On Summer Reading and Sylvia Plath

To begin with, the required list of books read over the summer:

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (of course)
Old School, Tobias Wolff
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling
Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer (Yes, I read it. Yes, it was terrible.)
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Dracula, Bram Stoker (And to all those Twilight/Stephenie Meyer fans out there: You want a *good* piece of vampire fiction?! Read Bram Stoker. That, or Anne Rice. At least their novels don't read like poor fanfiction.)

(Looking over this list, it seems only Old School, Pride and Prejudice, and Breaking Dawn were books that I had read for the first time this summer.)

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“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

The first sentence of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar brilliantly sets the tone of the stark, real, horribly believable journey of one woman into the depths of madness and back to the shores of sanity. Esther Greenwood, the lady whom the novel revolves around, is a young woman who travels to New York over the summer for a internship with a prominent magazine. Esther is a character who watches the world; she does not participate in it. Her eye is detached from the chaos that envelops her as she observes from afar. In her own words: “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

Esther then travels back to her home in Massachusetts where she struggles to decide what to do with the rest of her life and slowly begins to drown in depression. She is subjected to a traumatic experience involving an improperly executed electroshock treatment and later ends up crawling into the cellar where she swallows a severe overdose of sleeping pills in an attempt to kill herself.

After being sent to a new mental hospital, Esther begins a slow, life-changing recovery. Scattered throughout these events in her life are others: a rejection for a writing course taught by a distinguished author, more electroshock treatments, the suicide of a friend, a handful of love affairs with a variety of gentlemen, and the loss of her virginity. The novel ends as Miss Greenwood is led before a group of doctors who will decide if she is well enough to leave the hospital. The reader never learns what becomes of this interview, for the novel ends with the sentence, “The eyes and faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”

Esther Greenwood is a woman who knows exactly what she wants in life. Everything. But she can't decide on any choice before her and as she turns from "one mutually exclusive thing" to "another," she watches opportunity slip from her hands.

Esther is a character distinguished from her friends. She feels neither the buzz nor the excitement of New York City her friends do. Her world is silent. Her world is one within her own mind. And as she feels this sense of isolation, this pressing feeling of separation traps her. Like a bell jar. And suffocates her.

Sylvia Plath’s writing is brutal and honest, her descriptions, stark and real. No detail is spared in her dark, gritty world. Esther’s descent into madness is reasonable. The transition is slow and while she becomes increasingly insane, the reader sees each step in her life as rational and even “sane.”

The novel is gripping, chilling. One that you will question and ponder long after finished. (623 words)

The following is a selection of quotes from the novel. They are not included in the word count.

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

"I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead."

"How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"