The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, April 2023 Book Club Reading

[Falselogic]

The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. Plath died by suicide a month after its first United Kingdom publication. The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971.

The Bell Jar is the story of 19-year-old Esther Greenwood, the breakdown she experiences, and the beginnings of her recovery. Saying much more than that would reveal major plot points, so...

 

[Violentvixen]

I'm glad we're reading this, it's been on my to-read list for far too long.

 

[lincolnic]

I sat out the last couple of months but I'm here for this one! Just put a hold on a copy at the library.

 

[John]

I had forgotten this was my vote, and originally was going to skip this month, but then I wrapped the last book I was reading and have time again. I’m glad I did, read the first chapter last night and am intrigued. I see the easy comparison to a feminist Catcher in the Rye, but so far this one is better written. A shame of what Plath went through in real life.

 

[John]

I’m a few chapters in, and am glad that I’m in a relatively good mental space for this. There’s many little offhand jabs at depression and self image issues that could be triggers for readers, and absolutely were true to Plath. I hope everyone else reading is similarly stable. If I had read this when I was in college 20 years ago when I was in a worse mental state, I don’t think I would’ve been able to compartmentalize her issues away from my own.

 

[lincolnic]

I finished this up last night, and I'm still getting my thoughts together but I want to second John's comment above about being glad I read it now and not as a teenager. I liked it quite a bit, I just don't think I would've known what to do with it then.

 

[John]

I also finished it yesterday. Fascinating piece of semi-autobiography, everything related to her depression was very relatable.

Ironically, the only thing that dates it for me was an emphasis on institutional mental health treatment. We don't lobotomize people anymore, and I've read that electroshock therapy's still employed, it's drastically different than early efforts which caused more harm than good. We also don't have large scale facilities with a stated goal to help mental illness, just choosing to catch and release if you don't have a ton of money. Esther also had her angel investor sponsoring her recovery, but if she didn't, at least she would have food and shelter provided in the state run asylum.

I thought the back half was very well done, jumping between scenes with obvious time jump gaps and with things being left off the page. It's not clear just how many of her interactions were actually happening, or if they were skewed due to her breakdown, administered drugs or treatment, or both. She kinda floats through life without agency, at least as far as she tells the reader. I knew of ECT, but wasn't aware of Insulin Shock Therapy that she mentions with the byproduct of her gaining weight. She would be overdosed on insulin to have short term comas and convulsions induced, along with the brain shocks. It's a wonder that the "turn it off and on again" approach was accepted by both the public and the medical community, but I guess they didn't have many alternatives.

 

[Violentvixen]

I just finished a book for a different book club last week and have only read the Introduction to this one. My edition was published in the 90s, and makes note of how some contemporary reviewers have trouble connecting with her, especially pre-women's rights and "pre-Pill". I'm wondering if reading this after the Roe v Wade reversal is going to give me a different perspective than if I'd read it before that came down.

 

[John]

I think our policy here has been to mark or allude to spoilers for the first half of the month, and then go free the second half. Sorry if you were spoiled by anything I wrote, VV! I in-line spoiled it now just in case.


The women's rights is a huge theme, not just from reproductive, but all aspects. Esther pushes to be a poet as both a dream, but also as a response to the chauvinist society she lives in. She's not gonna learn shorthand just so she can be a secretary to some man. The only women in roles of power are the Psychiatrists and the Nurses, and they're also still surrounded by men. Telling that Joan saw that as her last path forward before she took her ultimate step.

On reproductive rights, I'm glad and surprised that her doctor sent her to a gyno to get a diaphragm fitted, but it still wasn't something that was out in the open. It's never explicitly referred to, and she just keeps it in her brown paper unwrapped box until she's ready. As soon as she uses it, she's punished for it by hemorrhaging. I wonder if this was an invention/exaggeration, or if this portion also happened to Plath.


This is one I'd like to revisit at a later date, at least the first half, but I need to give it some space.

 

[Falselogic]

I don't think I'm in the right headspace to re-read this book right now. Maybe in 6 months or a year, hopefully.

 

[John]

I don't think I'm in the right headspace to re-read this book right now. Maybe in 6 months or a year, hopefully.

Totally fair, it's a whole level up from my initial Catcher in the Rye comparison! I was constantly reminded in the back half of the book of our old thread for The Walking Dead Telltale game: "It'll Get Worse..." indeed.

 

[Violentvixen]

I think our policy here has been to mark or allude to spoilers for the first half of the month, and then go free the second half. Sorry if you were spoiled by anything I wrote, VV! I in-line spoiled it now just in case.

Nah, I already know the major themes and it is second half of the month too.

 

[Violentvixen]

Whoof, hanging out with and then running away when her friend is being/about to be raped and then refusing to let her in and just throwing her out into the hall when she vomits is pretty fucking awful!

 

[John]

I didn't quite get that the first part was rape, just that Doreen was much more wild than Esther. It can certainly be read that way, since they were both being very aggressive and biting each other. I read that as Esther got blackout drunk for a bit, and when she looked up, saw that they had escalated their "fun". She had missed the ramp up to that, so the progression from flirty dancing to topless horseplay with a bit of violence was jarring (or Esther's exaggerating to contrast with her own virginity).

Esther was certainly punishing her for her loose morals afterwards though, and was pretty unapologetic about it. She's not quite female Incel level of hating others and herself for sex issues, but it's quite a hangup.

 

[lincolnic]

I read that part the same way John did, but now I want to go back and reread it to see if I misinterpreted things. Unfortunately I had to return my copy to the library already!

 

[John]

Here's most of that scene from my ebook version:

“The two of them didn’t even stop jitterbugging during the intervals. I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground. There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction—every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

Every so often Lenny and Doreen would bang into each other and kiss and then swing back to take a long drink and close in on each other again. I thought I might just lie down on the bearskin and go to sleep until Doreen felt ready to go back to the hotel. Then Lenny gave a terrible roar. I sat up. Doreen was hanging on to Lenny’s left earlobe with her teeth. “Leggo, you bitch!” Lenny stooped, and Doreen went flying up on to his shoulder, and her glass sailed out of her hand in a long, wide arc and fetched up against the pine paneling with a silly tinkle. Lenny was still roaring and whirling round so fast I couldn’t see Doreen’s face. I noticed, in the routine way you notice the color of somebody’s eyes, that Doreen’s breasts had popped out of her dress and were swinging out slightly like full brown melons as she circled belly-down on Lenny’s shoulder, thrashing her legs in the air and screeching, and then they both started to laugh and slow up, and Lenny was trying to bite Doreen’s hip through her skirt when I let myself out the door before anything more could happen and managed to get downstairs by leaning with both hands on the banister and half sliding the whole way.”


I can see the scene here and the immediately following one as VV's interpretation, but since Doreen keeps seeing Lenny through the rest of that month, I read it more charitable on Lenny's part. Esther describes them as getting more and more crazy about each other, while she's the obvious third wheel. I can see parallels to modern interpretations of the "Baby, It's Cold Outside" song lyrics, navigating sexual encounters with social mores of the time.

 

[Violentvixen]

I can see parallels to modern interpretations of the "Baby, It's Cold Outside" song lyrics, navigating sexual encounters with social mores of the time.

This is fair. Women definitely continued dating men who had forced themselves upon them back then and it was considered consent.

Abandoning your friend in the hallway while she's blackout drunk is still a dick move though.

 

[lincolnic]

Thanks, John. Reading it again, I'm still not seeing it as a rape scenario. Obviously Esther is an unreliable narrator (and Lenny is a piece of shit), but the fact that she says "they both started to laugh and slow up" is what makes me think it wasn't. It's still early in the book at that point, I don't feel like Esther is very far gone at that point (or at least not so far that she'd completely misinterpret what was going on). Having said that, it's entirely possible that I'm completely misinterpreting what was going on.

Abandoning your friend in the hallway while she's blackout drunk is still a dick move though.

Unquestionably.

 

[Violentvixen]

Nah, that's fair, just the whole scene is sketchy as hell.

Remember that when they went up to the hotel room this happens:

"Listen, Elly, do me a favor." She seemed to think Elly was who I really was by now.
"Sure," I said.
"Stick around, will you? I wouldn't have a chance if he tried anything funny. Did you see that muscle?" Doreen giggled.

This conversation is before he serves them drinks and potentially drugs them. This conversation is when she is not intoxicated and she is clearly not giving consent for anything to happen. After they have several drinks she and Lenny are physically fighting, then Ester books it as soon as he starting doing something funny when they're both very drunk. That was my first thought when she says she ran out of the room, her friend specifically said she was there to keep something from happening then abandons her as soon as something happens.

But of course, "consent" as a term means something now but didn't in the 50s/60s. I do want to be clear this is not a knock against the book. It's a VERY good way of showing who this character is. I am using modern terms for making snarky comments about the narrator's shitty behaviour.

 

[lincolnic]

No, you're making some excellent points. I'd forgotten about that earlier conversation and it does color everything that follows differently. After all, laughing doesn't always mean someone's having fun. Your reading absolutely makes sense to me in that context.

 

[Violentvixen]

Well phooey, my library ebook freaked out and somehow deleted itself and won't redownload. I think I'll have to return it and finish the physical book. But I'm so glad to finally be reading this.

 

[lincolnic]

So, before this month draws to a close, I wanted to mention a couple of things I've been thinking about the book. One that really stood out to me is how Esther's descent into her illness happens almost subtly, with the writing being so matter-of-fact, so that the entire time you're reading everything feels...natural. Which isn't exactly the term I'm looking for, but I'm not sure how else to describe it. You start with the whole story of her internship, which feels like it could be the start of a very different book. But then once she goes back home there's one sentence where she mentions having an egg cracked into a cup of raw meat for lunch and it happens so casually that you could almost believe that's a normal thing to do. And that one moment kind of stands out to me as a metaphor for how insidious mental illness can be, especially in its onset.

I have some half-formed thoughts about reading this book in 2023 vs. what it must've been like reading it when it was released, given how much society's attitude towards mental illness (and its treatment) has changed over 50 years later. I'm wondering if people were shocked (or at least surprised) by what they were reading when this was new. So many of us can just casually mention being depressed in a conversation with a friend and not even have to explain anything, whereas all through the book you constantly feel that no matter who she's with, Esther's always alone. We do get glimpses of the toll Esther's condition takes on her mother, but at one point late-ish in the book her mom says something like "I knew you'd choose to get better" and holy crap, there's just no effort made to empathize or understand what's going on with your daughter. And that was just the prevailing attitude of the time, this sort of belief that mental illness isn't a real thing. I know that still exists today and the battle to be accepted as legitimate is ongoing, but I still can't help feeling like there's a disconnect between the present and the book's era. I don't really know where I'm going with this! Just wanted to get these things written down before we move on, I guess.

 

[John]

But then once she goes back home there's one sentence where she mentions having an egg cracked into a cup of raw meat for lunch and it happens so casually that you could almost believe that's a normal thing to do. And that one moment kind of stands out to me as a metaphor for how insidious mental illness can be, especially in its onset.

I agree that her disease has a slow-ish progression, but I think she was just making some homemade steak tartare, which I assume was more popular in her era and locale. Today’s staple of raw fish on rice wrapped in seaweed would also seem strange in her world, I bet.

I was struck with both how far we’ve come with supporting mental health, but also how much we’ve lost. We’ve got much better medications and therapy treatments, but we also don’t have any state/local facilities to help people who can’t afford private treatments. Any large city’s unhoused population would have had a large percentage that could be helped by asylums, with a rebranding to fix the stigma.

 

[lincolnic]

I agree that her disease has a slow-ish progression, but I think she was just making some homemade steak tartare, which I assume was more popular in her era and locale. Today’s staple of raw fish on rice wrapped in seaweed would also seem strange in her world, I bet.

You know, I completely forgot that this was even a thing.

 

[Kirin]

You know, I completely forgot that this was even a thing.

Yeah, I had a grandpa who would regularly just put raw ground beef on crackers as a snack (much to my microbiologist-mother's dismay).

 

[Violentvixen]

Fixed the glitch with my library copy somehow and am reading this again. Hard to read her mom's comments about the "awful dead people" and "I knew you'd decide to be all right again". It's such a stigma that you can just switch your brain to make yourself feel better.

 

[Violentvixen]

Finished it. I felt like the actual medical treatment at the end moved way too fast. But I am especially glad that it commented on how shock therapy can be done wrong and that when it works well it's done properly. I hate how it's portrayed in most media, denies people the medical care they need and creates stigma.

If I had read this when I was in college 20 years ago when I was in a worse mental state, I don’t think I would’ve been able to compartmentalize her issues away from my own.

I want to second John's comment above about being glad I read it now and not as a teenager. I liked it quite a bit, I just don't think I would've known what to do with it then.

I'm really not sure if I wish I'd read it when I was younger. I am surprised we never read it in high school, there was a unit where we read the Yellow Wallpaper, Aphra Behn, Virginia Woolf, etc, maybe we just didn't have time? I think it would have been important, especially in an all girl's school where mental health issues abounded and suicide threats were common and a few acted out on. Or maybe that's why, they thought it would be too raw.

I wouldn't have understood it at the time but I know it would have stuck with me and over the years parts of it would have made more sense. Very glad I finally read it.

But also what the fuck to the amount of racism in here. This feel like it was published way too late for most of these casual racist things, bleah.

 

[lincolnic]

But also what the fuck to the amount of racism in here. This feel like it was published way too late for most of these casual racist things, bleah.

I dunno, I think 1963 was still pretty prime territory for casual racism. But yeah, those parts were extremely unpleasant to read, especially since I was on the train for the worst of it. It was really one of those "oh god, please nobody look over my shoulder before I can turn the page and get this out of sight" moments.