Female writers you need to read
- Joanna Trainor
- Feb 5, 2017
- 4 min read
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Image by summonedbyfells on Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
Fifty years after Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was first published under her name, Kirsten Dunst has started production on her film adaptation of the novel, starring Dakota Fanning as lead Esther Greenwood. For our International Women’s Day edition of Female Writers You Need To Read, we’re looking at why Plath’s semi-autobiographical work is still so important in 2017.
Plath has written a gruelling, honest portrayal of living with severe depression. The Bell Jar might be set in the summer of 1953, but Plath has created a millennial character and examined mental health in words that were well ahead of her time.
The story starts as Esther Greenwood wins a competition to work for a fashion magazine in New York for a month, during her summer break from University. She lives in an all-female hotel, writes interviews, goes to lunches and parties, but feels "very still and very empty". When she arrives back in her small New England town the "bell jar" firmly descends and Esther is suffocated by an all-consuming depression.
This is very much a book of two acts. While Esther is spending her time with frivolous people in a sparkling New York, Plath’s language has a real F. Scott Fitzgerald feel to it, but just like Nick Carraway, our narrator soon becomes tired of the "wicked city".
Perhaps it’s purely by coincidence, but there’s no getting away from the fact that Esther’s character is incredibly similar to Girls’ Hannah Horvath, albeit rather more likeable. Leaving the comfort of University and finding her way as a writer in New York; it definitely sounds familiar. If Esther was a journalist now, Buzzfeed would be knocking down her door to get her to write listicles for them.
This definitely isn’t the cheeriest book you could choose to read, but that doesn’t mean it’s a chore either. Esther’s dark humour and brutal honesty is laugh out loud funny. For instance, on seeing her boyfriend Buddy’s penis for the first time she casually remarks that it made her think of a "turkey neck and gizzards". Plath is playing right into the hands of any woman in her twenties.
Throughout the whole book, Esther’s general reaction to men is pretty much perfect. When she’s forced on a double date, Esther decides against dancing with "that little runt in the orange suede elevator shoes". Still very relatable. Instead of the "infinite security" of married life, Esther "wanted change and excitement and to be shot off in all directions myself [herself]".
This ambitious nature makes Esther’s breakdown all the more distressing and you could not read a more realistic experience of someone suffering with mental health issues (Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was released in 1962, but Plath wasn’t using LSD to replicate other people’s symptoms). Esther’s depression comes in thick and fast as soon as she leaves New York and is without the structure of work or classes, but the pace of Plath’s writing feels heavy and languid. The difference exposes Esther’s numbness and emptiness. She hasn’t slept in a week or washed or changed her clothes in three, and the ease with which Plath slips in these details and comments about razor blades reads as though Esther is thinking about what she is going to have for tea; depression becomes her default rationale. It’s as casual and off-hand as Esther’s thoughts on the men she meets in New York, so there are times the reader can almost rationalise what’s going on even though we know it’s a skewed way of thinking.
For a book written half a century ago, Plath’s intelligent description of mental health is astounding. It wasn’t until the 1959 Mental Health Act that people were no longer hospitalised for falling under the category of "moral imbecile" here in Britain. And in the United States, Esther would have been one of 560,000 mental health patients in an institution at the time.
Plath’s description of Esther’s suicide attempt is graphic to say the least. The amount of detail that’s put in is what is most upsetting about the passage. It reads like Plath has meticulously thought about how she wants to kill herself, not just the book’s protagonist. Esther takes a bottle of pills before hiding in the crawl space in her house where she is found days later with a "cabbage head".
What’s most striking about this book though, is that it’s not without hope. As the metaphorical bell jar lifts, Esther’s wit and personality come back into force, and that’s really important for a book about mental health. Knowing that Plath took her own life just a month after The Bell Jar was first in bookshops makes reading the novel’s ending near heartbreaking, because she saw light at the end of tunnel for Esther, but not for herself.
The Bell Jar. Image by mike krzeszak on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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