CONTENT WARNING: SUICIDE
Years ago, I was tasked to write a literary essay in high school. I chose to write about The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Little did I know this novel would change my life forever, or that Plath would come to mean so much to me.
If you have not had the privilege of being exposed to Plath, she was a brilliant, confessional poet who wrote about life. In her famed semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, Plath writes about life as a young woman post-World War II. She touches on her indecisiveness of wanting to be a mother or needing a husband, while being sure about wanting to be a mature human being. She further wrote about her experience as a psychiatric patient, having gone through electroshock therapy in the 1950s.
As I grow older, I realize more and more how Plath impacted my life.
When I actually decided to pick up The Bell Jar, I regretted not reading such an important piece of work earlier. In fact, I was enthralled. Due to it being a semi-autobiographical novel, the main protagonist is not named Sylvia Plath, but Esther Greenwood. Greenwood moves to New York City to take part in a prestigious internship at a magazine for part of the summer.
Throughout her internship, she never glamourizes this experience of a lifetime. This is mainly due to Greenwood wanting to be unique. “By being different,” she says, “and these girls are all the same.” Because of this, Greenwood never really tried to fully integrate herself with the group of interns she lived, worked and spent most of her time in New York with.
As the summer progresses, her mental health worsens and she eventually attempts suicide. This led to her institutionalization. Her only novel, The Bell Jar makes it quite apparent that Plath was a true poet. She wrote about her envy of men being able to do whatever they wanted, her suicide attempts, interpersonal relationships and ambitious dreams.
As I grow older, I realize more and more how Plath impacted my life. Apart from the weirdly coincidental summer internship of a lifetime—mine being at the Permanent Mission of Canada to the UN—I see myself in her fluttery and melodramatic yet nonchalant words.
The Bell Jar was kind of a diary of despair and desperation. It centred around a girl who had everything going for her, but whose life was still spiralling. In her own words, Plath saw her life “branching out before [her] 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.”
This feeling of having a world of opportunities in front of you while continuously spiralling is hard to put into words, and Plath was able to do so beautifully. For someone like me, who has been given opportunities very similar to Plath’s, yet continues to be swept into the waves of crippling mental health, I recognized myself in her writing and the all-too familiar way she felt.
With this said, Plath changed my life. She helped me understand my own mental illness and what it means to be ill, but to also know you have what it takes to be influential and change the world. Plath matters to me because she lived her whole truth.
She did not downplay her mental illness, nor did she give it more space than it deserved in her writing. Despite the obvious way it impacted her life, Plath continued to dream and be ambitious. When she wrote about her treatment, she presented it as a part of a significant summer, but not the only part worth noting.
Her words in The Bell Jar have captivated many not just because of her brilliance, but because she was able to capture feelings many cannot explain.
She also presented what I believe to be a reasonable form of ambition, writing, “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’ve often been told to grasp onto reality and aim for realistic goals. I’ve been considered neurotic, as Plath said. But her words made me feel heard, and her brilliant life gave me hope. In fact, for many, this can be seen as ambitious, but for me, this is reasonable.
In The Bell Jar, Greenwood accomplished a great deal in the early summer. Although she ended up in a place where she could no longer go on, she eventually finished her education and went on to be a successful writer, as we know through Plath’s story.
Plath went through a great deal of triumphs and downfalls in her life and didn’t come out on the other end. But, her words have given comfort and have made so many people like me feel as though they are heard, understood and not alone.
Plath was not a huge public speaker, politician or philanthropist. She simply wrote about her life and about the ways in which she was trying to figure out her place in the world. Plath is important because she touched so many people and continues to do so decades after her death through being a normal girl with the gift of putting pen to paper. Through that, she helped and influenced generations of humans around the world.
Her words in The Bell Jar have captivated many not just because of her brilliance, but because she was able to capture feelings many cannot explain, and put it into words for others to understand.
After her treatment, Greenwood lived in fear of the bell jar hanging over her—a representation of madness preventing her from connecting to people and places—descending on her once more.
I, like Plath, often live in fear that I might get worse, or better then worse again, not knowing if, “Someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again.”
And I know that if it ever does, I’ll have Plath’s words there to make me feel less alone.
And so, Sylvia matters to me, but she should also matter to you.
Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.
