Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar – Distorted Images allow Truth to be seen.

The beginning of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar involves electrifying foreshadowing – her heroine, Esther Greenwood, a thinly disguised version of herself, is obsessed with the Rosenbergs, who are facing electrocution.  Esther can think of no worse way to die – and, over the course of the next few months as she contemplates first one, then another, and finally hits on a surefire method to kill herself that almost does the trick, she is revived, and the bell jar of depression is lifted, by a series of jolts of electricity that she receives in the universe that parallels Sylvia Plath’s treatment at Boston’s McLean Hospital.

This is one of those novels that everyone my age should have read.  I think I started it at some point- the early chapters were familiar – but if I did, I am certain that I never finished it.  Sylvia Plath’s own suicidally depressive episode began in 1950 when she was on summer break from Smith College and interning at Mademoiselle Magazine in New York.  It continued throughout the fall and ended – or seemed on the verge of ending – in the winter. 

My own brush with McLean hospital occurred when I interviewed for an internship there in 1989 (they didn’t hire me).  It was shabby chic – the clinical offices that had two sets of doors to protect the confidences told within them – and the grounds that were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead – had the elegance and grace of New York’s Central Park, which he also designed.  It was, as it is portrayed in the novel, a place for the rich set – and had amenities that the denizens of the nearby state hospital would never have imagined. 

Before you get to thinking that Sylvia Plath was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, know that after immigrant professor Dad died when she was nine, she and her brother were raised by her mother in her grandparent’s Wellesley Massachusetts house.  Her grandfather was gone all week working as the live-in cook at a nearby country club where she would go on Sundays and dine on bits of purloined caviar, dreaming that she would one day have a wedding with unlimited caviar, all the while knowing that this would never happen.  In fact, she felt that her last happy days had been with her father, who was too mistrusting of insurance salesman to provide for her.  While she was winning awards for her writing in high school and becoming a Smith college scholarship student and then interning as a writer at Mademoiselle magazine, her mother was encouraging her to learn short hand so she would have a trade to fall back on – so that she would be able to feed herself.

What strikes me (and about every reviewer everywhere) about this book is its close resemblance in tone and structure to another must read novel for my generation – J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.  Both books are incredibly well written.  Both authors have a remarkable capacity to observe and then to translate those observations into fluid language that is evocative both of the external world they are seeing, but also of their internal feeling states.  And it is here that the parallels seem strongest.  Both narrators – each story is told in the first person – seem arch, knowing, and above it all – and, certainly as a teenager reading Catcher in the Rye – I wanted to identify with this position.  I longed to know what Holden Caulfield, the hero of that novel, knew.  I wanted, likely Holden Caulfield, to be knowing.  Of course it also the case that both narrators are deeply troubled.  As an adolescent I was more aware of Caulfield’s arch coolness, but, as an adult (and, as a friend who read this with me pointed out, perhaps as a parent and clinician), I resonated more closely with Esther Greenwood’s pain (and assume I would now feel more of Caulfield’s as well).

The not so hidden part of this novel and Plath’s life is that she didn’t really want to have a big wedding with caviar.  She didn’t want to get married at all.  And despite her arch dismissal of her mother’s advice, there is some soundness to it.  This is an era when Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who was a member of the Harvard Law Review, could not find employment at a law firm anywhere in New York City because she was a woman and the big firms simply didn’t hire women lawyers.  Sylvia/Esther wanted to become a poet (as did my friend Phil, whom I asked, when I met him, how are you going to make a living doing that?)  and yet we learn in a very brief aside from Esther that she (as Sylvia) is juggling children while trying to write this book.  How did that happen?

Well we know how that happened.  It was the destiny that this girl with all this talent would inevitably stumble into – and not be able to find her way back out of.  Even though she is taught this new secret and still illegal (in Massachusetts) thing called birth control – there is a predictable destiny that awaits her.  What is less predictable and somewhat intriguing is how she got into a private hospital.  And that was because she had a guardian angel – a poet – who read some of her writings and wanted to use the profits from her own books to pay forward to the future by supporting a poet who had a voice worth hearing.  Plath/Greenwood absolutely savages the writer, her benefactor, as a hack.  It is no wonder that the book, which came out in 1963, at about the same time that Plath used gas to kill herself in England, was published anonymously and only there – not in the states – presumably to protect Plath’s benefactress, and everyone else she had come in contact with and wrote about during that tumultuous year.  Her mother – one of those who does not emerge unscathed – suggests that Plath had greater regard for the people in the novel than the writing suggests.  I think this is likely true – but the novel likely portrays what they looked like through the bell jar.  

Reading Plath these many years later, both the knowing attitude that she takes about herself and the world that she lives in – the United States in 1950 – seem incredibly limited and therefore naïve, perhaps all the more starkly because of that knowing writing tone itself.  It is not just that we have had an information explosion in the time since she wrote this novel (roughly my lifespan) so that we can access more “knowledge” about the various ways that one might think about some of the dilemmas that she faces from the phones in our pockets than she could have hoped to glean from the New York Public Library, and that we have worked to deconstruct stereotypes that she uses so unselfconsciously to articulate her own “knowledge” of the world (her face, after she has been crying, looks like a “Chinaman’s”), we feel, on our better days, that we “know” that these stereotypes are based in large part on an organizational system that is practiced not just by her but by the entire dominant culture so that things can run smoothly and efficiently and that her use of them just perpetuates her own marginalization that she is fighting to stave off.  Marginalized voices, including hers, will help us come to realize the dangers of marginalization, and to be able to wince at the unknowing ways she herself marginalizes others – carelessly.  Voices like hers are just barely beginning to be heard, so that her efforts to articulate both her inner world and the world around her, though absolutely stunning in their clarity, also betray a particular lack of knowing – living inside a bigger bubble than just the bell jar – or perhaps a bell jar outside of and beyond the one that she writes about.

I am reminded of a recent, brief conversation with a psychologist who works with patients undergoing sex change operations in San Francisco and we were both wondering what it was like for trans people before there was a trans community and before there were surgical means to alter the biological substrate of someone who didn’t believe that they were inhabiting the appropriate gender.  My guess is that many people who have read this book have – as I did with Caulfield – deeply identified with Esther Greenwood – the heroine whose first name, Plath Intimates in the writing, was chosen because it has the same number of letters that her own name does – and they, who knew of Plath’s death – and sensed or knew that Esther was her alter ego, may have wondered what path their own life would take:  whether they would, as Plath did, make it out of the bell jar, as she appears on the brink of doing at the end of this book – and whether they would, as she did, succumb to it at a later time.  But I think we can also wonder whether we as a culture will make it out from under the larger bell jar and the one beyond that before it (or they) suffocate us.

Bell Jar with Butterflies

So, what, then, is the bell jar?  A bell jar, somewhat confusingly, can be two things.  In Victorian times, it was a glass case that was used to cover a collectible item that was being highlighted – a clock would be displayed under it.  In physics, the bell jar creates a space that air can be pumped from – a vacuum can be created – so that there is no air left under the jar.  Both of those meanings seem to be relevant – though the latter seems closer to Plath’s experience of the jar coming over her as an image of depression – a psychological feeling state where she feels she does not have the emotional oxygen to live.  But she is also someone who puts herself on display – she is proud of her good grades and her ability to write, but also feels that these are not leading anyplace that she wants to go.  She does not want to be a Doctor’s wife – to be on display as a bauble - one of the options that presents itself.  Is this because trusting another man the way she trusted her father doesn’t make sense?  Or is it just that Buddy Willard – the kid from her hometown with a crush on her who is studying medicine at Yale - fails to inspire anything like a romantic longing in her? 

Laboratory Bell Jar with Vacuum Pump

All that said, Sylvia/Esther is far from the first or last woman to sense that she may well rue having given up the opportunity to live a life of relatively careless luxury.  So in this sense, the bell jar is a gilded cage.  I think the bell jar may also be an expression of an awareness that she is not as all knowing as she pretends to be – that she is, in fact, cut off from much of what would make her life rich, full and alive – ironic given how lively and aware her writing is – and in that sense this is a deeply tragic book.  If someone with her capacities can’t figure it out – what chance do the rest of us stand?  Shouldn’t her ability to portray the baffling beauty of her friend Doreen, whom men can’t not want to bed, bring her into contact with men who can’t not want to touch her mind?

Sylvia/Esther’s virginity, then, becomes a burden to her.  She must lose it.  It trundles around, exposing her as someone who has never had an affair – as someone who has never been touched - as a person even lower than Buddy Willard, who, after all, had a summer fling with a waitress.  She burns not from her loins, but from a sense of injured pride.  She wants to lose the loathsome label that is advertised as a compliment: she has the virtue to stay within the bell jar, but that is, in her mind, actually an indication of her being essentially unwanted.  She distances herself from the failure of the simultaneous translator to pick up on her interest in him – and she later saves herself from being raped by a different man – not so much, I think, out of a sexual or even physical fear as out of a simple awareness of the loathsome quality of the rake – only to unburden herself with a random philandering academic.

Esther’s “recovery” is, we know, temporary.  She will, as Sylvia, die.  Her treatment at McLean helps raise the bell jar, at least for a moment.  Her psychiatrist there, a woman, is perhaps the only person in the novel that feels like a warm spot.  There is a breath of something human, real and authentic.  But it is not their interaction that seems critical in her recovery; she is finally competently treated with ECT (an earlier effort was mostly sparks and evoked the Rosenbergs – this second is administered more or less as it is today – and ECT is still used as an effective treatment for what is called “treatment resistant depression”).  The thing she fears most (electricity coursing through her veins) seems to be the vehicle that allows her to escape a worse fate, at least for now. 

As I am rereading the first pages of the novel, I am more deeply struck by two things – first that this is a well written book – and second that it is written in a freely associative style – the kind of free association that I have come to associate with the successful conclusion of a psychoanalysis – indeed, I have offered it as a psychoanalytic definition of mental health.  And yet this is an author whom we know is on the brink of suicide as she writes – that if the bell jar hasn’t descended as she is writing that it soon will – so her free association is certainly not an adequate single measure of stable mental health.  This is then potentially a tragedy for not just humanity, but my conceptualization of psychoanalysis and its curative power!  (Tant pis, you may respond).

So how are we to understand Plath’s reversion to the bell jar?  Writing the novel – reliving the experiences – may certainly have re-triggered the emotional and cognitive pathways that led to her original state.  She is also burdened with two children and a failed marriage, now a divorce, to another philandering academic, one who has been blamed in her demise.  And this set of circumstances indicates that she is not out from under the larger bell jar – she is still at the mercy of a social system that is oppressive.  And this system, by the way, does not just oppress women – it oppresses all of us.  And while my earlier ideas may have suggested that we have found our way out from under that particular bell jar and moved into a wider space of “knowing” (would that it were true), I think that each time we lift the bell jar we find another one hovering over it – a depressing image if there ever was one.

So, why do we read this novel?  It incites us to empathize with a trapped heroine – one we know is more deeply trapped than even the ambiguous ending would suggest.  It helps us get a sense of the size of the foe we are up against – it is one that can fell someone as sensitive and competent as this (and we could turn away from her – blaming her sensitivity for her downfall – a course that would condemn us to a hardened shell of a life if we are to survive – hardly a desirable outcome).  It helps us realize that the struggle we are engaged in – and it is a struggle – to live an authentic, clear sighted life – is all but impossible even in the best of times and under the best of circumstances.  Doesn’t Esther have New York City under her thumb when she is hanging out in the starlight lounge and interviewing the best poets of the day?  So we must gird our loins to lift bell jar after bell jar – and recognize that, no matter how many we lift, there will always be one more.

One of the important weights on top of Esther/Sylvia’s particular bell jar is the death of their father when they were 9 years old.  Death is an integral part of life, but untimely death derails development. As she said, “Constantin [the simultaneous interpreter] drove me to the UN in his old green convertible with cracked, comfortable brown leather seats and the top down. He told me his tan came from playing tennis, and when we were sitting there side by side flying down the streets in the open sun he took my hand and squeezed it, and I felt happier than I had been since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died.”

What is the point of getting the best grades when the person I most want to show them to isn’t there?  How do I translate the opportunities that I have been afforded by these grades into something that I will find fulfilling when what I would find fulfilling – the simple feeling of flying along in the presence of another who loves me – will never come from the source that I feel is the one source that will satisfy that desire?  I do not want “knowledge”, or a job, or to articulate the sadness that I feel about this loss, but I want to know what I know and to articulate it in the context of a relationship with the one person who is and always will be unavailable to me.  And that is unchangeable.  So I go on – and I look for those moments when something like that occurs – and I report them – and all the other moments that are so much not like them – because that is what it means to be alive.  To be the particular me that is at the focal point of all these existentially meaningless but totally defining forces that create the person that I am and that I want to, and do, express – even though these words will fall on thousands of ears that might as well be deaf to me.

And so we read, we listen, and we hear a voice.  And this voice – the strength and clarity of this voice – this particular voice – allows us to access more of our own voice.  To hear and know ourselves a little better.  And to be able to communicate a little better.  To lift our own bell jar – if only for a moment – to see what it feels like to breathe a little oxygen – to let the wind come rushing into our convertible – to feel alive – and to see if we can hang on to this part of the ride long enough to get into another place where we can take another breath and go on breathing, go on living our way into a future that she, sadly, could not imagine.

In a related post, I discuss a book about the failed psychoanalytic treatment of Plath’s contemporary self-revelatory poet, Anne Sexton.

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