In an eerie coincidence, I’ve set out to write about The Bell Jar on the day after the anniversary of author Sylvia Plath’s death.
For about 10 years, I’ve wondered what Plath’s story was all about. Ever since Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club mentioned Plath, I thought she must be an important author to become acquainted with. The specific quote came when the “narrator” confronts Marla Singer about being a tourist at cancer support group meetings. “In the Tibetan Philosophy, Sylvia Plath sense of the word, we’re all dying. But you’re not dying the way Chloe is dying.”
I recently became more interested in Plath when I learned that she had only written one novel — a mostly autobiographical one; then even more so upon seeing that the book documented her experience in New York as an intern at a fashion magazine. I thought I would be able to relate to the tale, since I myself spent an overwhelming period in a big American city, and was hired as editorial intern at a magazine during my last season there.
I was wrong, for the most part. The book didn’t grab me very often. I considered that could be because poetry was Plath’s forte, and she hadn’t taken the time to develop her skills as a novelist. But my favorite book authors are extremely poetic (Kerouac, Miller, Hesse, etc). A poetic handle should make a work of prose better, not worse. I also reminded myself that Plath was a woman (duh…) — not that that would determine anything about her writing ability, but it may have presented some natural obstacles in my quest to understand the author, since sex has a significant effect on psychology, language usage, and many other human traits.
This theory became more viable when I remembered I haven’t read a book by a female author since high school (almost 10 years ago), when required reading lists dictated my total reading activity. I’ve forgotten most of those (I recall not hating The Joy Luck Club though). It’s possible too that female authors don’t have good representation in the school-assigned reading category. It is doubtful that To Kill A Mockingbird or The Bluest Eye have won over many males in recent generations — those creatures that spend most of their time playing video games, shooting each other in the brain with simulated automatic weapons.
My reasons for not loving the book are precise. For a respected female poet and future suicide victim, she was alarmingly out of touch with her own emotions. She didn’t pass over difficult moments, but she tended to breeze through experiences that seemed to deserve more analysis or attention. She also (somewhat annoyingly) didn’t make a convincing effort at self-analysis, to try and figure out what had caused the bell jar experience in the first place. Obviously there were many factors that contributed to the problem (I won’t discuss most of them, so as not to ruin the story), but one stuck out to me more than the others.
Esther Greenwood (aka Plath), a life-long straight-A student, has based much of her identity on her ability to win awards and scholarships. Then she returns home from her month-long magazine internship in New York, only to find out that she’s been rejected by a famous author who personally selects students for a writing class at Harvard. This is a person who has essentially never failed in her life, and then is suddenly refused the opportunity to thrive further by some snobby professor, before even being given the chance to display her abilities. That kind of helpless failure can cause total meltdown in the ambitious mind of a previously confident individual. Never mind the possibility of help from a psychiatrist; instead of working with her to pick apart the issue, Dr. Gordon prescribes electroshock treatment, which is about as useful as snorting gunpowder in terms of psychological therapy.
Needless to say, it’s a rough story — even for the weathered reader. However, there was one moment when I did connect strongly with Plath. It was during an episode in the novel when former romantic interest Buddy Willard takes Esther skiing for her first time. She expects to hate it, but alas:
“I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist.
A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery–air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy’” (p. 97).
And this came only a few paragraphs after one of the first hints of suicide:
“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
Skiing is my heroin, an activity that — when undertaken on the right mountain and during the proper snow conditions — sends me instantly into the land of bliss. And I think about that often lately. Is my answer simply to move to a small town on a big mountain, and let everything follow from that? It was my unlikely fantasy for many years after high school, but it still hasn’t happened. Who knows.
(My apologies for the recent inactivity. This week my computer hard drive crashed and I started a new job. I’ve been a bit out of sorts.)
UPDATE 2/13/09: I’m afraid I didn’t give Plath enough credit in the self-analysis department. Maybe she just didn’t want to draw it out. But she did explain:
“All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me” (p. 31).
“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks…” (p. 77).
Perhaps the story deserves a deeper analysis on my part. It seems like the problem had something do to with a human world based on Reverse Social Darwinism, where highly evolved individuals like Plath are actually at a disadvantage for survival or coping in modern society. It’s a paradox: succeeding at adolescent tasks in no way guarantees that you’ll succeed in adult endeavors, and in many cases those youthful successes actually render one less fit for adult life.
That’s a problem I think about a lot. Reverse Darwinism was the focus of Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy, which was reportedly a failure of a comedy, but still an amazing concept. The plot: an average man travels to the future and realizes he’s the smartest person alive, because starting in the 21st century, intelligent people stopped having children. They were unhappy with the degenerative state of world affairs, caught up in the implications of parenthood, or simply too busy working hard at their jobs.
From that angle, I appreciate Plath’s effort much more.
