On my recent trip to Portland, I picked up a nice trade paperback edition of Sylvia Plath's infamous novel The Bell Jar. I wasn't sure what to expect beyond my general awareness of the subject matter and its parallels to her own life, but I wasn't more than a dozen pages in before I realized this was a book that I should have read a decade ago. As cliched as it might be, Catcher in the Rye was one of the most influential books I read as a teenager. Even though I couldn't identify with Hayden's life in the slightest, I had an overwhelming sense of empathy for his philosophical situation. The Bell Jar is interesting as a similar type of narrative, a woman's coming of age story that deals with similar types of questions and problems. Hayden and Esther are both anti heros. Their struggle with difficult questions that most people push out of their minds leads them both to cast aside their designated roles in society, and fight against leading normative lives. Though the particulars of their situations are a part of an outdated social structure, the ideas absolutely hold. Though there is more freedom in how one arrives at their destination, that goal is still largely the same: good job, good husband or wife, strong family life. This struggle is what I identified with most in Catcher - Hayden is rebelling against the type of life society told him he ought to live, and Esther is doing the same.
I found the difference in tone to be interesting, but each book seems genuine to me in its own way. Hayden's detachment, anger, and wry amusement with life is a masculine reaction to his feelings of alienation and dissatisfaction with what his family expects of him. Esther's unhappiness begins with her limited social options and the expectations society has of all young women to grow into happy mothers, but as the story progresses she begins to see the entire world as the problem and contemplates suicide as the only escape. Hayden leaves prep school, forsaking his expected path to adulthood but retaining options as to how he may live his life. Esther attempts to do this when she enters the asylum - forsaking sanity for the stigma of a stay in a psychiatric hospital. But even this freedom imprisons her, and she begins to realize that though she's managed to escape from one prison, marriage and motherhood, she is now trapped in a new cage of her own making - that of the unstable woman, apart from the rest of society. She seems trapped between classic models of femininity, the mother and the prophetess, and is dissatisfied with both options. Seeing no middle ground, then, it is only a matter of time before Esther follows with her own suicide.
The main factor that complicates this book as a coming of age tale and makes it a bit of a cautionary one is Esther's mental state. From my own experiences as a young woman, I know that much of what she describes is an accurate representation of normal levels of depression. As a teen who was plagued by self-doubt and heavy questions about life, I experienced much of what she described in the early parts of the book. The depression, the confusion, the inability to function practically in day to day life - these are all things I experienced myself and confronted head on without medication or therapy. I knew my questions made me different from most of my peers, and I also knew that if I allowed others to see the depth of my depression I would be medicated in an attempt to make me "normal", able to function among my peers, much like how Esther underwent shock therapy in attempts to make her normal as well.
I really enjoyed reading this book because I was able to identify with Esther's struggle to figure out who she was separate from society's pressures. I found it intriguing to peer into the mind of someone so similar to me, and at the same time so much more troubled. I never contemplated suicide, and always had trouble understanding how people make the transition from depression to despair. I have always found my intellectual struggles stimulating and enjoy the darkness of depression for what it is - a natural part of life. By embracing all my emotions equally and appreciating sadness, helplessness and apathy as occasional parts of my existence I was able to conquer my own depressive tendencies. Esther was unable to do so - the power of her depression was too great to integrate into the rest of her life and eventually it overwhelmed her. The dark cloud of Plath's own suicide weighs upon me as the reader, and likely on most others as well. Though Esther survives several close calls in the book, it seems only a matter of time before she follows the author into an early death.
