The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

On receiving books for christmas, my uncle asked if I still had time to read, what with the baby and all. I told him I'd just finished The Bell Jar, and saw my mother make her "yikes" face. "I wonder if that's a good idea," she said. I realized at that moment where it is that I get the idea that Sylvia Plath is the queen of all that is gloomy and dark.

I guess the fact that Plath eventually killed herself goes against my mother's super-bouyant optimism, giving the writer's work a depressing weight; a weight that I don't think is actually there at all. Not that Plath can't write a darn good impression of what it is like to feel depressed:

"I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough.

It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep."

Depressed but not depressing, don't you agree? I found the book's direct clarity to be potent, unpretentious and a very easy read.

In fact, I was under many misaprehensions about The Bell Jar. I always thought it was an overbearing book of suicidal poems. When I learned that it was actually a novel (through reading Plath's excellent journals) I picked up interest. I mentioned my silly mistake to a co-worker and she said "oh, The Bell Jar, terrifying, I'll never forget the part with the sharks, circling circling." Did somebody say sharks? Now I just HAD to read it. So I spent much of the book waiting for the shark bit to come up, which it never does, I'll tell you right now.

This strange shadow of mistaken identity ended up being the only murky aspect of what is actually a clear-like-air account of a Esther Greenwood's bout with depression, and its treatment. If you want a heavier study of depression, read Beth Nugent's Live Girls. Esther Greenwood's nervous breakdown includes all kinds of groovy stuff that makes up college girls' lives in the 1950s America: cocktail parties, fancy hats and the expectation of being treated to absolutely everything by men - even cab fare.

Esther is a successful student, always winning awards, contests and placement in prestigious courses. The book begins while she is an intern with a New York City magazine. The future is hers to do what she wants: poet, journalist, academic, are all possibilities but she doesn't know which route she wants to take. Meantime, she is becoming dogged by the feeling that her luck is about to run out, along with the prizes that seem to justify her as much as they gratify her.

We are shown the perils of making visible accomplishment serve instead of inner self-esteem. When faced with an empty summer before her senior year, Esther begins to nosedive. So for all of us who spend lots of time doing not much - who knew we had a life skill?

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