.savion_blanc on the ways Sylvia Plath's TheBellJar defies gender constraints and offers a universal language for talking about the harrowing experience of living with depression.
Shortly after moving to New York, I slid into a deep depression. Initially, I fought it as one might fight to stay awake after a long day, my head nodding or a car honking the only things that could jolt my eyes back open. But, eventually, the weariness triumphed, and I found myself trapped in a leaden, aimless slumber from which I struggled to wake up, every day, for months.
One morning during this lonesome period, my feet dragged me to the Strand Bookstore, where I picked out Sylvia Plath’sfrom a “modern classics” table near the front. While some men might turn to self-isolation and brewskis when feeling blue, I wanted a confidant in misery. Esther Greenwood, the sharp-tongued yet fitfully disturbed young woman at the center of the novel, could be that confidant, I thought.
What, particularly, is wrong with her is spelled out gradually. Within the pantheon of modern female literary figures, Esther may be most casually associated nowadays with the crackly melancholia of Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway or Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier. But her constitution contains something these characters lack: a fury within her chest that drives her destructive behavior. Her shrewd dissections of New York’s high society are reminiscent of J.D.
And yet, her depression is rooted in an individual and inexplainable set of circumstances and biology, even while the invisible cultural and sexual politics that circle her like vultures undoubtedly contribute to her despair.
Gender roles for young, cosmopolitan women have evolved and psychiatric treatment has grown decidedly less barbaric since the 1950s . Yet the frankness with which Plath outlines her protagonist’s outsized emotionality and thirst for direction speaks to generations of young women—and men, clearly—navigating the formidable task of ensconcing themselves in an ever-changing world.
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