The Bell Jar
By Sylvia Plath
Genre: Suspense, Mental health, madness, insanity, 2021-read, good prose, modern classics
Rating: 4/5
A student one minute is pursuing the most envious and successful life and the next minute is undergoing shock treatments under harsh conditions of mental asylums to help cope with her life. What's happened?
A fast paced and gripping page turner. Disturbing and strange read which is heart pounding and equally seductive in style. Very thought provoking in its own way. I took my sweet time getting through this book and now I can't seem to get it out of my head. A scene never lingers or tarries at one point or gets too much into detail..it just moves forward into another.. seamlessly blending the two together. The chain of events are broken off and joined by links of continuity that keeps the prose going. But although a book on mental detachment, depression and other mental health issues, it had some strong laugh-out-loud moments and the narrator is hilarious and witty during those moments. It's a direct first person account of a patient going through different phases of insanity and shows what's in the head is far too precious than what's in the pocket!
Esther is a student pursuing honors in English. She has been a studious and diligent pupil all her life. She wins an essay competition for a fashion magazine and is given a month internship and other benefits along with a group of ten girls. During her internship, she starts noticing some stark changes in her thoughts and behaviour. She doesn't have interest to do or learn anything as she used to. Her experiences during/around this time are quite harrowing and outlandishly traumatic - must have been the suppressed reason for her changed attitudes/behaviour. She has lunch at a fashion event that ends in food poisoning and sickness. She is taken to ski on a trip with her friend that results in foot injury. She meets a stranger who tries to bribe and sexually assault her in exchange for a diamond. She escapes reality - life altogether - and goes home to recuperate. She couldn't sleep for days at an end. She couldn't focus on reading or writing. She has no appetite for food and is outright lethargic,suicidal. She visits a psychiatrist who suggests she undergo shock treatments as a solution to her problems. [ As a novice and complete stranger to the treatments of mental health issues, I was startled at the prescription of this harsh treatment for so simple ailment - as the story would have it, this won't be the last time I am shocked for the same reason] Esther's life takes an unexpected turn after this prognosis. I assume it's through severe depression or inability to cope with lackluster existence, she makes several unsuccessful attempts of killing herself. The last attempt gets her commited to a city/state mental asylum where conditions are beneath agreeable. She is later promoted to better facilities like Caplan and Belsize with higher degrees of freedom, subjected to nail biting, brain numbing and releasing shock therapies.
I had come to like and identify a bit of myself in Esther. Especially her views come off to me more like 'spiritual' rather than 'mental' - but nevertheless, I wouldn't have recommended shock therapies to her outright without making an inquiry into her personal life and suppressed emotions/traumas. Does this show what's wrong with some practitioners of psychiatry who go purely by 'text books' ?
Most of the narrative is in the first person of Esther and comes off as rational/ coherent. A mad person shouldn't be able to write a journal saying all the right things right? What does future hold for her? Will she continue living a normal life post her treatment or will it relapse? Is her asylum a place of treatment or a place that feels like safe/ 'home'? Can shock therapies be called 'benign'? I only wonder and want to read more of Sylvia Plath's works..
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