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As the book progresses we see her return home where she essentially suffers a nervous breakdown in which she is unable to move from her room and concludes that the everyday tasks of life are too unbearable. She then goes on the journey into a deep depression in which she clearly considers the best method for suicide, has regular visits to a psychiatrist and spends time in a mental rehabilitation unit. The one thing that this book highlights is the terrible way in which mentally ill people were treated in the 50’s and early 60’s, the method of electric shock therapy to eradicate her depressed feelings leaves her scared of any other ‘help’ she may receive, and we see how petrified she becomes when next given this ‘treatment’ albeit once more under more friendlier circumstances.
The story is a powerful evocation of Plaths own mental health issues and by writing this book she successfully suggested to a quietened nation of other mental health sufferers that it was ‘ok’ to feel this way and that it happened to the best and most promising bright young things. The way in which the Bell Jar is still seen as a core piece of literature on depression shows the values it holds even today, when rivalled against other authors memoirs such as Elizabeth Wurtzel’s ‘Prozac Nation’ and later on ‘More, now, again’ she remains the original and possibly the best writer on the issue of depression and mental health.
The novel has a poignant poetic quality and I know we shouldn't read it with the author's biography in mind, but somehow I can't separate out her poetry from her life and from the novel.
The imagery of Esther discarding her useless clothes, (which she describes as "hanging limp as fish in my closet"), to the wind, across a New York skyline, is one example of what I perceive as as a disembodied experience. This is made explicit by Esther's observation that it was like scattering "a loved one's ashes". It is almost like an out-of -body experience, as if she had already died, or some part of her that she could not come to terms with had died. The same kind of disembodied experience is framed in Esther's swimming out to sea, where she imagines her shoes will be found on the beach,pointing like a soul compass towards her destiny. This is a staging of events:
"The whole landscape - beach and headland and sea and rock - quavered in front of my eyes like a stage backcloth".
All the best poets have a melancholic frame of mind and their work is, thus, infused. Plath's work epitomises this dark, descending, cloud of depression and frames it for us in the stale air of The Bell Jar.
Wonderful stuff!
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