In the fall of 1953, while attending Smith College, Sylvia Plath overdosed on a bottle of sleeping pills in her dorm room. Her suicide attempt led to the college having her take a medical leave for the remainder of the semester and became the inspiration for her only novel, The Bell Jar, published a month before her death in 1963.

        The novel details the story of Esther Greenwood, a talented young college student who has recently received a scholarship that has given her the opportunity to spend a summer in New York City with a number of other women. As the summer goes on, Esther’s mental health begins to deteriorate and she overdoses on a bottle of sleeping pills while on her break at home. The second half of the novel details her experiences while in the psych ward. Included in these details are descriptions of her altercations with old friends from high school and college as well as her experiences, both the good and the bad, with electroshock therapy.

        The cover of 1972 Bantam edition of The Bell Jar states that the novel is “The heartbreaking story of a talented young woman who descends into madness”. The verbiage is undoubtedly deceptive; for “madness” is a word that denotes someone who has lost their sanity wholly. Reading The Bell Jar—as well as reading other works by Plath—it is quite clear to the reader that Esther Greenwood does not “descend into madness”. Martha Duffy succinctly serves Esther (and Plath) justice by summing up the final half of the novel in her review in Time after the novel’s publication in the United States. “By turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent, and artless . . . The story, scarcely disguised autobiography . . . ends when she [Esther] emerges from a mental hospital after a breakdown,” Duffy writes.

It would be wonderful if I could state with absolute certainty that Esther Greenwood is an anomaly relegated to the confines of literature. Such a desire, however, is one crushed in mires of false optimism. Depression is a beast captured best in the words of Plath herself:

       

        Whom can I talk to? Get advice from? No one. A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money. And I won’t take advice, even if I want it. I’ll kill myself. I am beyond help. No one here has time to probe, to aid me in understanding myself . . . so many others are worse off than I . . . No, it is my own mess, and even if I have lost my sense of perspective, thereby my creative sense of humor, I will not let myself get sick, go mad, or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else’s shoulder.

 

        Like Esther Greenwood and Sylvia Plath, I attempted suicide by overdosing—though, unlike them, I used propanolol. The Bell Jar and Plath’s diary both contain a multitude of passages that encapsulate the slew of emotions that rattle through the mind when one is lost in suicidal thoughts and depression. It would be inaccurate for me to say my reasons for attempting suicide were entirely the same as Esther’s—that would certainly be an uncommon occurrence, as suicide is not something that has uniformity in reasons or methods. 

        I can, however, say that Esther and I are similar in feelings of loneliness augmenting suicidal thoughts already present. The social climate created by the COVID-19 pandemic this year was undoubtedly part of the reason I was both able to overdose without any of my fellow classmates having previous suspicions about my mental health. I can honestly say I did not think that I would one day live in a society that has so swiftly and suddenly cast mental health aside into a decrepit pile of unimportant issues. There is something intriguing in the fact that this current society cares little about the mental health of others—until they try to kill themselves. The fear of being unknowingly and unintentionally complicit in another’s death and the terror of guilt is a greater promulgator of “sincerity” than perhaps any other force.

        Perhaps one of the reasons why it seems those with depression prefer to keep—if they occur—suicidal thoughts to themselves is for the simple fact that society has always shown a fear of its name. The Bell Jar depicts this silence perfectly throughout its entirety. Esther Greenwood is, ostensibly, one of the last people who one would expect to be severely depressed. She is a smart, beautiful, witty young woman who has earned a scholarship that has given her the opportunity to spend her summer in New York City—how could anyone not wish to be in her place? She should be enjoying herself immensely. “I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in one of those same size-seven patent leather shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour with a black patent belt and black patent leather pocketbook to match,” Esther says at the beginning of the novel. 

        Circumstantial riches, however, are not powerful enough to be the eternal dictator of mentality. Despite the apparent “social advancement” that is purported to have taken place in the twenty-first century, there remains a perplexing strain of thought that those with depression are at fault, particularly young people. I have lost track of the comments on social media I have seen of people deriding millennials and adolescents as “soft” or “weaklings” who merely seek attention. Naturally these comments most often come from people who either don’t have depression or know little about it—yet it is still saddening that such views still pervade society. 

        The Bell Jar uses not only Esther to show this destructive reticence that is all too common among those with severe depression. One of the patients Esther meets while at the psych hospital, Joan, appears to be quite an energetic and strong woman. She is—contrary to popular belief, most people in psych wards aren’t nearly as crazy as Hollywood shows—the perfect example of the character who seems wholly out of place in her surroundings. “I’m going to be a psychiatrist,” Joan says enthusiastically to Esther at the beginning of Chapter Nineteen. Her enthusiasm soon fades as the novel continues.

The phenomenon of destructive reticence is accentuated in both ways that are shown in The Bell Jar as societal constants as well as factors present in the COVID-19 pandemic. As Esther says at the beginning of the novel, she is supposed to be “having the time of her life”. The expectation of society is that a woman who has won a scholarship that gives her the opportunity to go to New York City must be content. As previously stated, this presumption remains normal in today’s world. Stories of comedians who committed suicide are both shocking and propel the maxim that “fame and money do not equal happiness”. 

        Yet as often as these words may be trumpeted, they are often ignored when in relation to everyday folk. The Bell Jar acknowledges society’s belief that physical comfort is an automatic source of mental contentment. Politicians, celebrities, friends, teachers, and schools have pressed people to stay away from others; the effects of isolation have, interestingly, been talked about to a surprising extent—talking, however, is quite different from action. I saw an opinion article in The Washington Post by an emergency physician who wrote that, contrary to the conjectures of the president, the suicide rate during the pandemic has remained the same. After finishing the article, I noticed his argument was gained solely from hospitals in Massachusetts. It was the only state he mentioned by name in the whole article and the only one whose statistics he had studied. I found it intriguing to read an article by a doctor who allowed his political views to compel him to compose an article fraught with selective bias. It is certainly interesting that my overdose counts as little more than a forgotten statistic to politicians in today’s world.

Depression, as with many other forms of mental illness, has long remained a stigmatized subject; the fact that there exist illnesses that can be seen only through the actions, mood, and personality of an individual is a concept that can at times be unsettling. The COVID-19 pandemic—particularly in the United States, it seems—has strengthened this stigma even further. The frantic need to control a virus that has a miniscule mortality rate among youths causes depression to have, oddly, fallen into unimportance and irrelevance. The idea that mental illness can only exist in an individual if tragic circumstances or “unkind genetics” have befallen the victim seems to have metastasized since the spring of 2020, with the puzzling and foolish belief spreading that COVID-19 must be the first reason a person dies now—relegating suicide to an issue of even lesser importance. Accusations and confusion at the prospect that a person can be thoroughly unhappy even when they are the recipient of good fortune on a consistent basis is one that, at first, sound quite reasonable and justified. This is precisely what makes certain mental illnesses so difficult to deal with—the existence of a conscience that damns oneself for reasons that cannot (it seems) be outlined and another that chars the mind into believing that one’s personality is at fault for having a disease attained through no fault of their own. This is why Esther Greenwood is such a tragically relatable character—she is the archetype of the talented young woman who wears a disguise of contentment and happiness. 

        Plath outlines all of these factors with a careful and unique authorial voice. She displays in a sarcastic and witty flair the ways in which society both treats her as a mere misfit and as a fascinating creature to be studied. It is a sobering fact that there are so many popular young adult novels that contain characters who either have depression or deal with mental illness. These novels are dramatized in box office blockbusters, made into Netflix shows, and excerpts from them are printed in multitudes of magazines as entertainment. Plath uses the opening chapters of the novel to expose the ugly facade of fashion and glamor that surrounds Esther. 

        Despite the negative portrait depicted of New York and the obsession with clothes and beauty, excerpts from The Bell Jar (before its publication in the United States) were published in Cosmopolitan, pushing the work from being a sobering autobiographical novel to yet another work of popular fiction.  The fascination with depressed characters and suicide in fiction by individuals who are unfamilar with the two is a tragically and repulsively morbid one. As someone with depression and epilepsy, I enjoy reading works of fiction that deal with these subjects because it helps me to remember that there is someone who understands. Granted, it would be foolish for anyone to state that they are the only person with depression; when in despair, however, it is easy to delude oneself into believing such fallacious and frivolous assumptions to be true.

        It would, of course, be incorrect to state that The Bell Jar is a novel that fits every person’s experience in a psych ward. Esther spends months there; I only spent ten days. Some people go willingly, others are forced. Hollywood has certainly not helped this issue of stereotyping psych wards—the picture often presented in films is a place where mentally and physical unstable people walk around in scrubs aimlessly—and unfortunately, as visuals are often more powerful than words, this stereotype has remained vibrant in the public imagination for many decades. The Bell Jar does, however, accomplish an impressive feat in the depiction of Esther Greenwood as a talented and beautiful young woman—it reminds us that looks do not always reveal the demons that reside in one’s mind. Perhaps it is merely inherent in human nature for us to suppose at first glance that those who are good looking and wealthy must undoubtedly be endowed with a consistently content and joyful state of mind. As such, it is difficult for any work of art or effort of persuasion to destroy this belief—there are, however, a small number of artists who are able to force a wave through this staunch misconception. The Bell Jar stands as one of the rare novels that is able to successfully do just that.