“I've been tearing around in my nightgown
24/7 Sylvia Plath
Writing in blood on the walls.”
The above lines are lyrics from a popular Lana Del Rey song, Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me. This song is an archetype for the current craze that has swept pop culture, the romanticism of mental illnesses. This may sound absurd to the ears, but in reality it is chiefly evident in today’s culture. Sylvia Plath, herself has become a symbol for this re- emerging movement. She was a brilliant writer whose work led to the advancement of confessional literature. However, the disheartening truth is that her marvellous literary works aren’t the most significant aspects that led to her rapid fame, it is her tragic suicide. In the year 1963, Plath was found dead in her apartment with her stuck inside an oven. Presently, this mournful incident has been rendered into an ‘aesthetic’ event, something many young women are being drawn to, as if they too desire to be in her shoes and suffer from enduring the same monsters that plagued her mind.
“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.
The Bell Jar, her sole novel, is written semi- autobiographically. It depicts the life of a tortured college student in New York City during the 1950s. Esther Greenwood, the protagonist, struggles to navigate the path of life, full of controversial societal norms and prejudices against working women. At every turn, she faces hardships as she labours, desperately trying to make it as a poet. Simultaneously, being trapped in an unhappy relationship. However, in the City of Dreams, Esther’s own ambitions slowly crumble around her. As she grapples with her career’s flitting success, her own monsters bubble to the surface and haunt her, making her question her own identity. She strays further and further away from the world as society’s missguided generalisations against her nag at her self confidence and individuality. Esther eventually crumples into a cocoon, her life surrounded by a bell jar. The opening line of the book, “I was supposed to be having the time of my life”, directly dives into the melancholy that encompasses Esther and grips her tightly, not letting any other emotions in.
For Esther, the Bell Jar she claims hangs over her ominously, is a symbol of her madness. When gripped by insanity, she feels as if she is inside an airless jart that distorts her worldview and blocks her from having human connections with others.
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
As Esther’slife becomes merbioeld with complications, she starts forgetting who she is. Her own identity becomes a stranger to her. “When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”
The fig tree is a symbol for the indecisiveness that beleugeur’s Esther. She imagines the tree full of ripe figs to represent all the life choices that lay in front of her, beckoning eerily. However, she can only choose one fig, but her overwhelming desire to want all of them paralyses her ability to think and act with astuteness. Dead in her tracks, Esther gloomily watches every fig eventually rot and fall to the ground, away from her trembling hands.
In all, The Bell Jar is a classic that I always recommend my friends to read. It has everything: Plath’s beautiful writing, a captivating life story and a character like none other. Reading this book was the volta in my life, the moment I fell in love with authors of another era. Sylvia Plath is and always will be one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to writing and I hope that a shift in our mindsets comes soon, so we stop treating her grievous life as a quirky trend to fit into. She’s an icon, not an object of our inane cultural idiosyncrasies.
“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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