by 
Mackenzie Patel
Sylvia Plath
Recently, I just finished reading the oh-so-cheerful (*sarcasm disclaimer*) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, an American novelist that is best known for her tumultuous personal life and her eventual suicide. However, despite her inner turmoil and her knack to color every thought with shades of black, dark blue, and gray, her work is amazing and so insightful into the world of depression. The Bell Jar is a work detailing Plath’s descent into gloom when she was a young woman; the main character, Esther Greenwood, personifies the actual emotions and events that transpired in her short life. According to Wikipedia, “Plath committed suicide a month after its first UK publication.” Her story is all the more tragic because a large chunk of The Bell Jar is devoted to exploring Esther’s contemplation of suicide and obsessive thoughts of death. I would definitely recommend this novel because it’s relatively short (about 200 pages) and speaks to the reader in such a personal, somewhat eerie, and dreadfully captivating way. I took AP Psychology this year, and right after my class finished studying our morose unit on depression, I happened to read this riveting nugget of gloom. As I suspected, Ester (and by enlargement, Plath herself) exhibited many of the sad symptoms of major depressive disorder, an abnormal behavior that affects millions of people a year. Per my textbook, “Major depressive disorder occurs when signs of depression (including lethargy, feelings of worthlessness, or loss of interest in family, friends, and activities) last two weeks or more…” (Myers, 659). For the majority of the book, Esther was slipping deeper into the chasm of despair and being further smothered by the stale air in her personal “Bell Jar.” For me, the comparison of depression being like a confining bell jar was so poignant and telling; nearly every sentence after the first few chapters in New York City was despairing and a complete downer to read. Majority of depression cases are females (about 9.5% of women experience depressive episodes in a year according to the WHO) and enduring stressful events usually triggers the outburst. A national hotline for suicide prevention can be found here. Listed are a few specific symptoms of depression and quotes in the book that perfectly exemplified them in the peculiar case of Miss Greenwood:
- General feelings of sadness or helplessness
Even right in the beginning of Esther’s journey, she was unusually dour for a pretty young woman trying her luck in the big city. She had everything: a glamorous internship, luncheons every day with mirrors and lipsticks as party favors, upright friends with similar tastes in fashion and writing, and a wholesome Yalie wanting to marry her. However, she still felt empty and invisible as the Deathly Hallow cloak in Harry Potter. In the midst of her swanky city life, she remarked sadly, “I felt low…I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race…” (pg 24).
- Insomnia or other changes in sleeping patterns
After Esther’s ritzy (and artificial) internship is over, she returns to her house in the suburbs of Boston. However, night after night, she is unable to fall into the peaceful dreamland of sleep and the unconscious. She insists that she is wide awake, her tired eyes plastered open in the milky dark, for every 24 hours that pass. “I hadn’t slept for seven nights. My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights…” (pg. 104)
- Loss of interest in normal activities
Esther used to be a spunky, ambitious young woman, applying for grants here and there, attending a prestigious women’s college, and studying hard to become a writer. However, after she returns home from New York, she physically cannot read or write for pleasure anymore, the once flowing words becoming as parched as the Atacama Desert. She doesn’t wash her clothes, she drops her college course work altogether, and she simply stops “living” like a normal human being. Plath describes the foreign process of trying to read in such poignant terms: “Words, dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain” (pg. 102). Ester tries to explain her desperate situation to Dr. Gordon, but he dismisses her in the offhand, condescending fashion of a spoiled rich man.
- Thoughts of suicide
About midway into the novel, morose thoughts of suicide dominate the text so that the reader is apprehensive and already depressed when they open up the yellow pages of Plath. After abandoning her schoolwork and loafing about town like an unhappy ghost, Ester contemplates her suicide and imagines it being glorious and easy like the ancient Romans of antiquity. “When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water” (pg. 121) Talk about depressing. However, she cannot bring herself to mar the clear whiteness of her wrists, no matter how sad she is. Eventually, Esther overdoses on several pills unsafely guarded by her mother and crawls into the darkness of her basement to die. “Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.” (pg. 138)
If you’re looking for a read that gives a unique insight into a little understood disorder (for those who don’t have it), then The Bell Jar would be an interesting fit. Her depression is so pervasive throughout the novel that it stains every musty page with gray thoughts and suicidal fantasies. Overall, this novel was extremely sad to read, but I’m glad I trudged through it until the end. I can’t begin to fathom the mental circumstances Plath must have been in when she wrote these gloomy words… More symptoms of depression can be found here.
Pictures from Wikipedia and myself