The Bell Jar
Author: Sylvia Plath or under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas
Acquired in: October 2020
Much like music, books can easily influence your mood. A skilled writer can move you to feel things as you have never felt before and open your mind to the vast expanse of his/her imagination. And all this through a single piece of writing! Such books are few but when you find them, take care to never let them go. Sylvia Plath’s unassuming book encompassed far more than what I thought it would- though I may not remember it verbatim, its singular prose is forever etched in my mind.
Her book stands testimony to the trivialisation of mental health issues from time immemorial. Perhaps the conditions were worse in her time and even before that when psychological breakthroughs were emerging. It chilled me to read about people, women mostly, who endured much in the early sanatoriums and so-called nursing homes.
Sylvia Plath’s part-autobiographical novel portrays her as a young woman, Esther Greenwood, trying to make her name in the city. Looking at Sylvia’s own life, I feel that Sylvia/Esther was predisposed to depression. Esther comes to New York on a scholarship for young women and takes on a short internship at a publishing house. But the more time she spends in the city, the more disillusioned she feels by the general shallowness behind the glitz and glamour. Upon the end of her stint in the city, she returns home to the news that she wasn’t accepted into a course she was sure of getting into. Faced with the prospect of having to settle for far less than anticipated, she makes futile attempts to escape the suffocating life destined for her- life akin to being trapped in a bell jar.
If we think about it, all of us are trapped in a bell jar, though it can mean different for you and me. Sylvia/Esther’s metaphorical bell jar locked her in with the few avenues scripted out for women if those times: academics, motherhood or the few typecast jobs for women like stenography. Her explicit accounts of life in sanatoriums show us the generalised treatment doled out to the suffering, despite the varied nature of their troubles. Dear reader, Sylvia Plath, Esther Greenwood and I welcome you to see for yourselves the life and internal turmoil of a tortured mind.
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