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| 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.
I agree that Plath's literature is often overshadowed by her death, and the references to death inside it. Because there is a lot of darkness in the novel, it was often easy to miss the dark humor there as well.
ReplyDeleteI've gotten so lost in the depressive tone of the book that I forgot there must be some positive, lighter side of Esther. I wish we could have narration from normal Esther to provide an even bigger contrast between depressed Esther and regular Esther, but I suppose we have to find that ourselves. This post definitely made me think- I like it.
ReplyDeleteYour post made me wonder what Esther would be like normally (ie. without depression), and also our (or at least my) ideas of who depression affects. It's easy to assume that depression happens to... Depressed people, you know? Not smart, successful, driven people. And yet, Esther was all of that, and she obviously was affected. I guess there are people at higher risk and lower risk and things like that (though I don't know the exact details), but it really makes me wonder why (if there is a why).
ReplyDeleteI agree so much with this post! Before reading The Bell Jar, I had only read the poem "Edge" by Sylvia Plath, which is one of her darker pieces of work. Thus, going into reading the novel I was expecting it to be a seriously dark picture of depression. And although it is astonishingly transparent about some of the aspects of depression, Plath's tone is not one of overwhelming sadness. I also agree that the end is optimistic, especially considering that Plath was planning on writing a second novel about what being healthy looks like (maybe she had planned to use Esther as the main character in this as well?).
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