A Literary Life

The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

So after rollicking my way through a 700-page, action-adventure, supernatural thriller, I turned back into my normal self to tackle this seminal work by our favorite head-baking poetess. I’ve always been curious about this mostly autobiographical account of Plath’s adolescent depression and suicide attempt, especially given the fact that hers is one of the most infamous suicides of the female literary world (along with Virginia Woolf, naturally), and I wasn’t disappointed. Told in simple and often poetic language, this book describes the unexplainable yet tangible descent of depression, which the author likens to being caught under the stifling lip of a bell jar (see illustration).

With brutal honesty, Plath speaks of how meaninglessness and powerlessness can sneak up on an otherwise successful girl like a thief in the night, stealing her ability to sleep, to read, to eat, to feel. Yet she manages this without resorting to self-pity or whining. She is more a journalist who returned from the brink, chronicling the dark side with a dispassionate and often humorous tone. It’s also a quick read - I finished it over a weekend - that nails the specifically female and specifically adolescent penchant for morbidity and doubt.

I liked the book. I don’t know how much of my feelings sprung for the fact that the novel is almost wholly truthful and that Plath descended once again beneath that bell jar, never to return: She killed herself one month after the book’s English publication and long before it came out in America. We are all interested in the dramatic misfortune of others, especially if we see roots of that person within ourselves. (No, I’m not suicidal, but I am an author, a woman and an emotional being.) We like to see the depths to which a person we can recognize can sink without having to take the plunge ourselves. And there’s always something so sad yet so poignant about a truly talented being drawn inevitably toward an untimely death like a moth to flame. (Elton John would say a candle in the wind, yes?)

(My favorite Plath poem? The very famous, but still excellent “Daddy.”)