The Bell Jar - chapters 11-15
In the depths
Part three!
We’re buddy-reading the novel, and each Friday, I’ll post something like this, with bits and pieces to read, watch or listen to at your own pace, and the comments are open for you to discuss.
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In case you’re not caught up, here are the earlier parts…
This week is the bleakest part of the book. Poor Esther has been rejected from the writing course she applied for, she’s back home with nothing to do, her mental health is suffering to the point that she can’t read or sleep. She’s been referred to a psychiatrist and things are going to get worse before they get better. Here’s a recap of this third quarter of the novel (CW’s in abundance here, too - ECT, suicide methods and attempts, racism).
Spoilers ahead!!
Unwashed, and still wearing Betsey’s clothes, Esther goes to her appointment with Dr Gordon. She immediately dislikes him, and won’t tell him the full extent of her symptoms. Dr Gordon recommends shock treatment, outlining his diagnosis for Esther’s mother over speaking to Esther herself. Esther reads about a suicide attempt in a newspaper headline when she is walking in the park, and she wanders the gardens pondering harakiri rituals. The next day, she tries to work out the best way to run away before she can be taken to Walton, Dr Gordon’s private hospital, but the logistics prove too difficult and she goes home instead.
At Walton, Esther is disturbed by how still and quiet the other patients are, like “shop dummies painted to resemble people”. She tries to ask what the shock treatments will be like, but she can’t find the words as she’s led down the hall and into the treatment room. The ECT is terrifying, and Esther thinks back to the Rosenbergs, the sense of ECT as a punishment.
I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.
She tells her mother that she won’t undergo any further treatments (again, a mirror for Sylvia herself), and her mother is relieved. At home, Esther still can’t sleep, and she takes a box of razor blades and heads to Boston. She asks a prison guard how she might go about getting locked in, before she goes to sit on the beach and await the incoming tide. The cold water shocks her back from its edge and she goes home.
On a double date, Esther discusses suicide methods, and decides to swim out a mile from the beach. It’s the latest in a string of attempts that day, none of which Esther feels satisfactorily ensure that she will escape failure and inevitable institutionalisation. After visiting her father’s grave for the first time, she waits for her mother to go out, leaves a note saying that she has gone for a walk, and sequesters herself in a tiny crawl space under the house with a bottle of sleeping pills. There’s barely any fiction to this part of Esther’s story, and the line between herself and Sylvia Plath is completely blurred.
When Esther wakes up in the hospital, her eyes are bandaged and she panics that she’s been blinded. She breaks the mirror when she’s shown her reflection, and is moved to a different hospital, where she makes up answers to the medical students on their rounds and refuses to cooperate with the doctors. At dinner, she takes offence at the Black aide who is helping to serve the dinner and kicks him from under the table. Back in her room, she smashes a tray of thermometers and pretends it was an accident, before stealing a globe of mercury while the nurse cleans up.
Philomena Guinea has Esther transferred to a private hospital, where she feels more settled. She is under the care of a new doctor, Dr Nolan, and she’s assured that her first electro shock treatment was misadministered, and shouldn’t have happened the way that it did. Dr Nolan promises to tell Esther in advance if she’ll be having more treatments, and that they’ll be very different to the treatments she’d had before. Esther meets Valerie, who lives in the hospital permanently after a lobotomy, and Joan, an old acquaintance.
Some bits and pieces for this week…
Pain, parties and work, from The Guardian
Still to come:
Friday 14 June — chapters 16-20