THE HARD TASK OF GROWING UP - THE BELL JAR: ESTHER GREENWOOD AND SYLVIA PLATH

Esther Greenwood and Sylvia Plath

The story of The Bell Jar is a first person account of Esther Greenwood,  Sylvia Plath herself, her story at 19. Esther, like Sylvia, is a girl who has almost everything she could ask for. She’s an individual with a mind that is above average , extremely sensitive, intellingent and talented . With all of that provided for her, Esther is also struggling with the perennial problems of morality, behavior and identity crisis. The stress and the pressure of being an achiever burns her mind out ; the tension of sexual relations and the double standards on women’s virginity, the ups and downs of family relationships increase her sense of derangement. Esther compares her life to that of an existence in a bell jar, where the air is stiff, heavy and unchanging. She feels as if she is watching her own life and everything that happened to her from within the jar.

Perhaps the best thing about the book is the fact that the life of Esther is synonymous with what the author, Sylvia Plath, had experienced. Like Esther, Plath had gone through a struggling ordeal in finding the real meaning of life and its hidden uncertainties and her eventual fall into the pit of madness.

The book has some similarities with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: both Esther and Holden are troubled young souls searching for the true meaning of life. Both escapes the reality they can’t accept. Both are considered crazy because of their atypicality and fragility.

“For the first time in my life, sitting there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks...” (The Bell Jar, chapter 7, pp. 72-73)

Sylvia and Ted


She was American, he was English. Both very sensitive, both very good poets. But he was lucky, he was a man in the 50s. She, instead, was stuck, entrapped in the cliché of the female role of the 50s, which was STILL the long-lasting stereotype inherited from very ancient times.

He was a heartthrob, she still felt like "a horse in a world without race-tracks". Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, two of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

The two met at a party in Cambridge in 1956 and got married in the same year. They had two children, Freida and Nicholas. However,  she was unsatisfied with her life, she desperately wanted to find time for her poetry,  but her house and her children sucked all her time and her energies.

Her life turned into hell one night when she lifted the receiver and overheard a conversation between her husband and his lover, a common acquaintance, Assia. Her turbulent marriage wrecked,  though their bond of love remained unbreakable. 

Sylvia had suffered from depression as a teenager and had even tried to kill herself at 19. She was rescued and treated with electro-shock therapy, that was the horrible period of her life she wrote about in her The Bell Jar, her deeply touching autobiographical novel.

Her fascination to death ( "blackness and silence") became one of her favourite subjects in her poetry, nearly an obsession, and grew on and on until she decided to try again: she gassed herself, she succeded in committing suicide, on 11th February 1963. She was 30. In that last troubled year, she wrote her most beautiful lines which Ted Hughes would published after her death.

Sylvia Plath was a great poet but also a woman who lived a very tragic life.  Her poetry, known as confessional poetry, is terribly dark but also really  touching. Here are some lines from "The Moon and the Yew Tree" (Ariel):

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy, spirituous mists inhabit this place

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to. (...)

This is instead the letter Ted Hughes wrote to Sylvia's mother after some time from her suicide. Can you imagine his sense of guilt? How difficult could it be to write such a letter? It's extremely moving...  

LISTEN

(letter read by actor Richard Armitage) 

LISTEN & WATCH

Images from the movie Sylvia (2003)

(most  materials in this post were already posted on my personal blog, FLY HIGH!)

Read also "A Sylvia" by A. D'Avenia 

Listen to Sylvia Plath reading her poems in 1958