with a nurse in his summer days at the hospital. She thought of him to be shallow because his sexual experience wasn’t limited or initiated with her, she did not have that exclusivity in his life any more. She always wanted more. She yearned for more and was dissapointed. She digged her own grave for her own sadness when even a speck of it was around like in this part when shes watching a betty and a guy getting intimate.

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction — every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”

In the narrative there also lies an analogy (mentioned below) which sums up the book perfectly for me. I was going through the pages swiftly, untill I read this and felt like someone bringing the body of Sylvia Plath in front of me to give a high-five. This is the current state of my life, the agony of my days. And for the fact that it has been put up in words by someone meant a huge deal for me. There are these moments in a reader’s experience when a line strikes the perfect chord and you just end up staring at the wall for a minute. This one felt the same provided a shudder of intensity.

“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 Constantin 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.”

What happens after this part of the book was a blur, I remember skipping my dinner because I just couldnt stop reading, my eyes couldn’t stop scanning the lines. But as far as I remember she falls sick and then the whole scene where she is given electrical shocks and then she’s hallucinating. She had a few intresting encounters in the hospital with a maths teacher, her dooctor, the novelist who paid for the medication and a fellow companion in the hospital who eventually commited suicide. And her?Even by the end she is still trapped in the bell jar as she sums it up perfectly — “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”

This book is considered to be an important classic and also as a feminist literature because it potrayed what women in fifties went through, they were at the gun point of society to act a certain way and make decisions. The book is relevant to the women today and the fact that women living the life she wants still remains a ‘luxury’ than a ‘choice’ speaks volumes for its own self.

The reason I loved this book and I believe it will resonate with any person vulnerable enough to be honest about it is, we all have at some point of time in our lives have felt like we were spiralling downwards to depths and feel a strong negation when we were meant to feel good. Though hers was an extreme case, she was in depression and also she ended her life between trying to choose the right ‘fig’ and the guilt of picking the ‘wrong one’. Her analogy of the fig tree became the story of her death.