“The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath
There’s something about clinical depression that I cannot quite put words in it. There’s something about the slow descending of it, the quiet and lonely journey of it. And by the time you realized that you’re in trouble, it might be a little bit too late.
This classic 1963 book tells a story about a smart and promising 19 year-old Esther Greenwood, who is 1 out of 12 college girls from around America who wins an internship in Ladies’ Day magazine in 1950s New York City.
She despises the high life of a big city, however, she doesn’t like its fashion nor its people. But here she is living in one of the biggest and loudest cities in the world, encountering all sorts of weird and wonderful characters.
The 1950s is a curious time between post-World War 2 and before the hippie movement of the 1960s, where the pressure of being a traditional woman with good Christian values is contrasted by the euphoria of post-war freedom and the quiet transition of feminism in the midst of the mad men era. And slowly but surely, Esther breaks down from the suffocating societal expectations and descends into depression.
I really love the way the story is not told in a linear way, but instead going back and forth between her current life in New York and her past lives during high school and college, before proceeding to post-internship where she comes back home and not knowing what to do next in her life after her plan suddenly gets derailed, and then jump to another different time when she has to introduce herself using a fake name. The book also intermittently tells the story about her being betrothed with the son of a family friend, but mix it up with her encounters with several men in the present, while secretly she doesn’t even want to get married. All of which create an intentional chaotic portrayal of this mysterious protagonist.
It is definitely deliberately constructed as such, so that the more we read the more we discover something new about her life, from past and present, all the potential things that she could have done with her brilliant mind, and wondering about what had happened or what will happen to her. Especially after she increasingly becomes more depressed at her hopeless situation and unable to sleep at night, which first landed her in an operating table conducting Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) that doesn’t work, and then led her to many more visits to other nasty doctors that only trigger more suicidal thoughts (which are being described in a detailed manner), before settling in a psychiatric ward.
The story itself is narrated from a first person’s point of view, with Esther herself describing the entire events in her life as if she’s only talking to herself or to someone in a distant future in a retrospective manner. Or to put it more accurately, it is as if the author herself – Sylvia Plath – wrote down all of her inner thoughts and project them into the character, making this book a semi-autobiography. Because the sad truth was, Plath herself also suffered from a depression. And we can really feel it in the book.
“I felt very still and very empty,” Esther said, “the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” And this sentence perfectly captures the essence of the story, while the title of the book refers to her description of depression as a feeling of being trapped under a bell jar, struggling for air.
They say that Sylvia Plath is one of the titans of existential writing, alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus. But this only book of hers is different; it feels too real, too personal. And as it turns out that is indeed the case when after struggling with depression, on 11 February 1963 Plath tragically died by suicide, less than 1 month after the first publication of this book.
THE CHAOS THEORY 