I suddenly felt moved to read this novel after having avoided it for many years. Why? Well, if you are a person who suffers from clinical depression from time to time there is something truly disturbing about reading books by people who are depressed, especially when you know that they suicided within a short time of writing them. But I survived Camus' L'Etranger, and reading Janet Frame's Owls Do Cry only made me slightly loopy for a while. I admit I have never tried to read her autobiographies though, too scary a prospect. It was time to tackle The Bell Jar because... the heroine of 10 Things I Hate About You has been reading it on and off in my film study for weeks... and I was wondering if it would work for a novel study alongside Hamlet. The first thing I have to say is that I have not read a selection of criticism of this novel before reviewing it. This is just my take on it. For a start, it strongly reminded me of Marilyn French's The Women's Room, which I have started three times and always given up after the daughter's rape when everything gets incredibly depressing. Or Dancing in the Dark, by Joan Barfoot (Women's Press, 1982), where the protagonist, trapped in her ostensibly perfect suburban housewife's life and discovering it to be (what a surprise!) totally unfulfilling, puts on some music and lies down in the dark to imagine dancing and singing, before stabbing her unfaithful husband (take that, you bastard!).
Plath, like these other writers, no doubt imitative of her, is setting out the essential hopelessness of being female in a time when, even more than now (and don't kid yourself that sexism or the glass ceiling have cracked themselves), women of intelligence, spirit, skill and ambition had their lives essentially amputated to exist as the adjunct of someone fortunate enough to be born in a male body.
The Bell Jar's protagonist and first-person narrator, Esther, who is at college on a scholarship, has won an internship to a fashion magazine in New York "by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs". One could ask why Esther, who is clearly not very interested in fashion, thinks it is fine to work for a fashion magazine. "I was supposed to be having the time of my life," she tells us. But she isn't.Esther's mother teaches shorthand and hates it, but she keeps encouraging Esther to learn: "My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter." Way to go, mom. Sounds exciting. Not. As Esther rebelliously puts it: "The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters."
Esther sees her life choices as mutually exclusive: wife, famous poet, brilliant professor, amazing editor, travel, Olympic rowing crew champion, etc. "I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest..." Fifty plus years later, I don't understand why she could not have aspired to and achieved all or most of her ambitions in one lifetime, but I guess that is thanks to women like Sylvia Plath, Marilyn French et al.
Esther also rails against the sexual double standards of the time, as set out in a Reader's Digest article her mother mails her at college: "...the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but as soon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her..." Ironically, it is Esther who loses all respect for Buddy, when she discovers that he is not 'pure', deciding that he is such a hypocrite she could never marry him. "Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a red-blooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry someone who wasn't pure either..."
Essentially, however, Esther does not want to marry, if marriage means the kind of relationship being presented as the norm in her world of the early 60s. "That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket." Marriage in this time means being a housewife and giving up the idea of a career. As Esther points out, "This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage is like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself."
From observing both Buddy's parents' marriage and her own parents', Esther is under no illusions about what life with Buddy would be like: "I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat." Buddy, who has told Esther that poems are "dust," also told her "in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think that maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state."
I think the saddest thing of all though is that real-life Sylvia Plath, who tried to achieve some of those ambitions (poet, wife, mother) ended up committing suicide over a plonker like her husband, poet Ted Hughes, who was off having sex with another woman on the night she killed herself. (Read all about it here.)
Right, so now I have cheered myself up a bit, I think I will go and mark a few essays. Um, should you read The Bell Jar? Yes. It is very good, it is one of those "true books" - but if you are female, do it with care.
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