Wait, So, Are We Doomed to Oblivion or Not?

Reflecting on this book, I feel like Robinson is making two major points. Feel free to dispute whether these are the two main themes of the novel, but I really see her driving home in the last chapters that

a) In the broad view of things, nothing is permanent. We are all inherent transients pretending to be housekeepers. We are only playing at stability and permanence, and those who drift are being more honest to our true nature.

b) Family members who have died are more formative presences in our minds and lives than those family members who live comfortably and normally around us, or than they would have been had they not died.

These are both interesting ideas (especially the way that Robinson presents them) on their own, but I felt a certain dissonance when they're considered side-by-side that adds another level. That is, in the novel's own estimation, a transient lifestyle is a lonely one. The very concept of family---having a family, raising a family---seems to require the housekeeping mentality to an extent. The two ideas aren't in direct contrast to each other, but it seems that one encourages the family unit sticking together and the other discourages it. When Sylvie tells the women on the couch how much she thinks of her father since his death, she is presenting it as a tragic thing. "Families should stay together. Otherwise things get out of control" (186). A surprising comment from a woman who didn't contact her family for many years.

How can the novel teach both things simultaneously? Shouldn't familial relationships fade away in comparison to the scope of geologic history, the way that homes and even mountains do? They are no more permanent. The ending of the novel only increases the tension between the two ideas, when Ruth becomes a drifter with Sylvie. I suppose we could view drifter partners as a synthesis of reverence for family and acknowledgement of impending oblivion, but I don't see any reconciliation---rather almost a refusal to pick a side. I'd be very interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.

Sylvia Plath, Sunny Side Up

Sylvia Plath, 1950s

The life of Sylvia Plath is paradoxical in that, in popular understanding, it is defined by a death. It's easy to forget in the throes of intense depression depicted in The Bell Jar that while her life did tragically end in suicide and while Plath did suffer from a very severe mental disease, before that day she was a beautiful young woman, remarkably successful for her age, ambitious and talented. When I read some of the poems and her biography and when I look at this picture (Plath looks so bright and happy!), I remember the lighter side of Sylvia Plath. 

This stands out in particular contrast to the first chapter of Housekeeping. Both Ruth and Esther interject images of death into their prose, but the effect is different. Housekeeping, at least so far, seems chilling. Parts of it feel like the opening scenes of a horror movie in which a lake is possessed by some sort of hungry spirit. When Esther talks about death though, its always in very matter-of-fact, medical language. She doesn't relish in the dark, but finds those thoughts consuming her regardless. And sort of the whole point is that this person whose breakfast cereal has cadavers peering over the top is not the same person that Esther has been her whole life or the person she appears to be from the outside. Before I read The Bell Jar, the name "Sylvia Plath" evoked images of depressed intellectual women in all black reading dark poetry next to a rainy window. That doesn't jive with what I read. Esther interns for a fashion magazine, for goodness sake. She's the overachieving, hyper-driven teacher's pet. The first thing she does when she gets to New York is a shopping spree. She goes to fashionable parties. She has an ivy-league boyfriend (even if he does turn out to be sort of a tool, she did like that about him at first).

Even though Esther loses interest in all these things, and the middle of the book is very very dark, I also find the ending to be light. I think its optimistic. While the book is about a very serious case of depression, I think the point is in the recovery. The last scene Esther is wearing bright red jacket, about to be approved to leave the institution. For me, this makes the overall feeling of the book optimisitic.