The Iconography of Death in Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar
Abstract:
To interrogate the dark chaos of post-war American culture in the mid-1900s, that is the purpose of this paper which surveys Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) and a few related stories. A reading of Plath’s work brings us to a literary terrain where the confessional and the personal terrain are employed by the author as metaphor and history in order to explore and expose the socio-emotional under-text of Capitalist American society at a point in time when there were immense material and academic advancements all around, but there was also at the same time - a general cracking up of structures of innocence, romance and family.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is autobiographical fiction that is dark, subversive and strangely funny. Also, it is fiction that is bravely honest, it moves lightly, swiftly and naturally taking us along with young Miss Esther Greenwood on her misadventures as she walks between poverty and plenitude, tradition and new-age morality.
The confessions of Esther in Plath’s autobiographical novel, alchemize into the stuff of bildungsroman, history and metaphor fit for Cultural and Feminist Studies which strive to explore and interrogate, landscapes of growth, breakage and restructuring that marked the process of women’s misadventures on their road to independence, survival and self-discovery. Brilliantly structured and exquisitely told, The Bell Jar breaks several writerly conventions which, to say the least, is interesting.
Keywords: confessional, feminist, subversive, autobiographical, postmodern.
“Dying is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
….. I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.”
[Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’]
Mostly used in laboratories, a bell jar is a bell-shaped glass cover with a flange at its lower rim to ensure that the space/object it covers is hermetically sealed and preserved as it is. In her novel, The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (1932-1973) places the symbolic bell jar over the conversations of her own mind and over the collective mindset of people around her. As a powerful motif the bell jar sits on the postwar claustrophobia of a world grappling with existential despair and a collective sense of the wounded tragic. It is a battered world recovering from the ravaging effects of prolonged war. It was a world only superficially healed and yet it sat on the threshold - all cleaned-up and ready - to leave behind the gruesome past and chart a fresh new course in the capitalist future of a powerful nation.
Spiritually crippled and embittered by the great burden of memory, death and war, this was an America, that sharpened its weapons and cultivated passive aggression in an era of sustained Cold War. Sylvia Plath as a child had witnessed from a distance the saga of the Nazi regime, Hitler’s madness and the dramatic suicides; closer at hand was the early death of her own German father, from gangrene and diabetes, following which her mother Aurelia had to shoulder all kinds of burdens in order to survive and flourish.
Through her novel The Bell Jar, Plath shares with us not just the story of her life, but also the changes that altered the American mind – she represents through the metaphor of her own life, the cultural, moral and social fabric of the western world - how it had transformed and how its women struggled to keep up, upholding past values and acquiring new ones at the same time. The new-age woman was a super, dream woman – smart, tough, sexy and fragile like Marilyn Monroe, she upheld both - the domestic ceremony of past convention and the dynamic freewill of the informed educated woman. She baked her bread (or cake) and earned it too.
A thematic concern of this short essay is to map the contexts of madness and death and thereafter to acknowledge, the case and context of Sylvia Plath – student, wife, woman-poet/writer - who in the face of desire for all the ‘figs’ on life’s tree, fell victim to the malaise of greed and indecision, and fashioned her very own death like the tragic-hero Icarus with wings-of-wax or Victor Frankenstein with his hideous murdering creation.
It must be remembered that Plath was an exceptionally perceptive poet, an uncanny craftsman with words she was like Shakespeare in a woman’s body in an era when women (and men) still wrestled with stereotype. I quote from Jo Gill’s Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath,
In the aftermath of World War II millions of Americans – at the behest of educators, advertisers, government officials, and producers of popular culture – subscribed to an ascendant domestic ideology that revised traditional familial values for the Cold War era... [It has been observed that] …in the immediate postwar years, many women struggled mightily with the decision to take a job, since cultural pressures of the most extraordinary kind were being brought to bear against the employment of wives and mothers. These are pressures which Plath negotiated repeatedly, particularly in her journals, but also in The Bell Jar, Letters Home and in a number of poems. (26-27).
The Bell Jar, first published in 1963, was initially brought out under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas and later released posthumously in Plath’s real name. A thinly veiled autobiography, the novel chronicles the mental breakdown and eventual recovery of a young woman called Esther Greenwood. A reading of the novel brings us therefore, to a literary terrain where the confessional-personal is deployed by the author as metaphor and history in a manner that exposes the abrasive nature of socio-emotional contexts in Capitalist American society in the 1950s and 60s. This was an era when the economy was advancing at a phenomenal pace while the emotional underbelly of society suffered a deep rot and a general cracking up. There was too much of materiality – too many ‘figs’ (choices) to consider and pluck from the fig-tree of life.
The confessions of Esther, we can say, alchemize into the stuff of bildungsroman, history and metaphor fit for Cultural and Feminist Studies which strive to explore and interrogate, landscapes of growth, breakage and restructuring that marked the process of women’s misadventures on their road to independence, survival and self-discovery.
Through Esther’s character Plath chronicles the bildungsroman of a young woman as she enters adulthood and explores the options of higher education, boyfriend, marriage, career. Her journey however is starkly realistic and subversive in nature; overwhelmed with the uncertainty, the corruption of action and intention in the world around her, Esther goes through the transforming churn of derangement-depression-death and emerges on the other side of the spin – quite reformed, hopeful and healed.
Through Esther Greenwood’s character, Plath narrates her own life story: the month-long internship with a magazine in New York replete with cultural shock, issues of identity and her efforts to blend-in in the outlandish cutthroat world. In the beginning when she arrives in New York, as an attractive twenty-year-old girl she comes across as ambitious, priggish and studious, slowly however, the loneliness and brittle inhumanity of existence in New York wears her down…. The disillusionment and anger she feels towards Buddy Willard who led her to believe he was a virgin, “pretending all this time to be so innocent.” (58). The footloose fancy-free lifestyle of girls from privileged homes. The terrible food-poisoning incident in the New York hotel, and finally the arrival of a ‘letter of rejection’ to the writing class she had set her heart on, unhinges her. On her last night in the city, in a brash act of resistance, she throws down from the hotel terrace, every piece of clothing she has acquired during her stay.
Esther goes home to spend the rest of the summer with her mother who works to make a living, her father having died when she was just nine. Dejected and depressed, Esther struggles to write a novel and becomes increasingly despondent, making several half-hearted suicide attempts. She ultimately overdoses on sleeping pills but survives. In the aftermath of her much-reported suicide life takes her to asylums where she is subjected to electric shocks and psychic treatment. As an unstable person, she is no longer a wife-material to Buddy who expresses this in no uncertain words when he asks her, “Who will you marry now, Esther?” The novel which chronicles actual events from Plath’s life, ends with young Esther about to be released from the sanatorium and hopeful of resuming higher studies and moving on in life. As we know, one month after the publication of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath aged thirty, committed suicide.
Brilliantly structured and exquisitely told, The Bell Jar breaks several of writerly conventions which, to say the least, is interesting. Although the novel is confessional, extremely dark and depressive, it has its strengths, consider the fact that it is unselfconsciously feminist and resiliently subversive in interrogating the romance and myth that is spun around ideas of love, virginity, sex, malehood and marriage. Consider also the fact that Plath spins it all with her unique brand of humour.
Esther Greenwood’s misadventures in love are an example. Her frigid attitude towards men and romance and the very fact that the young man who was serious about her at the beginning of the novel now says towards the end, “I wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther.” (202). Then there is her naïve and funny take on sex and losing her virginity. In a rare candid moment, she shares with Doctor Nolan, “What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb, … A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.” (185). “Propaganda!” Dr Nolan had said and burst out laughing, and then she had given Esther the contact of a doctor who could ‘fix her up’! Later in the narrative, when her friend Joan is found hanging from a branch in the woods near the asylum, Esther is deeply shaken, she says, “I turned out the light and tried to drop back to sleep, but Joan’s face floated before me, bodiless and smiling, like the face of the Cheshire cat. I even thought I heard her voice, rustling and hustling in the dark, …” (196)
Three issues confuse and challenge Esther’s journey through the novel – her views on virginity and sex, her choice of a professional career (which promises a modicum of independence) and lastly the prospect of marriage (and children) which to the young Esther appears dismal and laden with burdens and drudgery. Can we say that through Esther’s character and through the metaphor of her own life, Plath holds up a mirror to the corrosive mental and emotional trajectory of the American collective conscious? The total absence of a grounding spiritual core, is glaringly painful too and completes the picture of a collective that was spiritually crippled and Nietzschean at heart.
Plath’s genius and writerly gifts tend to get overshadowed by the fact of her gruesome death and depressive tendencies. Intense anger and pithily articulated grievances, dramatic posturing and the employment of shock, the mantric repetitions – ‘I am, I am, I am’, that build an uncanny energy and transcend the fashioning of rational sense – this creative interweaving of sense with nonsense in such a manner that traditional structures of sense making are transcended to reach a point of higher impact, is a striking aspects of Plath’s technique. In a fashion, The Bell Jar also recalls, (besides Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) Franz Kafka’s fascination of the tragic morbid, or yet before him the symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire’s synaesthesia of decay, correspondences and the rot of fetish.
Shunning the concept of masking her personal narrative behind suitable ‘objective correlatives’, Sylvia Plath chooses instead to flow closer to the bone of her own life and to the reality of her collective contexts. She chooses to access the material of her own life and alter it in a fashion that speaks to the needs and sensibilities of the reading public of her times. The ‘psychic osmosis’ she shared with her mother Aurelia contrary to her portrayal of the mother’s character in The Bell Jar is an example.
It is best to not brand and judge the likes of writers and poets such as Sylvia Plath, Olive Prouty, Anne Sexton, Mary Shelley, or for that matter even Assia Wevill (whom Ted married), and the infamously mad character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, 1847.
It is best to replace superficial labels like neurotic, depressive and maniacal that we commonly use to describe these women with sympathetic ones, like – ambitious, supreme intelligence and Icarus syndrome.
I would rather we remembered Sylvia Plath as tragic, Icarian, genius and an aspiring feminist voice who was way ahead of her times - she left behind her a blazing trail of powerful disturbing work before she succumbed to the fear of rejection (Ted had left her for another woman) and to the violence of unresolved inner and outer chaos. It is from the churn of preposterous goals the poet sets for herself, and from the churn of stereotypical expectations in the social and marital space, that Plath’s depression and death-impulse emanate. I quote here briefly in homage, lines from her poem ‘Daddy’:
“…I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.”
Plath died but once, but the world has continued to relive that moment, again and again. As her daughter Frieda Hughes confesses, in a poem titled, ‘My Mother’,
“They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
But they do it annually, or weekly,
Some even do it daily,
Carrying her death around in their heads
And practising it.
…………………..
My buried mother
Is up-dug for repeat performances.”
It is time we buried Sylvia Plath, time we celebrate her for the power, skill and craft of her pen.
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