The Bell Jar

This month's selection, The Bell Jar, was included on the 2012 reading list for a few different reasons: first, it is considered a classic, as in a no English major worth their salt has never read Sylvia Plath kind of classic; and second, it is important to me to read classic novels written by women. I choose my reading list after carefully scouring best-seller lists, lists of American classics, and recommendations from other readers. It seems that, overwhelmingly, the books commonly considered to be classics - both traditional and modern - are written by men. Out of TIME Magazine's list of the top 100 novels, only 15 had female authors. That's less than a quarter, which seems low to me, as women have been publishing novels since the mid 1800s or earlier.

Last year somehow turned out to be the year of distopian novels, and it seems that this year might be the year of characters with psychological disorders - two out of the three books I've read this year have been set in a mental hospital. It was actually very interesting to see how the hospital Esther stayed at compared to the hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was published only a year before, in 1962. In Cuckoo's Nest the hospital was much like a prison, where in Bell Jar it was more like a dormitory. Chief and McMurphy had horrible experiences with the shock treatments, while Esther's went pretty smoothly. And no surprise, considering the contrast in treatments - the men got worse, while Esther got better.

This book is a fascinating insight into the life of a young woman in the 60s. She felt monumentally alone, being distanced emotionally from her family and somewhat outcast among her peers. Her stream of dates and writing scholarship to New York made her seem happy, but deep down she never was, and didn't know how to deal with it. Her journey into insanity was very subtle - I didn't realize how odd she was acting until she threw all of her clothes out of the window and into the wind. Esther's downfall escalated from there, eventually finding her holed up in a dark part of the basement after swallowing a bottle of pills.



I was struck by how much this novel reminded me of the movie Girl, Interrupted - until I found out that it is based off of the memoir of a woman who spent time in a psychiatric hospital during the 60s when she was young. It's no wonder that when I was reading I kept imagining the hospital in the film. The girl she knew in the hospital, Joan, reminded me a lot of Brittany Murphy's character Daisy, who also seemed well adjusted but came to the same tragic end.

This novel was beautifully written, which gave it an almost haunting quality, as it is essentially about a young girl's life. Below is one of my favorite passages, written about the weather:

"When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew strait down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalk with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete." - pg. 41

How delicious is that writing? This is why it is important to read books like The Bell Jar. New books focused on plot just don't have the same quality.