Sylvia Plath And The Bell Jar

About three days ago, right after I finished the book titled The Bell Jar, I wondered about the life of the author Sylvia Plath and her other books. The result of my research reminded me of the idea that authors actually write about themselves. Before I talk about the reason for this, let's analyze the book a little bit.

The author starts the book by talking about a young girl named Esther, who is one of the 12 girls selected for the article she submitted to a contest organized by a fashion magazine. Esther is a 19-year-old girl interested in writing and reading, who has crowned her academic success since she was a little girl with various scholarships. After winning this contest, the magazine arranges a month-long job for the 12 girls in New York, covering all their expenses and offering them many opportunities. Now, when you read this, you might think that this is a wonderful thing and that Esther is over the moon. But on the contrary, Esther feels lost and empty in her glamorous life in New York. Every time she talks about her experiences, I felt like I was listening to a teenager who couldn't enjoy life, who had anxiety about the future, and the deep worry of not knowing what to do with her life.

Esther, who refuses to participate in the activities offered by the magazine during her stay in New York and finds them boring, goes to bars with a friend named Doreen and meets people there. She then shares with us her observations about men, which, I must say, are not very positive. There is one man, Buddy Willard, for whom Esther has been pining for a long time. He is one of the rare people about whom Esther speaks positively when it comes to men. Esther begins a relationship with Buddy after her platonic affection for him, but upon learning that Buddy has had a sexual relationship with someone else before, she feels anger and disappointment and decides to distance herself from him. In fact, her anger becomes so great that she thinks she should be with someone else as soon as possible.

After this, the stories in the book start to be presented in fragments and a somewhat disorganized manner. Esther recalls Buddy telling her that she has a neurotic personality. At a ski resort they visited together, before she had even learned how to ski, she let herself go from a high slope. She recounts how, even though both of her legs were broken, she wanted to climb back up the mountain and jump again. During all this, the author describes Esther's inner world so vividly that I felt bored and constricted while reading it.

When Esther returns to her mother from New York, she hears that she was rejected from a course she had hoped to be accepted into. This leads her to attempt suicide. In fact, although the idea of suicide lingers throughout the book, it is shocking to see how the internal conflicts of a young girl—who had been so successful in her life and had won good scholarships—suddenly turn into suicidal thoughts. After a few unsuccessful attempts, Esther is admitted to a mental hospital and begins receiving electroshock therapy. She moves from hospital to hospital, and at one point, she describes how, after an electroshock treatment, it feels as if a bell jar that had trapped her mind is lifted, and her foggy thoughts are replaced with calmness.

To be honest, at this point, I thought Esther would start to recover, but that is not entirely the case. Esther is transferred to a more comfortable hospital, where she learns that a girl she knows from a distance—who had also been involved with Buddy—is staying in the next room. After a while, Joan, this girl, is discharged on the condition that she stays with a nurse who also works at the hospital. Esther, too, is granted permission to go out. On one of these outings, she meets a man and has sex with him. However, a rare complication occurs, and Esther's bleeding does not stop. She goes to Joan's house for help. After this event, Joan is re-hospitalized. Although the author does not explicitly state that Joan's hospitalization is connected to this incident, this was my inference.

One day, Esther learns that Joan has hanged herself near the hospital. Just before the end of the book, Buddy Willard visits Esther and asks if the problem lies with him. Esther doesn't understand the question at first, but Buddy explains that both women he was involved with were institutionalized for suicide attempts, and he feels guilty. The book ends with a committee meeting to decide whether Esther is fit to be discharged from the hospital, and we are left not knowing whether she recovers or not.

I'm not a fan of books or movies that leave the ending open to the reader or viewer, but we can say that Sylvia Plath wrote the ending of her own story through her life. In fact, if we compare Esther's and Sylvia Plath's lives, we can find many similarities. Sylvia Plath, like Esther, was a successful figure whose talent for writing was recognized at an early age. However, she was probably melancholic throughout her life and ultimately committed suicide, leaving milk and cookies for her children. Even though Esther occasionally entertains thoughts of marriage, she eventually decides she will never marry. While this separates her from Sylvia Plath to some extent, their fates converge again in their disappointment with men. Esther loses trust in Buddy Willard when she learns—albeit belatedly—that he had a relationship with someone else, while Sylvia Plath was cheated on by her husband. Based on what I have read, this issue of infidelity shattered Sylvia Plath's already fragile inner world and drove her to suicide. Initially, I thought that Sylvia Plath's suicide might not be related to infidelity, but it is hard to dismiss as mere coincidence that the second wife of the poet who cheated on Sylvia Plath also committed suicide with her child after being cheated on.

Although the book is not my favorite, I believe Sylvia Plath successfully portrays the gloomy and pessimistic world she wanted to depict. From Esther's perspective on life and people, we can understand the state of mind in which Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar, a work that bears many traces of her own life. After finishing this book, I realized how a man's behavior can have a profound impact on a woman's life.