FREED VERSE

A surface level impression of Little Miss Plath

As big of a fan I am of language, I have to admit it is a tad reductionist. There is an immense difference between me saying “I’m sad” versus me sobbing on your shoulder. We inch towards what I’m trying to get at when I say “I’m feeling blue,” and get yet closer if I tell you “I’m trapped in the shadow of a cloud hanging over me.” Even the most detailed descriptions, the most poignant metaphors seem to miss something about my affective state, no matter how vividly I try to paint a picture of the inside of my head. Chalk it up to me not being self-aware enough or not having the vocabulary to articulate what I’m feeling, but something tells me the words I need just don’t exist and never will.

If words can never really convey what it is we’re feeling, why is it that we keep trying to tell stories? Curiously, we often do the impossible: despite our lack of accurate communicative skills, people empathize with us.

Understanding doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t know Martin Luther King, Jr. just by hearing him say “I have a dream.” Rather, we familiarize ourselves with people through extended discourse with them, and narratives provide us with a semblance of intimate knowledge with another by the way they extend themselves through their rhetoric. You can learn more about a person from the way they tell their story than the content of it. This is entirely evident in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; after reading just a few chapters of her prose, the details of her abusive marriage, miscarriage, and early suicide didn’t surprise me in the slightest. Elements of Plath’s individual temperament, particularly her despondence and frustration with personal relationships, are demonstrated in her writing through her syntactical juxtaposition between run on sentences and short declaratives, over reliance on metaphor and allusion, and the creation of an aimless protagonist.

The frustration Plath has for the quality of her relationships with men and her position in a patriarchal society is revealed through her persistent use of run on sentences immediately followed by short, declarative ones. This is a recurring practice in the first few chapters of Bell Jar, but the most striking example comes from a scene in which Plath describes a movie her protagonist, Esther, saw with fellow members of the ladies’ periodical she was working for:

“Finally I could see the nice girl was going to end up with the nice football hero and the sexy girl was going to end up with nobody, because the man named Gil had only wanted a mistress and not a wife all along and was now packing off to Europe on a single ticket.

At about this point I began to feel peculiar.” (Plath, 42)

Call the sentence structure dramatic, call it stylistic; but it was at this moment I knew Sylvia Plath was in an abusive relationship. My annotation in the margin of my borrowed copy can prove this revelation isn’t just hindsight bias from reading Plath’s Wikipedia page. Her refusal to use commas in the last half of her paragraphical sentence speeds up the rhythm of her narration to a boiling point, which is immediately quelled by the simple declarative sentence that follows. It is no coincidence that Plath is describing a narrative of marital woes using this dynamic tempo. This buildup and subsequent fall reflect a chronic formation of anger towards the circumstances of her marriage, which she then feels the need to entirely let go of before ever being able to fully actualize.

This is a clear reflection of Plath’s abusive relationship with poet Ted Hughes, who routinely beat her before eventually having an affair that resulted in the pair’s separation. However, this pattern of strong emotions forming only to be dropped at the expense of the individual feeling them is demonstrative of the female condition as a whole. Though women are often stereotyped as the ‘emotional sex’ incapable of producing rational thought and with an over reliance on emotions to guide decision making, they are also ridiculed when they display intense feelings and are written off as ‘crazy.’ Thus, women are conditioned to both feel their emotions and push them down before they can act on them, creating an inert prototypical woman that is both overly sensitive to her environment and does not have the agency to control it.

It is perhaps this constructed lack of authority to create change in one’s environment that drove Plath’s apathy to her surroundings and, consequently, the depression that eventually led her to suicide. This is demonstrated in her prose by the sheer density of metaphors and allusions she employs. It seems that every other sentence in Bell Jar is a reference to something outside of the story, whether that may be another literary composition or an abstract comparison. Take the “blonde hair lit at the tips from behind like a halo of gold,” the silence as “thick as jungle grass,” or the chemistry lecture that was “only a mosquito in the distance” (Plath, 47; 11; 37). A small sampling of the charcuterie of similes Plath inserts into each page of her novel, it seems that she feels uncomfortable being fully immersed in a fictitious world of her own design, deferring instead to analogous phenomenon sprung from her imagination. This is further developed through the dense mines of literary allusions Plath places her readers in:

“I was taking one of those honors programs that teach you to think independently, and except for a course in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and a seminar in advanced poetry composition, I would spend my whole time writing on some obscure theme in the works of James Joyce. I hadn’t picked out my theme yet, because I hadn’t got around to reading Finnegans Wake” (Plath, 33).

In the span of two sentences, Plath underscores four distinct works that aren’t necessarily obscure, but also not readily understood by the average reader. This may serve the rhetorical purpose of characterizing the protagonist as one that maintains a superiority complex through academic pursuits as a way to feel righteous in her aloofness, but I posit the alternative (and not necessarily incongruent) argument that this works in tandem with Plath’s countless analogies to reflect the entrenched disconnect she feels from the world. Her refusal to use apt descriptive language and instead draw on concise reference to imaginative or literary subjects suggests that Plath felt alien to the world around her since she was either unwilling or unable to draw from it.

Plath’s feelings of un-homeliness in her surroundings are consistent with the repeated suicide attempts and chronic depression she suffered from over the course of her life. At age 30, Plath committed suicide by sticking her head in an oven while her children slept in the next room. Her lifetime of mental illness is reflected not just in the content of her prose, but the manner in which she wrote it; it is made abundantly clear by her inability to remain grounded in her constructed universes that there was a pervasive sense of being unwelcome and out of place in reality. It is, of course, ironic that it is through Plath’s means of describing the world that it is revealed she is detached from it. This irony speaks to an urgency to critically examine the way in which we and others classify our surroundings, as our descriptions may involuntarily delineate our internal affective states and hold unarticulated cries for help between the lines of our speech.

Signs of Plath’s depression can also be found in the characterization of The Bell Jar’s protagonist, Esther, who is initially portrayed as a moral vagabond.*

*Note: I implore the reader to take the following analysis with a grain of salt, as I am currently writing this essay having read through 74 of The Bell Jar’s 244 pages. My impression of this character is an entirely incomplete one, though I believe my analysis of her expositional characterization to be astute and perhaps more valuable than it would be if I knew the whole story.

Plath accomplishes this characterization largely through internal monologue connoting a lack of investment in herself and her surroundings. Esther remarks that she “couldn’t have been listening” to a question her friend asks, and curtly responds to an interviewer that she is “very interested in everything” (Plath, 29; 32). Esther’s character lacks interest in those she associates with and doesn’t have a clear idea of what she wants from life: she is merely an observer of a world that is playing out in front of her. Further, Esther is not originally portrayed as having any goals in the story. It seems that her character exists exclusively to suffer in the wake of characters she is trying to emulate, such as the attractive, unpredictable Doreen, or the docile, polite Betsy. The wandering nature of Esther’s values are inconsistent with the typical depiction of protagonists in stories, who are usually seen as driven, morally righteous individuals that are the center of the story’s universe because they deserve to be so. However, Plath’s Esther initially seems to only be the main character because she happened to be placed in that position. She has no real goals and isn’t special besides the fact that she struggles from problems of inferiority and alienation that she, herself, constructs.

Admittedly, this is an entirely reductionist approach to Esther’s character. She appears this way as commentary on the source of invisible suffering: you do not need to have a punctuated bad thing happen to you to be worthy of struggle. Rather, hardships can spring from one’s own sense of self as well as the uptake of social topoi, norms, and standards that may be incongruent with one’s identity. But, for the sake of argument, allow me to reduce Esther’s initial character to a sliver of its significance.

Plath’s production of an aimless protagonist reflects her view of her own self-concept: a wanderer separated from the world by a pane of glass she cannot shatter. Both the one trapped in the enclosure and the ogler, Plath’s detachment is reflected through Esther’s character. She is easy to empathize with for the sake of her suffering, alone, but hard to understand because she is reduced to that suffering. This becomes the center of her identity and all the reader comes to know her by. Written in an intimate first person perspective, we can infer that Plath at least felt a grain of resonance with this in herself. This is confirmed by virtue of her ongoing depression and suggests that Plath assimilated her mental illness into her identity so far as to shed aspects of herself that were distinct from it: her goals, her relationships, her values. This is likely why Plath found it so difficult to recover from her depression, and never did. Even when under the care of psychiatrists and using prescribed antidepressants, she was unable to separate from the idea of a lost, suffering self, one that is exemplified through Esther’s character in Plath’s most notable work of prose.

The signs of Sylvia Plath’s depression and frustration with the world are evident in her writing, both in its content and rhetorical appeals. Her syntactical manipulation of rhythm, reliance on analogous comparisons, and formation of an aimless protagonist reflect a growing dissatisfaction with life and a perceived inability to change the world plaguing her. Without an outlet for these feelings in the face of an abusive husband and obligation to her children, Plath called for help through the stories she constructed until even this was not enough.

It seems obvious, now, that we should recognize that the quality of Plath’s words are a reflection of her thoughts. However, the fact that there was a body to be found by her unsuspecting children speaks to the inadequacies of readers to consider what narratives say about the authors behind them. The value of the stories we tell doesn’t just lie in the semantics of the words we put on the page. It’s not just what we’re saying, it’s how we’re saying it.