On Reading Sylvia Plath While Everyone Else is Drinking at Cookouts

Or: On Reading The Bell Jar at the Perfect Time in Your Life
Or: The Right Book to Drop in a Bath Tub

I am rather surprised that it took me until age 23 to read The Bell Jar, because I have always enjoyed Plath’s poetry. Although, maybe my attraction to her poetry and the veracity and fierceness of it scared me off from her novel. And also, for some reason, I think related to the order our literature teacher shuffled through summaries, it has always been tied in my mind to The Color Purple, which might as well be stored in my mind as “book with copious sexual violence”. The book seems to hold a weird space in popular culture, where it is always the book in the hand of the aggressive, broody feminist.

Stylistically, the book is much different than I expected. Mainly because nothing about the language and word play sounded like it was coming from a poet. I have to wonder if Plath had lived in the modern day where prose and poetry is less dichotomy and more continuum, if her book had read differently. I was a little disappointed by how conversational it sounded, but it definitely hooked me and by the end, I have to say, the book was probably better for it. To show a version of depression that is not poetic, is not glamorous, is not sensational, but rather dull, droning, confused and disordered. The content and realism is what carried the book.

I really believe that I read this book at the ideal time, as a young woman only a few years older than the protagonist, in a less extreme version of the same dilemma and from within a structure more supportive than she has. A good way to remind myself to really appreciate what I have. It is curious to imagine myself living in her time and without my supports and to wonder how well my own temperament would deal with what she goes through.

This dilemma, this transition to adulthood, is one that I have only partly made it through. To begin life winning every honor, every scholarship and have nearly every door open to you, it feels like this transition should be another simple, natural step, but really it makes it ever more difficult. It is so much easier to live in the world of “I could do x, y or z” then to actually set out to do any of these things. Not only because each of those things is difficult but also because they are mostly exclusive. Choosing x means you may never again have the opportunity to do z. And the action of making the choice is a heavy one, especially if along an early step of the way you have someone like Jay Cee taking notice of your hesitance, your anxiety, and saying, “Is this really what you want?” and you have to admit to yourself for the first time that you don’t know what you want but you wish “Everything” was an option.