Some semi-coherent rambling on The Bell Jar

As this book was discussed in the Guardian Reading Group last month as part of commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Plath’s suicide, I thought I might try and read it, although I admit to approaching it with some trepidation as I thought it would be quite a depressing book. I didn’t know all that much about the author aside from knowing that she was married to Ted Hughes and that she committed suicide, I think in some ways it was good to approach the book without too many preconceived ideas.  Having read some of the articles about her after finishing the book, it looks like there was (and still is) a great deal of controversy about her life, that she was somehow a ‘difficult’ woman. I haven’t read that much of her poetry, but what I have read seems to be quite angry particularly at the men in her life.

The book itself is written in such a style that it is not a difficult book to read, although the influence of Plath’s poetry can be clearly seen in the way she describes her severe depression and the electroshock treatment that is supposed to cure her. Despite the potentially depressing subject matter, there are flashes of humour and an admirable level of self reflection. The narrator is not always likeable or pitiable to the reader; there is an element of her being rather selfish as well as behaving judgementally towards other characters which is revealed through her innermost thoughts.  It has been quite hard to write about it because there is just so much material available, so I have got to the stage where I have analysed it from a feminist point of view in quite a detailed way but haven’t written much about the psychoanalytic point of view, just refreshed my memory about it so I can finally finish this review.  I also figure that in some ways, the two topics will overlap.

Thoughts about The Bell Jar

The setting is America in 1953, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs. The Rosenbergs were a Jewish American couple who were executed for passing nuclear secrets to the USSR. (Aspeers). This  links to Esther’s sense of isolation (‘It had nothing to do with me,’ p1), with her own ICT treatment which she feels is like a punishment and with her feeling pressurised to conform with an idealised representation of femininity.

Esther works at a magazine for women and lives in a hotel for women, only really encountering men when going on dates with them. The women that she encounters are Jay Cee, the Editor of Ladies’ Day, the magazine  who is in control of her career, but looks terrible and disassociates herself from her femininity by using her initials: ‘As a woman, Jay Cee represents the potential for female discourse.’(Budick, The Feminist Discourse) but ‘she speaks a man’s language and represents and man’s aesthetic.’ (Ibid).  Although she is Esther’s mentor she is unable to help her to find a suitable direction and there is a sense that Esther doesn’t wholly respect her. There is also Doreen who behaves like a slut and takes Esther out with her on a disastrous double date which leaves Esther feeling alienated and disassociated from her own identity: ‘Doreen is Betsy’s antithesis, sexually adventurous and iconoclastic’ (Aspeers), and Philomena Guinea who looks after Esther in a way that both her mother and Jay Cee fail to do by helping her to leave the mental hospital. It is not clear what Esther thinks about her work and her books are not in the college library as she is not considered academic. Betsy is a more traditional portrayal of femininity with her homespun, corn-fed charm.  Yet Esther seems to reject all these different facets of the feminine experience. .  “The images of femininity available are so contained and so distorted by the various lenses through which they are perceived that contradiction and neurosis can be said to be built into the structures of her society.” Seeing Through The Bell Jar: Distorted Female Identity in Cold War America. Rosi Smith (Aspeers).

Another female character in the book is that of the mother. Esther has a complex relationship with her mother that causes her to reject her mother’s advice and support. Her mother is depicted as not being that useful or able to guide Esther’s choices as she, tries to make her get job as a secretary, which Esther rejects as being beneath her.  Her mother has had an unhappy marriage which ended when Esther’s father died. Part of Esther’s breakdown is related to the fact that she has never grieved for him, nor has her mother. Her father is associated with the German language representative of death and men.  Doctor Nolan seems to encourage her hatred of her mother as some sort of clinical breakthrough, and part of the analysis she undergoes involves asking Dr. Nolan asking her mother about her potty training.

At the beginning of the novel Esther describes her experiences in the woman’s college. The subjects she chooses to take are physics and chemistry and she admits that she is not that good at traditional womanly activities, or even that interested.  Her (male) physics professor is condescending:  ‘The universe of Plath’s novel is, from the outset, explicitly sexist, expressing and advancing its sexuality through language. Physics and chemistry are closely identified with the powerful male teacher in the all-female college, whose textbook is  “written…to explain physics to college girls” (p36) and whose language represents a painful condescension to women.” (Budick, The Feminist Discourse). The professor  uses a ‘masculine discourse’ reducing everything to letters and numbers, along with  ‘scorpion-lettered formulas’ and ‘Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk’ (p37).  The chalk is associated with blood and death. She avoids chemistry after skilfully manipulating her lecturers so that although she attends lectures, she does not have to participate or pass the subject, and spends the lessons writing poetry. Shorthand and languages (particularly German) are also associated with this lack of decipherability and masculine language, as is Joyce and her thesis.

 The girls in the college judge her for not having much of a social life with lots of dates and for being too into her work. She is afraid that every man she meets will not live up to her expectations and she sees  married life as being constant domestic drudgery, like the lives of her mother and Mrs. Willard. She doesn’t particularly like or identify with many women, aside from Doctor Nolan, and in the course of her therapy she tells the doctor ‘“I don’t see what women see in other women,” I’d told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. “What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?”Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, “Tenderness.”’ (p231).  She is disgusted by what she sees as Joan’s sexual advances and horrible to her as she suspects her of having lesbian tendencies: “Why did I attract these weird old women?...they all wanted to adopt me in some way, and, for the price of their care and influence, have me resemble them.’ (p232).  Joan commits suicide.

Esther acts passively towards her situation, particularly at the beginning of the novel – she doesn’t want to be involved with men when going out with Doreen, yet doesn’t do anything about it. She possibly has a problem with sexuality, hence having to have a bath after going out with Doreen and the two men. Purity is a big theme, Esther  is attracted to pure drinks, is encouraged to keep herself pure, birth/re-birth as well as author describing herself as being like a baby in certain contexts, witnessing birth with Buddy. After the unfortunate date she has to take a hot bath to restore her sense of purity.  

She is afraid she can’t get a good job after college. Shorthand is off-putting as she doesn’t want to do a subservient job ‘The trouble was, I hated serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.’ (p80), but she has trouble choosing what she wants to do for fear of missing out on something else. Esther visualises a fig tree which each fig representing a choice that she can make in life, but she is ‘starving to death’ with the pressure of the choices available, unable to choose for fear that she will make the wrong choice.

 At the Ladies’ Day lunch she eats a massive amount of caviar wrapped in chicken: ‘Seated at a table emblematic of the cloying excess of female domesticity, Esther gorges herself in a stereotype of worshipful, repressive female hunger: the grotesqueness of overeating and its relation to female sexuality are picked up in the hospitalisation scenes later on…’ (Budick, The Feminist Discourse). It is as if she is punished for both her acceptance of the stereotype and the subversion of her over-eating as she is violently sick afterwards (as are a number of her colleagues at the lunch).

Her relationship with Buddy fails as he seems to look down on her, dismissing her poetry. Yet she doesn’t answer him back, just retrospectively thinks of witty responses to dismiss him. In her head she calls him a hypocrite for having had sex with a woman but pretending that she is the sexually experienced one. Her mother considers him a ‘fine, clean boy’ whom she should ‘stay fine and clean for’ (p72), but she is disgusted by his attempt to seduce her.  She views his contracting TB as ‘a punishment for living the kind of double life Buddy lived and feeling so superior to people.’ (p77).  Nevertheless, she blames herself for breaking her leg because of the way she treated Buddy – that she refused his offer of marriage but didn’t refuse to ski: ‘A queer, satisfied expression came over Buddy’s face.’ (p104) after she breaks her leg, it is as if he wants to subdue her.

She has another terrible date with Marco the woman-hater who forcers her to dance and attempts to rape her, calling her a slut: ‘I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power.’ (p113).  He marks her face with the blood from his nose from where she punched him, which she doesn’t wash off. It is as if she wants to preserve the experience, perhaps marking out her lack of purity.

Another theme in the book is that of birth and re-birth. The narrator describes the treatment of a woman who is giving birth which is an upsetting experience. She is drugged and patronised by the male doctors (“that’s a good girl” p69). Esther disagrees with the drug: ‘I though it sounded like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman 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, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.’ (p69). Despite Esther’s horror and continuing dislike of the role of mother, by the end she has had a baby.  Her responds to the insulin therapy working is to describe it as a sensation of feeling like she is a baby: ‘...I fanned the hot milk out on my tongue as it went down, tasting it luxuriously, the way a baby tastes its mother.’ (p211) and the final meeting she has with the doctors is compared to marriage or being born a second time.

The fear of having a baby which seems to haunt her relationship with men is relieved by Doctor Nolan giving her a solution which allows her freedom, this is arguably part of her recovery: “I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless…” (p235). However, when she loses virginity with Irwin, she bleeds excessively. Although she feels liberated it is not a pleasant experience.

Doctor Gordon, her first psychiatrist is depicted as being conceited. Esther feels like he cannot help because of his seemingly perfect domestic situation and his ‘therapy’ doesn’t work because  partly because she feels she can manipulate him.  He doesn’t help by talking to her and he quickly gives up and chooses to give her ECT instead. The ECT experience is death-like and disorientating, (possibly a punishment for refusing the traditional feminine role?) whereas the ECT given by Doctor Nolan is like a re-birth and she feels better afterwards. Doctor Gordon’s ECT is associated with the execution that is happening at the beginning of the novel and Esther’s horror at the thought of electrocution.

Before she is committed she generally has a bad experience with the medical profession. After her suicide attempt she is temporarily blinded after overdosing on pills. The nurse’s response is to tell her that: “There are lots of blind people in the world. You’ll marry a nice blind man some day.” (p180). She is committed to a mental hospital for women where she believes the other patients are gossiping about her behind her back. In there she meets Miss Norris and Mrs. Mole who both have no voice. Valerie has had a lobotomy which seems to make her the happiest woman in the book; she has no anger and wants to stay in the hospital.

Esther’s appearance and her recognition of it alter throughout the book. At the beginning she visualises herself as being poised, dressed in her Bloomingdale’s accessories and her uncomfortable, expensive clothes. After she goes on the date she has trouble recognising herself in the mirror of the lift, thinking that she looks like a Chinese woman, then in the mirror in her apartment where she looks like ‘a ball of dentist’s mercury’ (p20). After she is sexually assaulted she looks like ‘a sick Indian’ (p119) and she abandons her expensive clothes, borrowing Betsy’s and neglecting her appearance. It’s as if she is rejecting herself. Her appearance and perception of it is further altered when she fails to recognise herself after her suicide attempt when she is bruised and hideous.  The insulin therapy makes her fat with stringy hair; it is only by the end that she is able to cope with her reflection and her identity.  R.D. Laing suggested that this alienation from herself was a sign of her schizophrenia. Esther is never really diagnosed as such in the book, although it is evidently strongly suggested. I also looked a little at Jacques Lacan’s mirror theory. Although Lacan has been widely criticised, especially by feminists, I think that there is a certain sense that something has been disrupted in Esther’s development, hence the way that she comes across as being rather childish and petty at times as well as the psychiatrists asking her mother about her development.

In conclusion, I can see why this is such a powerfully feminist work dealing as it does with the female experience and the fear of making choices which still plagues women even today, and I think that even though it was written over fifty years ago and medical treatment for mental health problems is quite different, it’s still relevant. It is a book which I think would affect people differently according to the time when they read it; I think I would’ve reacted quite differently had I read it when I was younger. As it was, I enjoyed both reading it and analysing it and I will probably read it again one day.

References

The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

E. Miller Budick

College English
Vol. 49, No. 8 (Dec., 1987), pp. 872-885

Seeing Through The Bell Jar: Distorted Female Identity in Cold War America. Rosi Smith

Aspeers

Issue 1, 2008

http://www.aspeers.com/2008/smith