The importance of ‘The Bell Jar’ by book club member and writer, Susan Furber
‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.’
About The Bell Jar:
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in January 1963, is one of my favourite novels. I’ve read it five times; the first when I was nineteen and most recently at the age of thirty-two. With each reading I discover, or connect to, something new in the work. This, for me, is the definition of a classic.
In The Bell Jar, nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood wins an internship at a leading women’s magazine, Ladies’ Day, in New York City in the early 1950s. Over the course of the summer, her mental health deteriorates, and when she returns home to the suburbs of Boston to live with her widowed mother, she learns she has not been accepted on a prestigious writing course at Harvard.
After a suicide attempt, Esther recovers in a mental health care facility, and faces what it means to live in the bell jar: ‘What was there about us, in Belsize, so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.’
When the novel was published, it wasn’t a commercial success. A month later, on 11 th February 1963, Plath, who was estranged from her husband the poet Ted Hughes, died by suicide. Two years later, her poetry collection Aerial was published posthumously to much acclaim, and when her only novel was republished the following year in the UK under her own name, it was a critical and commercial success. The myth of Sylvia Plath had risen out of the ash.
Imagery from one of our most recent book clubs, taken by one of our members, Wida
Susan reading the novel
I first read the novel as a teenager and immediately saw myself in Esther Greenwood. It is one of the great accomplishments of the work that so many of us readers not only relate to Esther, but believe we are Esther – that Plath is describing so intimately and accurately our own feelings and experiences.
At nineteen, I wrote the first draft of what would become my first novel, The Essence of an Hour, which is a coming-of-age story set in upstate New York in the 1940s. I wanted to write a young woman character who had that same intimate and yet acidic voice of The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield, and through her explore the sexual double standards that I was experiencing at my own American mid-western all-girls’ college.
A few weeks after finishing that draft, I read The Bell Jar for the first time, and I thought, ‘Well, Plath has already done it.’
For me, a successful first-person novel should teach us as readers the vocabulary of the narrator within the first few pages, so that we cannot just sympathise with them, but actually feel that we enter into their minds and see the world as they do through their language. T
his is most obviously done in A Clockwork Orange with the teen language of Nadsat, but I also find it effective in novels with deeply troubling narrators such as American Psycho and Lolita.
In The Bell Jar, Esther’s idiosyncratic language infects us and so we see the events of those six months through her eyes, but we may also bring our own stories into the novel and feel she could just as well be narrating our lives. This is certainly how I felt when I first read
this:
‘When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue … I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and that seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.’
I also felt the anxiety Esther expresses for not knowing what to do with her life after she finishes college. ‘The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.’ I believe that it is because Plath gets us not only on Esther’s side early in the New York section, but makes us believe that we are being seen through this character, that we follow her through her clinical depressive episode and suicide attempt – experiences not all readers will have had, or perhaps not to such extremes.
I also believe that this helps us as modern readers to overcome some of the differences of period – we thankfully do not live in an age of electrical shock treatment being so commonplace nor where marriage and children are so readily expected of women. However, at least in the repressive communities in which I grew up in America, several girls’ highest ambitions were to marry and have children as quickly as possible and most boys were just as dismissive of young women’s mental health concerns as Esther’s ex Buddy Willard is in the novel.
How The Bell Jar informed Susan’s writing
In redrafting my first novel, I kept returning to The Bell Jar not so much thematically or even historically but to study Plath’s handling of Esther’s voice and the divide between the Esther who is looking back presumably about ten years and the Esther of nineteen.
Plath writes in the voice and vocabulary of a nineteen-year-old, but we as readers hope that Esther has grown past her insular limitations of nineteen. We are only given one clue as to who Esther becomes, when she tells us,
‘I still have the make-up kit [Ladies’ Day] gave me … I also have a white plastic sun-glasses case with coloured shells and sequins and a green plastic starfish sewed on to it … last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sun-glasses case for the baby to play with.’
Like other readers after the republication in 1966, I assume to know what happens to Esther given how closely her life follows that of Plath’s – she too will go on to win a scholarship to Cambridge, where she will meet and marry an aspiring English poet with whom she will have this baby she mentions.
Plath could have told us this in The Bell Jar – she could have filled in what happens between the Esther of twenty who likely returns to college after her recovery and the Esther who narrates the story – but she doesn’t.
And, as a writer, this choice to give us only this one small clue as to what and who Esther becomes has inspired my own decisions about what the narrator admits and what is left concealed for the reader to interpret.
Readings four and five
On my last two readings, I’ve been struck by how isolated Esther is – she has no real friends, and she never speaks well of anyone nor shows kindness to others. Esther constantly says racist, homophobic, fatphobic, and, above all, misogynistic remarks, often in an attempt to exert her own superiority in the midst of her self-hatred.
This makes for uncomfortable modern readings, and there is also the issue of Plath’s appropriation of others’ suffering and traumas, more notable in her poetry, particularly in ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’, but which can also be found in Esther’s strange fascination with her heavily pregnant neighbour’s Catholicism or the other women in the mental health care facility. It is perhaps ironic then that so many of us readers appropriate Plath’s tragedy as our own, believing we feel the same as Esther and by extension Plath.
But what other novel so openly describes the mental decline of its protagonist, and allows us as the readers to have such access to her thoughts? The honesty and the vulnerability of the narration – though Esther is hardly likeable nor is she always reliable – I believe is what keeps us returning to Esther’s story long after we grow out of so closely identifying with her, if we ever did.
Each time I come to reread, I fear that this time I will have outgrown the novel, that it is best to be read by teenagers who are simultaneously experiencing the feelings Plath writes about. And this is part of the problem with the reception of Plath – she is quaintly placed in the canon of writers meant for young girls and not given the serious consideration she deserves, or, if she is, it is usually for her late poetry.
The personal, the political, the social
While The Bell Jar is a deeply personal novel – both for the author as an autobiographical piece of fiction and for the reader who associates with Esther – it is also a political work. It echoes the ‘problem with no name’ of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (published in February 1963). Plath shows how the personal is political, the rallying cry of the Women’s Liberation Movement a few years later.
It would be an important work of social and historical relevance merely for how well it details the lives of young women in the early 1950s and the attitudes towards mental health at that time.
There are certain novels which I measure my own growth against – both as a woman and as a writer – and The Bell Jar is one of those novels. I wish we had more work by Sylvia Plath, that she had lived to write about women’s mental health issues in their thirties and beyond.
What an illumination and comfort that might be – and admittedly how little in fiction we still have of women chronicling their whole lives. We cannot know what books Plath may have written, or how she would have engaged with Women’s Liberation. All we have is her poetry, the journals (or what is left of them), many of her letters, some early short stories, and this, her one novel.
But it is through the work that Plath left, that we can see ourselves and our own transitions from girlhood into womanhood expressed, and continue to keep her legacy if no longer in the bell jar, then in a mirror.
Writer, Susan Furber
Thank you Susan for writing such a beautiful and intelligent article for us!
Susan Furber is an author and book editor based in South London. Her novels ‘The Essence of an Hour’ and ‘We Were Very Merry’ (Valley Press) explore modern themes such as sexual double standards, consent, motherhood, marriage, and women’s friendships set in the near historical past.
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