The first observation I thought of was that it's not the case that Esther sees what depresses her as anything that she is bringing on herself. The things that are making her depressed are things that Esther sees as being done to her and that she has no say in. The name of the book after all, The Bell Jar, is used by Esther to describe what it is that's driving her crazy. Something else totally apart from Esther is responsible for lowering the Bell Jar over her and driving her insane. When she goes to talk to Mr. Gordon and he ask her what's wrong she responds "I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed further and further into a black, airless sack with no way out" (129). Esther doesn't describe her depression as being like she, herself, is the one pulling this sack over her head--something else is doing the pulling for her. This makes it very hard to simply tell Esther that she needs to stop moping and get on with her life. Esther doesn't see herself as having any control over that which makes her so depressed, and thus can't simply decide she'll get better now.
I believe that the things that make Esther depressed are similar--in at least one big way--to the same kinds of things that might make you or I depressed. Esther is depressed by things that she has no control over--her fate as a woman has been decided by the society around her without ever consulting her about how she feels about it.This would be characteristic of what I see causing depression in many people, including myself. The things that frustrate and depress people the very most are those things that they can't change or decide about at all, such as for instance, the loss of a loved one. It's a widely known fact that any human who experiences a permanent loss of someone they were close to will feel a a very deep sense of depression. For Esther this sense of loss isn't in a person but in the idea that she has a choice over what her future will be like. For those who would wonder what it is that stops Esther from choosing to get better I would say it has to do with the fact that the lack of control over her life and herself is in fact what's driving her insane.
In Esther we see a potent combination of a person succumbing to an illness that she has no control over (the bell jar descends, without warning, and has its effects--isolating her, distorting her perception), and also that person as responding quite logically to what she sees as the constraints of her gender in her society. With mental-health issues, it's hard to separate the two: what in other people might be a "depressing" set of realizations (which then might motivate them to try to navigate society despite these constraints) ends up becoming a debilitating and life-threatening inability to function.
ReplyDeleteIt's crucial that we note the degree to which Esther's symptoms are physical: she literally *can't write* any longer, not just in terms of original ideas or artful expression but *her handwriting is illegible and childlike*. It's the same as her not being able to recognize herself in the mirror--she literally *cannot* write legible English any longer. She describes feeling like she's lost her self, wanting to have her "old self" restored. She can't eat, she can't sleep--these are the symptoms of her illness, and it's not a simple act of will to shake them off.
But Plath also makes us see how her society has partly produced these conditions--the breakdown is clearly stimulated by a perception of her limited range of choices, and the crisis of the period of formative education winding down.