50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Tag: Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar

March 29, 2018 /

Good morning class.

If The Bell Jar is any indication as to what Sylvia Plath’s life was like, she was surrounded by tragedy. She wasn’t a typical tortured artist, if there is such a thing—I imagine that her art would have thrived fantastically without her mental illness. As it is, I believe her art thrived in spite of her troubled mind, not because of it. Even in my own limited experience with mental illness, I’ve never seen psychological turmoil as a gateway to impactful creativity . . . I only see it as a hindrance.

That might be reason enough to read The Bell Jar, which subverts misconceptions about mental illness, women, and the American dream without hesitation. Plath holds nothing back, and it’s painful, powerful reading.

The story follows Esther Greenwood, a young woman with a bright future who begins to suffer from depression. At first it’s mild—inconvenient distresses that affect her life here and there—but it develops into suicidal thoughts and actions. One almost-forgettable moment stands out to me: she sleeps in one morning, innocently enough, because she feels like there’s nothing to look forward to if she gets up. The light from the window shines in, but she buries herself in her sheets and under her pillow, back into the darkness. It’s subtle, but it’s a clear sign of her illness affecting her every moment.

After a suicide attempt, Esther is committed to an institution, where she goes through medication and shock therapy. She describes her condition as being trapped under a bell jar, breathing in the same toxic air every moment of every day, no matter where she is or who she’s with—the bell jar is always there.

The extra layer of her struggle is being a woman in 1950’s America. She goes on dates with men of differing levels of ingrained misogyny. She sees other women around her as reflections of her two extreme options—the perfect do-good lady and the rule-breaker—and only she seems to belong in between. Several people, including her mother, pressure her towards finding a man, settling down, beginning a family . . . and everyone cautions her against sex before marriage, despite the obvious double standard. Esther’s life seems to be one hardship after another, and the 1950’s do her no favors.

Author Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar is not light reading. Several times, over multiple chapters, Esther does more than consider suicide in a passing thought. She analyzes the best way to kill herself, and goes through the motions before being interrupted or facing an insurmountable obstacle. At one point, she remarks that her body has “little tricks” that keep her from killing herself, like an internal instinct she has no say over—but if she had the whole say, she’d be dead already. When she actually conquers this instinct, the suicide attempt portrayed on the page is simple and disturbing.

But as graphic as The Bell Jar can be, that’s not the reason to read it—the reason to read it is because of what Plath gets right in the details. The subtleties of depression are portrayed with honesty, and with no grand presentation. To read The Bell Jar is to get a nuanced depiction of a troubled mind.

Next up, I’m reading The Diary of Anne Frank—similarly not-light reading. But I’m excited because I know that it’s no portrayal; her diary, her actual thoughts, convey her life as a young woman in a strange kind of captivity. Her diary did as much for understanding young women as The Bell Jar did, if not more. It’s also not a graphic portrayal of a tragedy; it’s the ups and downs of her life, come as they may, and it’s even more honest than The Bell Jar could hope to be.

But more on that next time.

Prof. Jeffrey

March 26, 2018 /

“Doctor Nolan led me through a door into a fresh, blue-skied air.

All the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

. . .

How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

—from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

March 22, 2018 /

“Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly between gulps of water, one by one by one.

At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.

. . .

It was completely dark.

I felt the darkness, but nothing else, and my head rose, feeling it, like the head of a worm. Someone was moaning. Then a great, hard weight smashed against my cheek like a stone wall and the moaning stopped.

The silence surged back, smoothing itself as black water smooths to its old surface calm over a dropped stone.

A cool wind rushed by. I was being transported at enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth. Then the wind stopped. There was a rumbling, as of many voices, protesting and disagreeing in the distance. Then the voices stopped.

A chisel cracked down on my eye, and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound, till the darkness clamped shut on it again. I tried to roll away from the direction of the light, but hands wrapped round my limbs like mummy hands, and I couldn’t move.

I began to think I was in an underground chamber, lit by blinding lights, and that the chamber was full of people who for some reason were holding me down. Then the chisel struck again, and the light leapt into my head, and through the thick, warm, furry dark, a voice cried,

“Mother!”

—from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

March 19, 2018 /

“I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. But even that didn’t shut out the light, so I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up.

I had nothing to look forward to.”

—from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Off-Topic: Poetry Favorites (Part 3)

March 15, 2018 /

Hello again, class! Time to poetry it up again.

Be sure to check out my other favorite poems with Part 1 and Part 2 of this list. I’ve included links to each poem so you can read them for yourself!

Kipling isn’t one of my favorite writers, but this is certainly one of my favorite poems. It’s built on a series of almost-impossible virtues, with the father-son relationship tagged on for good measure. The poem as a whole paints the perfect ideal to strive for, and I love it.

My favorite lines are “If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim.” It always reminds me that my introverted delights should have a purpose, even if they aren’t clear to begin with.

I think that “The Road Not Taken” has more depth than most people give it credit for. There’s the comparison between the two roads, one slightly more worn than the other, but both inviting and undisturbed. I like the speaker’s internal conflict about which road to take.

But it’s the last lines that keep this poem universal: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Frost made good poetry, and “The Road Not Taken” is one of his best.

This is one of the weirdest poems I’ve ever read. The word choice gets to me every time I read it—“angularity,” “avalanche,” “guttural,” “hieroglyphics” . . . and the image of a hawk’s wings as scythes cutting down stalks of time to describe the passing of a day is beyond creative.

If there’s anything this poem does wrong, it’s overreaching—poetry for poetry’s sake, one step too far. But for me, before reading “Evening Hawk,” poetry was flowers and love metaphors. This is one of the few early poems in my life that changed the game forever.

If “Evening Hawk” is one of the weirdest poems ever, then “The Red Wheelbarrow” is one of the simplest. It’s one of those that’s simple enough for anyone to read, understand, and analyze, but it’s also complete and complex enough to have layers of meaning.

It’s about the length of a sentence—four stanzas of four words each, painting a brief picture of a wheelbarrow. But if you look closely enough, you see the balance of each phrase, the care in each word, the imagery and the symbolism between the lines. It makes me smile and wonder every time I read it.

This Heart of Darkness-inspired poem (blog post pending for that novel) is classic T. S. Eliot—too vague to make complete sense but just beautiful enough so that sense doesn’t matter.

I like Eliot’s artistic choices, and it’s hard to like his work otherwise if you don’t, but it’s not hard to appreciate how powerful his poetry is. “The Hollow Men” showcases the best that modernism is known for—rule-breaking poetry, terror at the collapse of the old world, and a hodgepodge of genre that clashes against itself. It’s pretentious, but incredible.

This poem is dedicated to victims of 9/11, and for that alone it speaks volumes. Collins picks the names of individuals who died on 9/11, one name for every letter of the alphabet (though he asks us to “let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound”). Those names haunt him—or maybe it’s less violent than a haunting . . . it’s more like the names are painted on everything he sees: the rain, the night sky, the shop windows, the bridges and tunnels of the city, and the petals of a flower. It’s a literary memorial; those names, and the lives that they belonged to, remain after the tragedy. Like I said, it speaks volumes.

Of all of the poems I’ve selected (between all three posts) this one is the funniest. Sheehan wrote the exact opposite of a love poem—there was nothing else to call it but “Hate Poem.” She REALLY hates the subject of the poem. Everything about her hates the other person, from the flick of her wrist to the lint under her toenail to the “goldfish of her genius.”

What’s really remarkable is how beautiful the writing is, which is maybe even because of it’s content—it’s full of passion and exquisite hatred, and it’s one of the most enjoyable poems that’s ever crossed my path.

I’m not planning on a Part 4, but at this point, who knows what’ll happen.

Next up, I’m finishing up The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Also by Sylvia Plath, the poem “Lady Lazarus” (found on my Part 2 poetry list) equally deals in the subject of suicide. “Lady Lazarus” and other poems by Plath have a sense of glorifying suicide and death, which certainly makes me uncomfortable, but The Bell Jar seems to be more interested in portraying than glorifying. I don’t think her poetry is better or worse than her novel, but they are absolutely worth comparing, especially since they are eerily close to Plath’s real life suicide attempts and eventual suicide. But more on that next time.

Prof. Jeffrey

March 12, 2018 /

“I aimed straight down.

A keen wind that had been hiding itself struck me full in the mouth and raked the hair back horizontal on my head. I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist.

A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

—from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

March 8, 2018 /

“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. This city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.”

—from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

March 5, 2018 /

“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 subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.”

—from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Off-Topic: Poetry Favorites (Part 2)

May 3, 2017 /

Hello again, class.

There’s a lot of poetry out there, so I’m following up on my last post about my favorite poems! Be sure to check out my previous post to see the poems I’ve already written about.

I’ve included links to Poets.org for the full poems below. (Once again, as sort of a disclaimer, I’ve only chosen English poetry…I have zero expertise in poetry from other languages, and I wish I did. These are some of the best English-language poems I know.)

This poem is not one I would usually call a favorite, but it’s grown on me for its subtlety. Wheatley was one of the first black poets in America, and her work challenged beliefs about racial treatment and humanity. In this poem, Wheatley praises God’s mercy for being revealed to her, and celebrates God leading her to a new land. She carefully warns others that anyone can be a Christian, and anyone can be redeemed—even men and women from Africa. That’s a message that was sorely needed at the time, and has challenged prejudice and injustice to this day.

If you’ve ever seen Dead Poets Society, you know this one. Whitman asks the “To be or not to be” question: what’s the point of life? What good comes from living? The answer is that the powerful play of life goes on, and we can contribute a verse to that play. The poem is a simple and powerful understanding of life, worth reading every time.

A professor once told me that the best way to read and understand this poem is to get very drunk (his exact word was PLASTERED) and then read it. While I haven’t followed his advice, I can see where he’s coming from—this is a very long and complicated poem, and all of the helpful meaning has been filtered out. But it also captures the chaos and decay of the time; Eliot’s thoughts on the collapse of society, the terror of war, the brave new world around the corner . . . the poem does a really great job of capturing those themes. I discover something new every time I read it.

I know of no other poem about suicide, and I certainly don’t know any piece of art that glorifies it in this way. It’s off-putting, but it continues to draw me in. Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963, was writing about such dark themes very personally, and this poem reflects it by including Nazi imagery and graphic moments of bodily decay. It’s hard to read about her suicide attempts, but it is powerful, emotional poetry that shakes me.

The link above is to a picture of this poem on a wall in Charlotte, NC—I couldn’t find the poem anywhere else. It’s a simple poem about two people in love, but it’s also about the choice to love someone . . . a choice we face again and again. It’s a choice people face when they meet for the first time, and it’s a choice years later. But there is also the question that something external chose these lovers: God, the universe, or maybe the luck of the draw. It’s empowering and humbling poetry. The man who wrote it was a professor of mine in college, who continuously inspired me to write, and for that it’s personally special as well.

This piece of prose poetry is from Rankine’s incredible Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), portraying racism in modern America. Rankine describes a train (or any and all public spaces) where a black man sits next to an empty chair while another woman stands, uncomfortable sitting next to him. The speaker sits next to him, and in that simple action they form a bond that is close to family—a defiance of racial attitudes, of fear, and of injustice. Most of Citizen does this as well, but this is one of the more powerful passages.

Make sure to take a look at each of these! In the comments, tell me your favorite poems—I’m always down for reading more poetry.

Until next week,

Prof. Jeffrey

Off-Topic: Great Women of Literature

March 22, 2017 /

Good morning, class.

It’s National Women’s History Month, and as usual, I’m celebrating through literature! Out of the many, I’ve picked my favorite female authors and poets who have changed the game (and just to be clear, it may be a national holiday, but my picks are global).

These are in no order, and I’ve included their most notable works (and links to previous blog posts, if you want to hear more of my ramblings . . . enter at your own risk).

  1. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion
  2. J. K. Rowling: The Harry Potter Series
  3. Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman
  4. S. E. Hinton: The Outsiders
  5. Lois Lowry: The Giver and Number the Stars
  6. The Brontë Sisters: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
  7. Alice Walker: The Color Purple
  8. Emily Dickinson: various poetry
  9. Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and various poetry
  10. Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar and various poetry
  11. Claudia Rankine: Citizen: An American Lyric
  12. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
  13. Elizabeth Bishop: various poetry
  14. Phillis Wheatley: various poetry
  15. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women
  16. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own
  17. Aphra Behn: Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave

We all know that this is the tip of the iceberg . . . none of these women were stopped by the male-dominated-ness of the world of literature, and neither were millions of others. So, small as it may be, consider this post an act of feminism.

Happy National Women’s History Month!

Prof. Jeffrey

© 2024 50 Books to Read Before You Die

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑