This review includes spoilers, you've been forewarned.
This is a hard book to read, partly for the confused start, but also the very real ending. A deep insight into clinical depression.
This is a hard book to read, partly for the confused start, but also the very real ending. A deep insight into clinical depression.
I have to admit that in reading this book I really struggled to enjoy it - and not because it of the nature of the book, but because it felt like I was bouncing around inside of Sylvia Plath's head in a random jumbled up, non linear fashion.
In fact, I'd say the first third of the book is almost entirely that. The mini stories that occur don't really finish, and as we were journeying through one recounted story, I'd find we'd quickly make a sharp turn and begin a new journey.
The middle third starts to become a bit more pieced together but the book was struggling to win me over. Esther Greenwood (which I'd read earlier The Bell Jar was semi-autobiographical) wanted to kill herself. The way that this third goes on read almost childish and, for my shame, I was beginning to hope the character "just get on with it".
It was also that the first section of the book painted an extremely successful character and the character in the second part was very much the opposite end of the spectrum and the different was jarring and hard to consolidate (as a reader).
Suffice to say, she does indeed attempt suicide. For the final third of the book she is institutionalised and undergoes therapy but also electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). The ECT isn't glorified nor is it vilified which was interesting and challenging (particularly with the story being semi-autobiographical).
The last third takes its time and walks gently through the journey that she takes during her institutionalised. None of this part of the book is glamourised and she doesn't make some magical recovery.
It's slow, gentle and unsure. Even as Esther finally reaches her board review to see if she can leave the institution, she herself is unconvinced that anything has changed, but something is certainly at rest in her.
The last part of the book definitely calls for reflection and helped to give me an insight into those who struggle with existing. There's rarely some grand purpose that drives them to death by suicide, and indeed in Esther's case there's nothing that particularly explain why she wanted to end her life.
There's a moment with her medical supervisor where Esther says that she hates her mother. This is after their last encounter - and her mother isn't bad in the slightest, it's that her mother wants to know what she had done wrong to have not been able to help protect her daughter from these feelings. The supervisor (slash therapist) says, "I believe you do". She doesn't try to sympathies or give Esther another point of view. This line surprised me, in a believable way.
And as the book ends, Esther is reunited with her mother, and her mother, naively says she just wants to forget about it all and move forward from this, healthier time. To which Esther writes that her mother may want to forget and that perhaps Esther might forget those feelings:
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.
Having dealings with depression myself, and shock grief of the worst kind, it really doesn't go away, and it isn't forgotten. It's as Plath writes: it becomes part of your landscape.
This is a hard book to read, partly for the confused start, but also the very real ending. Made harder by knowing that Sylvia Plath died by suicide the same year of this book's release.
Plath described the book (to her mother) as:
a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown.
Indeed that's the experience of the last third of the book.
14 Highlight(s)
My dream was some day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'
I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been,
Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.
I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
Now the one thing this article didn't seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.
wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from.
Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits.
Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.
What did I think was wrong? That made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong.
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenceless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.
wherever I sat – on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok – I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.
How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?