I am, I am, I am
Rating: 2/5 Trigger Warnings: depression, suicide, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, sexual assault Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t read the book, this review will contain spoilers so it’s up to you if you continue…
The Bell Jar has been on my TBR list for about 4 years now but I finally got around to reading it and, like most classics or must reads… it disappointed me a bit. Well, disappointed is the wrong word. I don’t feel let down by the book, just unimpressed.
Esther Greenwood’s psychological journey isn’t an uninteresting one. Her “overachieving” in education led to a feeling of being lost when there was no more path set out for her, which is a relatable enough experience for many people who finish education and are none the clearer as to what they want to do in life. To move from this, to depression and suicidal thoughts is made to look incredibly natural in the narrative, and the slow realisations about her emotions - or lack of - were well expressed to indicate to a reader that it wasn’t a sudden switch from a successful life to wanting to kill herself.
Something I really appreciate in The Bell Jar is the display of mental health as an ongoing journey. Even once in the asylum, it was easy for people to move back and forth between the wards and progress was not a case of moving in a straight line. At the end of the book, there is a sense that Esther is not recovered. Her narration shows the progress of her health, and by the end of the book it has definitely returned to a “pre-breakdown” style, but after all she’s been through, something in the writing has changed, and I think it indicates the idea that the end of the book is not the end of the story.
I said to my sister that it was one of those ‘nothing happens but people learn a deep lesson’ books - which I really tend to hate - but she corrected me: things do happen, but in a very passive sense. After she said this, I appreciated more the sense of disassociation that the writing put across. The events were all there, but, like Esther, the reader had a disconnect from them, they weren’t really sinking in and having the emotional effect they could have had.
Whilst I did appreciate a lot of the elements in The Bell Jar, I didn’t enjoy it as a book. It felt educational, almost, in its ability to reveal what living with depression can be like. Of course, this isn’t everyone’s journey, but it’s something Plath went through, and that is evident in the writing. I don’t want to go to far with an autobiographical reading as it can be hard to see where the line is between real life and fiction, but it would be hard to depict depression and suicidal thoughts the way Plath does without having experienced it. The Bell Jar is an interesting book, and no doubt has plenty in it to pick apart and study, but I can’t give it a higher rating as I didn’t enjoy the actual process of reading it.
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