The Bell Jar was the novel to read if you were a deep, brooding young woman in our gifted language arts class in high school. I could only get half way through it at sixteen, but Sylvia Plath had an impact on me with her acerbic language, the fact she committed suicide, and the iconic feminist she symbolized. One almost must be older, have lived in New York, and be able to place the historical context of the novel to truly appreciate its complexities. The opening line, “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” sets the tone and place of our story. Plath’s voice and style then resounds with, “It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.” Here, her dark, morbid, graphic language invites the reader for a ride that will not be the stereotypical feminine fifties Donna Reed.
Plath breaks not only the feminine wall of proper, but also writes with metacognitive reflection:
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent leather pocketbook to match. She explores the image society and Vogue has set forth for women, bubbling class issues, and her realization of how she fits in amongst the intellectual, elite crowd. Raised Unitarian, Plath went to public schools, her father died young, and she was on scholarship to Smith College. This is her first voyeur out of her town to the big city.
Mrs. Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first fingerbowl.
The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.Here is the cultural deficit in Plath’s education—she doesn’t even realize she has broken the dining, decorative code of conduct because she didn’t even know what it was.
Plath has a keen eye for the double standard of sexuality between men and women and demonstrates the hypocrisy in her characters. Women are expected to wait until marriage. But the clean image of the medical student she is dating is shattered when she finds out he is no longer a virgin. “Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.” The ramifications pertaining to this new knowledge extend to all the women in his life:
Buddy was amazingly close to his mother. He was always quoting what she said about the relationship between a man and a woman, and I knew Mrs. Willard was a real fanatic about virginity for men and women both. When I first went to her house for supper she gave me a queer, shrewd, searching look, and knew she was trying to tell whether I was a virgin or not.
Esther asks Buddy, her dating companion from Yale, if he has ever had an affair. He has, with a waitress. When asked what he told his mother, he replies, “I said Gladys was free, white and twenty-one.” Here, Plath demonstrates the juxtaposition of race and prostitution with a single quip. Esther is disgusted by this, “I thought the TB might just be a punishment for living the kind of double life Buddy lived and feeling so superior to people.”
Plath says through the character of Esther, “How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?” Ironically, Plath writes this novel, these words, after her own breakdown. But given the patronizing time she was living in, it is no wonder she was trapped in “The Bell Jar” and given shock treatments. An intellectual woman, an outcast, apart from her society due to the fact that she is ahead of her time in her progressive thinking, she sheds lights on the doctors and mental health staff treating her.
There is a conflict of power, shown in the following scene:
“Why can’t I see a mirror?” I had been dressed in a sheath, striped gray and white, like mattress ticking, with a wide, shiny red belt, and they had propped me up in an armchair. “Why can’t I?”
“Because you better not.” The nurse shut the lid of the overnight case with a little snap.
“Why?”
“Because you don’t look very pretty”.
Here, a woman’s place is to look pretty, but after having a shaved head from shock treatments, who is responsible for the product of mental health treatment in this era?
My mother’s mouth tightened. “You should have behaved better, then.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t have broken that mirror. Then maybe they’d have let you stay.” But of course I knew the mirror had nothing to do with it.
Due to “bad” behavior, she is transferred to another institution where she meets her first woman psychiatrist.
I told Doctor Nolan about the machine, and the blue flashes, and the jolting and the noise. While I was telling her she went very still.
“ That was a mistake,” she said then. “It’s not supposed to be like that.”
“I stared at her.
“ If it’s done properly,” Doctor Nolan said, “it’s like going to sleep.”
“If anyone does that to me again I’ll kill myself.”
Doctor Nolan said firmly, “You won’t have any shock treatments here. Or if you do,” she amended, “I’ll tell you about it beforehand and I promise you it won’t be anything like what you had before. Why,” she finished, “some people even like them.” Killing herself is not only an escape from the abuse of the mental hospital, but a verbal expression of taking back her power with the treating psychiatrist. She does endure more shock treatments, and her friend, Joan, ends up hanging herself. As Esther questions her own responsibility in the death, it is ironic, how the doctor detaches her own responsibility in the death.
“Of course you didn’t do it!” I heard Doctor Nolan say. I had come to her about Joan, and it was the only time I remember her sounding angry. “Nobody did it. She did it.” And then Doctor Nolan told me how the best of psychiatrist have suicides among their patients, and how they, if anybody, should be held responsible, but how they, on the contrary, do not hold themselves responsible….This idea of responsibility, of “having the time of my life,” of being grateful for the gifts of education and experience threads throughout the novel.
I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. This mentor Mrs. Guinea, “at one time, at the peak of her career, she had been in an asylum as well.”
My mother said that Mrs. Guinea had sent her a telegram from the Bahamas, where she read about me in a Boston paper. Mrs. Guinea had telegrammed, “Is there a boy in the case?”
If there was a boy in the case, Mrs. Guinea couldn’t, of course, have anything to do with it.
But my mother had telegrammed back, “No, it is Esther’s writing. She thinks she will never write again.”
Originally, Plath had hesitation in publishing The Bell Jar in the United States due to its autobiographical nature and her concern for its portrayal of her mother. When it was published, the Feminist movement was on the rise, and Plath’s voice echoed from the grave what silenced women longed to say and hear. Plath’s personal story became a backbone to issues of women as an artist, the mental health care of women, and the domestication of the woman as a wife. Once Plath separated from Hughes, she was able to find herself as a writer again and hone her creative energies. In a letter to her mother, she writes, “Living apart from Ted is wonderful—I am no longer in his shadow, and it is heaven to be liked for myself alone, knowing what I want.”
Plath is considered a Feminist in the ways she graphically writes about sex, not necessarily romanticizing it, but as the character Esther has clung to it, then, finally gets rid of it. It is a badge of honor, of power, of transformation. She writes about the ritual of losing her virginity:
“You know, Irwin, I think I ought to tell you, I’m a virgin.”
Irwin laughed and flung me down on the bed.
A few minutes later an exclamation of surprise revealed that Irwin hadn’t really believed me. I thought how lucky it was I had started practicing birth control during the day, because in my winey state that night I would never have bothered to perform the delicate and necessary operation. I lay, rapt and naked, on Irwin’s rough blanket, waiting for the miraculous change to make itself felt.
But all I felt was sharp, startling bad pain.
“It hurts,” I said. “Is it supposed to hurt?”
Esther discovers she is bleeding:
Then the stories of blood-stained bridal sheets and capsules of red ink bestowed on already deflowered brides floated back to me. I wondered how much I would bleed, and lay down, nursing the towel. It occurred to me that the blood was my answer. I couldn’t possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of a great tradition.
Plath proudly writes about using birth control, having sex before marriage, and celebrating female sexuality in the fifties, a historically repressed generation. Simultaneously, she does it through Esther, a woman being treated at a mental institution.
Plath addresses the stigma of a mental breakdown:
Doctor Nolan had said, quite bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a leper with a warning bell. My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
“We’ll take up where we left off, Esther,” she had said, with her sweet, martyr’s smile. “We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.”
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. Plath takes us back to the point in the story where Esther is viewing the “big glass bottles full of babies that had died before they were born.” Esther is “quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things.” Plath has endured shock treatments, stared and studied where others look away, and brought these issues through metaphor in her writings. Her death immortalizes her work, forming its own dream for others to interpret.
Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, writes in the foreword to Ariel:
It appeared to me that my father’s editing of Ariel was seen to “interfere” with the sanctity of my mother’s suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous, but that was because my father made it appear so, even playing me a record of my mother reading her poetry so I could hear her voice again. It was many years before I discovered my mother had a ferocious temper and a jealous streak, in contrast to my father’s more temperate and optimistic nature, and that she had on two occasions destroyed my father’s work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it. I’d been aghast that my perfect image of her, attached to my last memories, was so unbalanced. But my mother, inasmuch as she was an exceptional poet, was also a human being and I found comfort in restoring the balance; it made sense of her for me. The outbursts were the exception, not the rule. Life at home was generally quiet, and my parent’s relationship was hardworking and companionable. However, as her daughter, I needed to know the truth of my mother’s nature—as I did my father’s—since it was to help me understand my own.When the film Sylvia came out in 2003, Frieda expressed no interest in seeing it because she was more interested in her mother’s “life, than death.” Frieda would not release the rights to any of her mother’s poetry for the film. The film explores themes of Plath’s intuition at her husband having an affair. Having watched it a second time, it is also clear how her husband could have manipulated her mental health issues to his advantage. One might say he has been able to manipulate his own image by controlling (and in some cases censoring himself out of her work) the rights to Plath’s publishing. Plath and Hughes son, Nicolas, hanged himself in 2009.
Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, whom she was separated at the time of her death, but not divorced, felt a sense of responsibility in editing her work. The complexities of an intimate relationship are not for an outsider to judge. However, it has been commented on that Hughes’ second wife, Assia Wevill, the woman he had an affair with during his and Plath’s marriage, committed suicide in the same manner as Plath. When she laid down to die, though, she also took their four-year-old daughter to death with her. Apparently, Hughes never acknowledged the child as his own. It is said that Assia could not compete with Sylvia, not even dead Sylvia.
As a graduate student, Nan Cohen put the quote, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch” in our poetry packet for Core. “Morning Song” is about the birth of her child and being a mother, but one can’t help think of the temptuous relationship Plath had with Hughes. It has been almost twenty years since I was first introduced to Sylvia Plath. Whereas once I could not finish
The Bell Jar, I understand it with much more depth because of my own personal experience as a woman living in New York, an academic overachiever when I was in school, and the perspective of a Feminist in how women’s mental health issues were addressed. The ending of The Bell Jar does not tie everything up with a bow:
“Don’t be scared,” Doctor Nolan had said. “I’ll be there, and the rest of the doctors you know, and some visitors, and Doctor Vining, the head of all the doctors, will ask you a few questions, and then you can go.”
But in spite of Doctor Nolan’s reassurances, I was scared to death.
I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead—after all, I had been “analyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.
I kept shooting impatient glances at the closed boardroom door. My stocking seams were straight, my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans. Something old, something new….
But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder.
“All right, Esther.” There are so many interpretations to Plath’s work and life, but as a Feminist, she told her truth. She did not paint her marriage as perfect, or her domesticity as simple, or motherhood as the end all be all. Suicide is said to be the ultimate, “F YOU.” Whether or not Plath intended to be found or not will continue to be debated, but her signature as an artist, a confessional poet, and an icon will live on.
Works ConsultedHughes, Ted. Birthday Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel The Restored Edition, with a foreward by Frieda Hughes. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.
Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, edited by Aurelia Plath. New York: Harper Collins, 1975.
Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar, with a foreward by Frances McCullough. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems, edited with an introduction by Ted Hughes. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008.
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Wagner, Erica. Ariel’s Gift Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
