Last Wednesday, we met to discuss The
Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel written by Sylvia Plath. The
presentation started with a brief peek into Plath’s life and a fragment of an
interview with the poetess carried out in 1962. Looking back and recalling our impressions of reading the book for the
first time, many of us admitted that Esther Greenwood used to be a role model
and although mysterious, dark and troubled, still remains a fascinating and truly complex
figure. We’ve also noticed some interesting notions and pondered on motifs,
themes, and symbols found on the pages of The
Bell Jar. We wondered how we shape our reality through language and how
language shapes the reality we live in. What would happen if female writers
were given stylos as attributes instead of paper roses? We tried to FIGure out
what paths could women follow in
America of the 1950s and more importantly, whether the plural form [paths] was righteously
used in their case?
We came up with a few interesting interpretations when discussing the theme of
water in The Bell Jar: how its
unstableness and liquidness may represent the state of Esther’s mind, whether
it had any purifying powers or represented the calmness and unity of self. We
also mentioned other works that contained the watery theme, mainly of modernist
writers such as T. S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings as well as Kate Chopin and her 1899 short novel The Awakening. When the discussion came to an end, we all felt the
topic had not been entirely exhausted. But leaving some loose ends seemed
reasonable enough, especially since Plath herself wrote:
“The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room”. (The Bell Jar: 275)
by Ewa Olszewska
