The Bell Jar

When I wrote about how fiction portrays mental illness, one book set the standard for all the others. The Bell Jar is the benchmark for depression in fiction, and nothing since has displaced it.

Its power comes from precision. Plath doesn’t write that her narrator felt sad. She shows how depression bends perception, drains motivation and makes the ordinary world feel as if it’s behind glass.

What is The Bell Jar about?

Esther Greenwood is nineteen, brilliant and on her way. In the summer of 1953 she wins a guest editorship at a women’s magazine in New York, the kind of prize that’s supposed to launch a life. She goes to parties, meets editors, gets food poisoning at a magazine luncheon and feels nothing she’s supposed to feel.

Back home in the Boston suburbs, she learns she wasn’t accepted to a writing course she’d counted on, and the summer stretches out empty in front of her. She stops sleeping, stops reading and stops being able to write. The depression deepens into a suicide attempt, and the second half of the book follows her through psychiatric hospitals, a badly handled electroshock treatment and then a better one, under a psychiatrist who treats her as a person.

The bell jar is her image for the illness. It’s a glass dome that sits over her and traps her in her own sour air, wherever she goes.

How much of The Bell Jar is autobiographical?

A great deal.

Plath was a guest editor at Mademoiselle in 1953, came home to a rejection, fell into a severe depression and was hospitalized after a suicide attempt that summer. Many of the novel’s characters are thinly disguised people from her life. That’s part of why she published it under a pseudonym, Victoria Lucas.

Heinemann released it in London on January 14, 1963. Plath died a month later, at thirty.

Her mother opposed American publication because of how the family was portrayed. Harper & Row published it in the United States in 1971, under Plath’s own name, and it became a bestseller.

Why does The Bell Jar still matter?

Because readers don’t learn about depression from it.

They recognize it. That’s a different thing, and it’s what any writer on the subject should aim for.

Plath’s reputation grew after her death. Her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, the first time the prize went to a poet after death. A film version of the novel came out in 1979.

Anyone who reads The Bell Jar and recognizes too much of themselves in Esther should know that help is available. A doctor, a counselor or a crisis line is a good first call.

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