For me, well I haven’t quite worked out exactly what it is. For Esther, the bell jar was a manifestation of her madness. In truth, I feel I’ve encased myself in a bell jar of my own making.

If you do follow my blog, you know I’ve fallen desperately behind on my postings. Frankly, this lack of artifice makes us feel more for Esther. There’s no going easy on us to assuage our delicate sensibilities. There is no sugar-coating her personality. But, if we’re being authentic with ourselves, we know this is because our own thoughts have a tendency to be uncomfortable from time to time. Sometimes Esther’s thoughts are extremely uncomfortable for us readers. Esther Greenwood is a mirror image of Sylvia Plath, living the events of her life and experiencing the internal torments she’d endured a decade before, as Sylvia wrote this novel in the 1960’s. It’s full of sadness, fear, isolation, and torment. The Bell Jar, one of the most important works of fiction about mental health, is a raw and intimate look into the early experiences Sylvia had in the 1950’s. We’ve come a long way since then but still have farther to go. It wasn’t understood, and victims of it were maligned and ostracized, often institutionalized because no one knew what the hell else to do with them, and truly helping them was outside the range of abilities and knowledge for psychologists and psychiatrists of the day. Pretty much any time prior to the present was a nightmare for those suffering from mental illness. Electroshock therapy was commonly used for patients like Plath. Supposedly well meaning doctors pumped her full of drugs which left her feeling like a shell of a human, her creativity deadened beneath a fog of chemically-induced calm. She battled a fierce and all consuming depression and was treated for psychosis, oftentimes by doctors who didn’t really understand her affliction.

Sylvia Plath would be plagued by mental health issues her entire life. Their books are about themselves even if they created a new identity to carry the weight of themselves to new eyes, this new persona creating somewhat of a distance in the intimate nature of the truth they were telling. Those like Kurt Vonnegut, as discussed in my review for Slaughterhouse – Five, and Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, wove pieces of themselves into their own sections of that tapestry. Many authors’ own lives were as intriguing and sometimes heartbreaking as the tales they wove into the tapestry of literary canon. Fiction is a veil cast over a haunting reality.

Every now and then, there’s a story behind the story.

The belljar