GLR May-June 2024

ESSAY

The Silence of The Bell Jar D ENISE N OE

S ET IN 1953 and published ten years later, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is widely regarded as a masterpiece, a female com ing-of-age story like J. D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher in the Rye . Told in the first person, it’s about Esther Greenwood, a young Massachusetts college student who, along with eleven others, wins an award to spend a month interning for Ladies’ Day magazine in New YorkCity. Raised by a financially struggling widow, Esther is a schol arship student. During her internship, she finds herself in creasingly disoriented. She often thinks negatively about her boyfriend Buddy Willard, whom she comes to despise for his hypocrisy about a casual sexual relationship. When she returns to her mother’s home, Esther’s mental state deteriorates into clinical depression, leading to a suicide attempt followed by a stay in a mental hospital. She slowly recovers. The novel ends with Esther leaving that institution, presumably for a brighter future. Events and characters were largely taken from Plath’s life when she spent the year 1953 interning at Mademoiselle mag azine, became deeply depressed shortly thereafter, made a sui cide attempt, and spent time in a mental hospital where, like her protagonist Esther Greenwood, she was treated for her depres sion with a combination of talk therapy, electroshock treatment, and the now-discredited insulin shock treatment before being pronounced “sane” by her psychiatrist and released. Describ ing The Bell Jar , Plath remarked: “What I’ve done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color— it’s a potboiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a per son feels when he is suffering a breakdown. ... I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the dis torting lens of a bell jar.” Plath appeared to believe The Bell Jar would be cathartic for her, calling it “an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.” Along with the brilliant poems in her Ariel collection, The Bell Jar won Plath a cult following, albeit posthumously, espe cially among feminists. She was known for her opposition to fascism and is regarded as politically liberal, but there are prob lems with this designation. For starters, her poetry includes the problematic phrases “[N-word-]-eye” in “Ariel,” “My Polack friend” in “Daddy” (probably her most famous poem), and “Jumpy as a Mexican bean” in “You’re.” The Bell Jar depicts its one “Negro” character in a racist stereotype: “grinning and chuckling in a silly way,” he “gawped at us with big, rolling eyes.” Denise Noe’s work has appeared in The Humanist , The Literary Hatchet , and other periodicals.

Sylvia Plath

And another thing: although feminists naturally respect Plath for dramatizing harms from the double standard (more below) and limits on women’s options, she also felt a strong pull toward traditional female roles. The Bell Jar reflects a yearning for housewifery when Esther thinks it would be “nice” to be married to a working-class man and have “piles of little kids ... wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee.” In another passage, Plath ridiculed women who prioritized profession over fam ily. Esther tells a college poet and academic: “I might well get married and have a pack of children someday.” The poet is de scribed as staring at Esther “in horror” and exclaiming: “But what about your career ?” Another irony in the feminist adoration of Plath is that The Bell Jar is rife with lesbophobia. My contention is that this pho bia is linked to, and probably based upon, her secret attraction to other women. Lesbian tensions are most strongly dramatized in Esther’s confused feelings about Joan Gilling, a friend who

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