Straight out of My Own Bones: Some Thoughts on The Bell Jar

It's the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Here, in honor, is an essay I posted at the Downtown Writer's Center's blog a couple of years ago.

 

A few years ago, I outlived Sylvia Plath. And somehow, despite an aborted attempt at a PhD in American Studies, and a robust American poetry course as an undergrad, I'd read a lot of Plath's poems, but I'd never read The Bell Jar. Until this week. I read the whole thing on Monday. I haven't read an entire book in a day since high school, when I read all of The Great Gatsby in one sitting.

Why didn't I read it before? I think because no one takes it seriously. It's sort of that memoir-disguised-as-novel written specifically for college girls who cut their wrists for attention. Right?

In her introduction to the 1997 edition, Frances McCullough writes that if Sylvia Plath had lived, “it's hard to say whether … the novel would ever have been published in this country.” McCullough goes on to question what might have happened if Plath had written more novels, better novels. Would she have returned to her first novel, The Bell Jar, and thought differently? Would she have self-censored? Told less of the truth? Crafted the truth into something less raw? Something dulled at the edges, or as Wordsworth says, recollected in traquility?

We'll never know. As McCullough says, “of course Plath did die a tragic death at the age of thirty, and the book's subsequent history has everything to do with that fact.” By which she means that Plath's suicide makes the book a cult favorite, but she also means that if Plath didn't die, the book might never have seen the light of day – because it's not very good. Right?

I was surprised. It's not the best book I've ever read. The plot – maybe because it's so true – feels predictable. The ending feels a little like a a Lifetime Movie. But, as McCullough points out, “her voice has such intensity, such a direct edge to it,” it forgives the structural flaws.
  

Take the opening lines:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive along all your nerves.

And she never lets you go. It's a close, tunnel-vision narrative, right out of the eye-sockets of Esther Greenwood. And that voice never waivers.

It's not The Kite Runner. It's not a globally significant narrative. In fact, it doesn't stray very far from the geography, class or political background that it knows. So why does it matter? Why did it ever matter? Because one college educated white girl from New England was depressed one year and wanted to get it off her chest? Wanted to drag you into the eye of the storm?

This is why: because in her marriage negotiations with Buddy Willard, Esther Greenwood stumbles upon this observation:

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. 

That's why.  Because more than anything, this book struggles with the notion of either / or. Esther can be a poet or a mother. She can be an editor or a wife. You can pick one fruit off the fig tree, she says, and once you pick one, the rest of them wither and die.
   
What makes it so hard? Why are women prone to second guessing? Can't you do both? Be a mother and a writer? Tell the truth, and tell it hard, unfiltered, like a holy scream*, and do it well? I'm asking you. I've second-guessed my own answer.

You can debate Plath's answer – the suicide answer – the answer No, you can't. And if you try, you won't get out alive. But what you can't ignore here are the questions that Plath asks – about agency, about identity, and about telling the truth without apologizing. Or that what she asks has resonance, regardless of her own solution: Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones. 

*from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry – the really old, 1972 version I have, which was given to me by poet Barbara Moore. In it, Anne Sexton is listed as still living. In the intro to Sylvia Plath, the editors write “Sylvia Plath's poetry is a document of extremity. Her sensitivity is inordinate, but so is her ability to express it. The result is a holy scream, a splendid agony – beyond sex, beyond delicacy, beyond all but art.”

Hello Universe

The universe woke me up this morning. This is markedly different than the way I've woken up the last few mornings, gripped with panic, shaky and exhausted from not sleeping.

Yesterday, I saw a job posting that spoke directly to me. It was a two-year position, with the possibility of tenure track, for a 20th century Americanist, literature and theory heavy, a 2 / 3 load, at a small, prestigious college that just happens to be right up the street.

Where were you five years ago? This is the question I plan to ask my students today, with the follow up of where they will be five years from now. Five years ago, in 2007, I was still thinking of myself as a 20th century Americanist, still working through the coursework of a PhD. I was writing on Baudrillard, jazz and the Cold War, the birth and death of the American suburbs.

And then I stopped. I was unfunded. I was driving an average of 300 miles a week back and forth to Binghamton. My reason was simple and practical. Even if I did finish the PhD, I wasn't going on a national job market. It wasn't enough for me just to have it -- especially when I was paying for it. I didn't see the sense in having a PhD -- in hand, as they say -- only to sit around and wait for a job to open up at a local college. What are the chances of that happening?

Apparently, pretty good. There it is. The job. Within walking distance.

And me, without a PhD in hand, or even in progress.

What's the message in that, universe? The job that I never though possible is right in front of me, and it's not mine to have. Why?

Because it's not mine to have.

I talked with a friend, whose opinion and insight I trust, about the position, and about that fact that with the choices I'd made -- despite some really crazy coincidences -- it wasn't possible anymore.

Instead, he said, Work on your novel.

All panic aside, I'm going to try not to forget that. Sometimes the signs from the universe are subtle. Sometimes you miss them. And sometimes, they wake you up in the morning, after letting you sleep in, and rock your shoulder, reminding you to get to work.

I Don't Know How Anyone Does It

I never go to the movies. We went from being those parents who never go to the movies to the parents who still never go. It's a logistics hassle. Not a nightmare, just a hassle. Netflix is so much easier.

Last night, however, I went to see I Don't Know How She Does It, with a new friend. It was an old-fashioned get-to-know-you girl-date. Afterwards, in the car, we both agreed the movie was pretty much what we expected and not as funny as we wanted it to be.

Then I said, I found it to be stressful.

She laughed. Maybe that's because you're a mom? she said.

Maybe. It's because that shit is true, I said. And I didn't like that. I didn't want the movie to have an agenda, but it did address head on the myths and truths of working women. If you act like a man, you're aggressive and difficult. If you act like a woman you're moody and difficult. Either way, you're difficult.

But there were other things -- more subtle things -- that bothered me about the movie. I wanted Greg Kinnear's character to be stronger. I wanted him to get angrier than he did. To be less of a dream boat supporter. He was a great dad, and totally -- totally -- cute in his glasses. But his near passivity annoyed me.

I wanted it to be less of a fairy tale ending when the assistant had her baby. It was a little too "babies are difficult but they solve all of your identity crises" for me.

I would have slept with Pierce Brosnan's character. Or, okay, maybe I wouldn't have. But I would have wavered a lot more than SJP did. A lot.

One of the things I love the most about the fiction I love is when the people are really real. When they make mistakes. They make bad decisions. Things are hard for them. People get hurt. When the baby falls down the stairs because you're at work, something terrible happens. Greg Kinnear doesn't pick up all the pieces. And the baby doesn't fall down the stairs while you're working, because that feels didactic. He falls downstairs while you're right there. Watching. And there's still little you can do to stop it from happening.

I guess it felt like advertising to me. A shiny commercial for having it all, a career, beautiful kids, a hot nanny, a supportive and cute husband. The strong will not to sleep with Pierce Brosnan. I hope the book is better. But in truth, I'll probably never find out. I have too much to do. At least I can cross "blogging" off my list for today.