It’s a scary book especially for those who have known ‘lows’. It tempts you in a strange way to descend down the alleys of sanity. It’s like standing on the edge of a building top one is tempted to jump. The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s only novel and one which is understood to be highly autobiographical. It is believed that Esther is based on Plath herself who had faced mental breakdown in her early life. Like Plath, Esther wins a magazine scholarship. Her benefactress is also largely based on the character of Olive Higgins Prouty whose scholarship took Plath to college. Parallels are also traced between Plath’s medical history and Esther’s decline. Though Esther is shown to be on the path of recovery, at the end her fate is a maze, perhaps it becomes clear in the light of the fact that Plath committed suicide few months after the publication of The Bell Jar. The novel is also premonitive as Buddy’s both girlfriends land in asylum and one ends her life. Ted Hughes’ second wife also committed suicide later, in the same manner as Plath.
Neurosis is a subject well-explored in literature right from greats’ like Dostovesky to lesser known names. But here the cause of neuroticism is very close. It’s not a murder or a fixation or betrayal that sets in neurosis. A high grader must find what course to take before she looses out the race. The decision she needs to take involves not only her career but also the larger question of her place in the setup of life. While learning shorthand typifies what she should do but doesn’t want to, creative writing on the other hand is what she wants to do but is unable to. Sexuality and virginity are weights that hang around her neck and that she wishes to get rid of. Hyped and mythified, sex, seems to her a milestone that changes one forever. The veracity of this she finds in the course of the novel.
Falling in the genre of a buildungsroman, it actually traces the gradual deterioration of a ‘promising’ young girl. What is most striking is how close the reader is brought to neuroticism because she/he empathizes with Esther and partakes in the breakdown. Esther is a bright ‘scholarship’ girl from small-town. While she refuses to make ideological compromises the road begins to narrow in on her. What seems logical and practical course of action disillusions Esther.
Sexuality is a powerful theme in the novel and one which contributes a deal to Esther’s breakdown. She believes in the ‘purity’ of body but is drawn into an abyss of confusion when she finds her boyfriend had lost his virginity. She must now loose hers before she allows herself love again. She looses it with a haemorrhage, perhaps symbolic of the load that she sheds along with her virginity. Sex here is a dispassionate ‘act’ with no strings attached except for pleasure.
Whereas male-female relationships in the book are shown to be essentially flawed, female relationships make up for it. So Dreen is one way for Esther, a way that she refuses to take; Betsy is another, one she thinks defines her identity; and Joan is something of an alter-ego one who ends up where even Esther could have ended.
One cannot help reading The Bell Jar from a feminist perspective. It rakes up issues that are dangling in society for lack of words, expressions and emotions. The birth of a baby in the first half is one such. Esther’s mental reaction at the pill that made the mother forget the birth pains typifies the feminist angle. “Here a woman was in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it, or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, while all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless, windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.” The brand of feminism here hides unfullfilled rightist aspirations. Esther is a simple traditional girl who must find her place in a world whose values and structures have changed. She doesn't feel the need of a boy-friend till it threatens somehow to become a brand of he freakness. Neither does she believe in casual sex but she forces herself into these. It can either be read as a step to fit-in or an act out of desperation to abandon her own values for which she finds no takers.
Yet more than the essential female eyes are the artistic words that haunt Esther. It is the artist’s anguish that forms the core of the book. From this angle all ends fall in line as do all of Esther’s explorations from sex to suicide.
“How could I write about life when I had never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?”
