“The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath

I’ve been reluctant to pick this book up for quite some time, despite the fact that it’s been on my to read list for ages. I just always felt that since it was a classic, there was no way for it to live up to the hype. I feel a little differently now, after finishing it I think that it should be required reading for high schoolers, similar to The Catcher in the Rye, I can’t believe that they aren’t paired together. There’s a lot of similarities, but that isn’t really the focus of this.

For those who don’t know, The Bell Jar is the semi-autobiographical novel Plath wrote about a summer where she fell apart and tried to kill herself. It’s also her only novel, the rest of her writing is poetry. The protagonist, Esther, lives in New York City on scholarship and is working for a magazine. She doesn’t know what she wants to do for a career, but feels limited since she can only pick one thing to do. Heap on the fact that it seems like all the men in her life are pigs, and you can see why she starts coming apart.

Slowly she stops working on her writing and ultimately cannot find the will to eat, write, or even sleep. Having always been a straight-A student, she begins to fall behind and just cannot bring herself to start up again. She describes her mental condition as similar to being stuck in a bell jar, breathing her own air and unable to escape. This entire section I found very relatable, even in the modern era. For so much of the time students are put into competition against each other, and it feels as though if you get a bad grade you start to fall behind. For most of my schooling one of my biggest fears was to fall behind in classes and be unable to pick it up again, so I was quite like Esther, always studying out of lack of anything else to do and felt guilty when I wasn’t productive.

It reminded me a lot of “The Yellow Wallpaper” that short story where the husband is trying to restrict his wife by sticking her in a hospital. There are all of these nice boxes that Esther is considering doing as a career, one of which is being a housewife. A number of men try to seduce her, but she professes to not want to marry or have kids, and therefore they all lose interest in the end. She also sees right through them to all of their many flaws, and therefore she also loses interest in them. Her struggling to figure out where she belongs contributes to the bell jar closing in around her, as she cannot make up her mind what path to take and therefore does nothing.

There’s another side of it where you can see the medicine and how doctors dealt with mental health. Of course everyone was smoking back then. And the go-to treatment seemed to be rest, glucose, and shock therapy every once in a while. Another one of the characters had a lobotomy. All of which is horribly outdated now, you can even tell how the other characters treat Esther after she attempts suicide how taboo anything related to mental health is. I think it has improved since then, although there still is a fair bit of ground to cover.

This is a highly important book that more people need to read for a number of reasons. 1. It gives an honest look at what it is like to have a mental illness and be suicidal. 2. The trials of Esther and the other girls demonstrate how hard it was to be a woman back then, especially when dealing with men, sex, and marriage. 3. Class issues come up as well, Esther needs to work hard to keep her scholarship and her mother cannot afford all her medical bills eventually.

This book lies at the center of several issues, all of which are still relevant today. Sure the customs have changed and the details are different, but at the heart of it there is still the threat of the bell jar dropping down on any of us. And reading about one person’s journey through it can help you make it out yourself.