The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

I just finished re-reading The Bell Jar last week—I read it almost 50 years ago as a teenager. My sister had a paperback copy on her bookshelf in our bedroom—it looked like this:

I latched onto it and read it in secret because I was always getting into trouble for reading books above my age group at the time—and yes, it was sometimes a bit over my head, but it still intrigued me. My friends and I were all passing around books like My Darling, My Hamburger, and Sarah T., which were literary forbidden fruit for teenage girls in the 1970s small-town world—The Bell Jar was a pert feather in my cap as I was the first to read it in my small group of friends. You know how it goes—if people are making a fuss about a book, kids will find a way to read it—most of us had older brothers and sisters whose bookshelves we mined for the books we weren’t allowed to read. (I read my brother’s copy of The Exorcist way before I should have—I couldn’t put it down.)

Whatever, right?

I picked up The Bell Jar earlier in November to revisit it with experienced eyes—a different point of view. Once I started reading it, nothing seemed familiar, so it was like reading it for the first time—but as I went along, things came back to me. I went into it remembering how the book resonated with me in an interesting way when teenage me struggled with self-doubt. I especially understood Esther’s anxiety about the future—the expectations placed on young women to follow a certain path—getting married to a nice boy with a good family (like Esther’s Buddy Willard) and having lots of babies—as if that was the only way to be. I wrote pages and pages about this shit in my diaries and felt the overwhelming apprehension—what was I going to do—where was I going to go? I wanted to be an artist and a writer—I was determined to get out of the small town where I was born and go where no one knew me. I knew I needed to go to college, and I needed to work harder in school (but I hated school. I flat-out sucked at being there—being present, daydreaming, emotionally and physically twitchy, terrified—it was awful.) There were brief glimmers of light as I achieved some successes with my artistic ability, but it was mostly like imprisonment, my bell jar, metaphorically, I guess. A bell jar, hermetically sealed, keeps anything inside locked up, unchanged—perfectly preserved. I wasn’t willing to be contained or pigeonholed—I was always doing my own thing and foiling the expectations of others—at the same time, I felt it necessary to please people.

When I first read it, Esther’s opportunity to attend college and win a month-long summer job in NYC working at a teen magazine impressed me. I had wondered back when I was young and impressionable if such things still happened. I knew it wouldn’t ever happen to a small-town girl like me; I wasn’t that sort of person—a promising one with high grades—though I did pull myself together to graduate on the honor roll. During this current reading, I was especially drawn to the part at the end of the summer job (in which she was “supposed to be having the time of my life”) it was time for her to have her picture taken for the teen magazine she had been working for—she was prompted to pose— “Come on, give us a smile.” She was not having it, and I sympathized with her inner turmoil and how it picked apart her composure, and she slowly began to unravel. (You can’t fake it if you ain’t feeling it; just sayin’.) I know when I’m reluctant to do something, I resent being told what I’m supposed to do. It’s an overwhelming sense of anguish. It’s an unnamable horror—fear, remorse, disgust.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know. 

(Her boss interjected; of course, there’s always that person who feels compelled to answer for you when you become stuck on the “I don’t know” because you’re too afraid to admit your dreams out loud or they’d be spoiled or, worse, laughed at.)

"Show us how happy it makes you feel when you write a poem.” (The photographer prompted.) Then, the second request was made to “Give us a smile.” This request expected obedience—that’s when she lost it and started crying—the photo shoot was abruptly over, and she was left alone in her misery.

I felt limp and betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it and everything else it could lay its paws on.

Included in the notes at the end of the book, Sylvia Plath wrote about her experience:

“A time of darkness, despair, disillusion—so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be—symbolic death, and numb shock—then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.”

From that moment on, the progress of Esther’s downhill slide seemed unstoppable once she returned home at the end of her NYC experience—and it seemed no one tried to truly understand why she came undone—and her journey through psychotherapy, electroshock treatments, attempted suicide, institutionalization, and more electroshock treatment, drugs, and eventually, a semblance of being healed by the end. Esther would be turned loose and dropped back into her former existence as if nothing happened at all, yet everybody knew, and she had to pretend it didn’t matter.

Her mother said,

“We’ll take up where we left off, Esther…We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.”

A bad dream.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

A bad dream.

I remembered everything.

Per Sylvia Plath’s return to Smith College after her troubled time, she wrote how she reconquered “old broncos that threw me for a loop last year.” She moved on with the semblance of living a normal life before she chose to end it—the bell jar had descended on herself, just as she had feared it would for Esther.

“…because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

Esther’s thoughts just before going into the interview that would set her free go like this:

I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead—after all, I had been “analyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.

I’m sorry to report—there is no cure for uncertainty. At 61 years old, I still haven’t figured shit out—I’ve learned to go with the flow.

These days, they teach you mindfulness, they tell you to get a hobby, exercise, eat well, drink lots of water, and they prescribe anti-depressants or anti-anxiety meds for people like Esther and Sylvia—it seems no one knows how to help a human in crisis, and after they’ve been “analyzed” or determined healed they’re left still ill-equipped to cope.

“The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

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