Perhaps I'm Just Losing It, Too

About a year ago this month, I read American poet Sylvia Plath's only novel The Bell Jar. I'd heard of it before, but I was really exposed to the story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes through a Senior Seminar paper done by a girl who actually sat in front of me in chapel. Her paper was on Ted Hughes' poem "Daffodils", which is a reminiscent look at the early stages of Hughes' and Plath's marriage, in the days where they were simply struggling poets - not estranged lovers that crumbled apart piece by piece.

The book is a semi autobiographical look at Plath's life and struggles with mental illness. The novel is told through the eyes of protagonist Esther Greenwood, and it deals with time that she spent as a magazine intern in New York City, the development of her views on morality, writing, and reality, her first descent into madness, and her subsequent stay in a mental hospital.

The second I finished reading this book, I really wanted to flip it around and start again. It's a tragic story, really, especially viewed in light of Plath's eventual suicide, but her manner of storytelling makes you forget all that. It's quite a comic novel, as Esther's cynical and witty remarks have you seeing through her eyes. This trait - this high level of identification - also makes her "crack-up" seem completely rational and sensible. You see the world as she sees it - through the bell jar - and you forget that it's not supposed to look this way. Plath expertly lures you into believing that this is what reality looks like, since it's Esther's piece of "reality."

Really, it's hard to convey my love for this book. If you've never given it a look, I suggest you find a copy.

Since reading it, I've also stumbled across (read: was assigned in various literature courses - see, I really do learn things!) a few short stories that remind me of the feel of The Bell Jar, whether from content, style, or some combination of both. The first one I encountered was British writer Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen." It is the story Susan Rawlings, a woman who rents a hotel room in order to escape from the pressures and discontentment of her life as a wife, mother of four, and homemaker. She visits the room daily, and it destroys her relationships with her husband and children. She becomes absolutely dependent on the room, and eventually kills herself.

Nineteenth century American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman used her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a way to fight the misguided ways that mentally ill women were treated in the nineteenth century. It is a first-person narrative drawn from Gilman's own fight with postpartum depression and her subjection to Weir Mitchell's "rest cure". The narrator is a woman who has been diagnosed with a form of hysteria (the blanket ailment for women with any sort of mental illness) and put on the rest cure. The lack of activity and human contact drives her to begin seeing patterns in the wallpaper. Eventually, her mind morphs this into a woman trapped by the pattern. At the end of the story, she has lost all rational thought and assumed the identity of the woman who has escaped the wallpaper. Through the duration of the story, the reader is given little hints at the woman's further deterioration - lapses in consciousness, verbal ironies, and the like.

Note: Although Gilman did overcome her postpartum depression (despite the rest cure), she, like Plath, ended her own life.

Each of these stories has had me completely entranced. I've loved every line of them, and I regretted the completion of each one.

So what exactly is it that fascinates me about these intimate looks into the breakdown of reality? I've begun to worry just a smidgen - I can't get enough literature about women going crazy (I believe I'm headed for Kate Chopin's The Awakening next). Perhaps it's just a testament to the skill of these writers, because every step in that journey away from reality seems perfectly innocuous and reasonable. The wit and candidness of The Bell Jar, the social commentary and coherently irrational thought of "To Room Nineteen," and the beautiful use of imagery and foreshadowing in "The Yellow Wallpaper" show that these "cracked" women have the ability to be amazing, amazing writers.

But on the other hand, perhaps I'm just losing it, too.