The descent, and the struggle back

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Bantam Books, 1971)

One of the things that has made me nuts for years about this book was that I would see "bell jar" and think "bell curve" -- no matter what I did, I couldn't shake that immediate association, and who wants to read a book about depression while you're thinking about statistics and averages and such.

Welcome to my brain, ladies and gentlemen.

This paperback belonged to my mom, and apparently she bought it shortly before her 27th birthday. (It's weird to think of parents as being adults, but still younger than you are now.) None of this is particularly relevant to my review, but I did find myself wondering about the various eras of the book and how it was read... Plath's lightly fictionalized autobiography is about events in the early 1950s, was written mostly in the early '60s before her suicide in 1963, came out in 1971, and here I am reading it 30 years later. Our culture's relationship with mental illness has changed drastically over the past 60 years, and Plath's tale likely played some role in that. Would I have been her, or her alter ego heroine Esther, had I lived in a different time?

Which takes me to the point I wanted to make about this book all along. I was so struck by how much this book reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye. (Of course, I hated that book passionately, and quite liked this one.) Both seem to speak directly to young people, assuring them that others too feel that same sense of alienation from the world around them. (The list of artists and works that do this goes on and on, but for whatever reason, these two seemed perfectly paired.) Even more so, Esther Greenwood, like Holden Caulfield, has a strong (and to my mind unreasonable) abhorrence of hypocrisy and phoniness. This seems particularly strange coming from Esther, who plays the phony game so so well. But man does she judge other people harshly.

I'm babbling quite a bit. I'm glad I finally read The Bell Jar, and can more clearly consider its place in 20th century literature, and society more generally. I also wish I could know how my 16 y.o. self would have met it. Would she have had as little tolerance for Esther as she did Holden? Would she have any idea how much sympathy she would have for her a decade and a half later?