The Bell Jar

Continuing my adventures in reading books my students ask about that I've had to embarrassingly confess I haven't read, I finished Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar today. A surprising number of my female students have gushed to me their love of her poetry (poetry! These modern students have actually willingly enjoyed someone else's poetry!), and wonder what Plath's one novel is like.

In short, it's depressing. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, describes a hypothetical sister of Shakespeare (provisionally named Judith), who is driven to madness and suicide by the force of her poetic gifts trapped in the repressive circumstances of a woman's body. Yet here in The Bell Jar we see Woolf's Judith play out in real time, in real life--and that in the mid-20th century, long after Shakespeare's far more sexist era has supposedly passed.

Now, gender-equality-wise, we are still even farther along now than the 1950s in which this novel takes place. Yet somehow this novel still doesn't feel like an anachronism, a dispatch from a lost world--no, young women everywhere are still distressingly identifying far to fully with the oppressed, depressed, and ultimately suicidal protagonist of The Bell Jar. Something is missing, something still has not been addressed, at far as our young women are concerned.