To a curator, a bell jar is a glass repository that magnifies the value of the precious stone or rare artifact it contains. To him, a bell jar would be as worthy as its contents for not only does it safeguard against possible defacement or theft, it adds an alluring drama for the awed spectator.
To a young woman, however, the bell jar with its suffocating dank air and "stifling distortions," could represent a maddening confinement where she finds herself cloistered, alone and hopeless, while the whole world is outside looking in, callous to her inner struggles as it goes on, seemingly unperturbed, without her.
Such is the plight of Esther Greenwood, the tragic protagonist in the novel I have come to love above other classics, The Bell Jar, written anonymously by the leading confessional poet, Sylvia Plath, under the name Victoria Lucas in 1963.
The book reveals the story of Esther, an American golden girl endowed with the intellect of a genius, who at such a young age, was already a prolific literary luminary, with her poems and short stories published in leading national magazines.The story, narrated by Esther as if she were reading from her journal, revolves around the events, particularly her magazine apprenticeship in New York City, which led to her suicide attempt later on and a nervous breakdown that was to be as inevitable as the electric shock therapy she would receive at an asylum.
Someone once said that petty minds discuss personalities, mediocre minds discuss events and great minds discuss ideas. The author of The Bell Jar, speaking inconspicuously behind the main character’s persona, indeed possessed a challenging cerebrum. For she is not content recounting the events, mechanically as they happened, nor is she indulgent in prosaic soliloquies; rather, the author speaks with her mind and heart, allowing her persona to delve deeper into her innermost recesses and darkest corners, thus adding credibility to the cleverly-structured events and the bitchy, albeit witty and honest commentaries. And that makes the book all the more real, all the more alive, and all the more human.
What is stimulating about The Bell Jar is the strong undercurrent of emotions lurking beneath a surface of glossy and almost superficial existence. Esther was a girl whom society took on kindly, undoubtedly a giant in a constellation of white dwarves. Esther is a girl who has it all, presumably: beauty, brains and a boyfriend to boot. Esther is a girl destined to become anything but mediocre.
And Esther is also a girl who tried to kill herself.
For what intent? To exact revenge on the society which she deemed responsible for her imprisonment in a bell jar of perpetual expectations, female inferiority, sexual ambiguity and, above all, a loss of identity.
"What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots from."
Esther, like so many other women like me, is trapped between choices, choices between career and motherhood, assertiveness and gentleness, chastity and boldness, marriage and single-blessedness. Man is perceived to be the enemy, society’s hidden alter-ego, for "in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like a kitchen mat." Unfortunately for Esther who has perceived this reality with such crystal-clear epiphany at such age, the future, the world, the self as she has always known it, was never the same again.
At the end of the story, the heroine conquer her fears and anxieties, although she was aware that anytime, anywhere in the future, the bell jar could descend again, the tremendous pressure of a male-dominated society crushing her fragile ego. But then life goes on and in spite of her worldly successes, she is in an existentialistic angst. She is nobody.
Throughout the novel, I laughed and cried, laughed then cried again with Esther, with the author and with the females in the same bell jar as I am in, my kindred souls. I laughed with Esther at the way she painted sardonic caricatures of the people who insulted her wit. I cried with her when she felt that death was the only antidote to her misery. I wanted to enter the pages of the book so badly so I could hug her and be her friend. I screamed in terror and in anguish as I felt her body being jolted like she was being electrocuted. I never doubted she was real, though. She lives in me and I in her. For that I knew.
More than being a masterpiece, an ocular feast of poetic language and a hope chest of re-treaded and patched dreams, The Bell Jar for me represents something more profound, the realization that underneath the bell jar we are all living in, underneath the stifling inequality and despair that define life is a tiny hole, the forgotten truth that despite all bad dreams, something makes life worth living. And it has escaped Esther’s intelligence, which for me is the real tragedy and irony of the story. Love is the hole that makes life worth living. It can only come from wisdom. Only with love can we overcome that angst and be somebody.
And only then could she hear her heart hum, "I am. I am. I am."
I just wish she knew.