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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar was Syliva Plath's masterpiece novel. A month after it was published in 1963, she put her head in a gas oven in London, committing suicide at the age of 30. And, Michael Spring writes in this contemporary reappraisal, that's what The Bell Jar is about
by Michael Spring
The opening sentence of The Bell Jar is a little less meditative perhaps than the start of Pride and Prejudice, but it does rather clamp its jaws on the imagination:
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
The Bell Jar is often described as 'the story of a breakdown', 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. It's 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 her is to be uncomfortable, awkward and humiliated, and no wonder she fights back with lies and deceit. More than that though, to be alive 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 as losing her virginity.
Set against all this are the efforts of those trying to inspire her, give her a sense of purpose and make her 'well' in the end. They are the people trying to show her that the world is good, 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 Hamlet'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. And sometimes, as Buddy Willard does when telling her how to ski, propelling 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 perhaps?) watch their subjects writhe in agony, under the bell jar. In this world, suicide is the logic, not life, and when Joan, the previous girlfriend of the emergent doctor, Buddy Willard, finally achieves that goal, it feels like a victory, as though she has succeeded in escaping. Esther remains confined, still the subject of a terrible experiment in which sex brings her closer to death than all her own suicidal instincts.
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 for ever. In the end, its effect is temporary. Just a month after this book was published, Sylvia Plath committed suicide, putting her head in a gas oven in London, aged 30.
(c) Michael Spring 2009
Reviewed 20 January 2009 / London
NOTES - The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963); first published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. In print and available. A current edition is ISBN - 9780571226160, publisher - Faber and Faber, paperback 234 pages, date of publication - 2 June 2005 (www.waterstones.com). Websites about the book include www.sylviaplath.de/plath/belljar.html.
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012