Teaching The Bell Jar in the American South

Today, a 19 year old boy, who I imagine thinks that I have a liberal, feminist agenda designed to make him and his fellow classmates clinically depressed, declared emphatically that he hates The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. This is the first of two books I’ve chosen for my freshman English class themed around mental health.

I am a first year professor, straight out of grad school. I look much younger than my wizened age of 29 (my students assure me). I am originally a Southern woman but I have been “citified” and rarefied by my time living in places like Los Angeles and London. For my freshman Critical Thinking and Writing courses we are recommended to choose a theme to structure our classes around. Last semester, I chose to focus on Civil Rights and selected to read Native Son by Richard Wright in order to hopefully address America’s (and particularly the South’s) ongoing race problem. But during the middle of last semester my world was rocked with my childhood friend tragically took his own life. Though he was never diagnosed with depression, his obituary indicated that he was suffering from that too seldom talked about disease.

This wasn’t the first time my life had been directly impacted by mental illness. My Aunt became addicted to prescription medications like Adderall, which eventually caused an imbalance in her brain chemistry and she became increasingly paranoid and schizophrenic. A few short years ago she accidentally overdosed on a cocktail of prescription drugs and was found dead in her bedroom by my grandfather.

Now, if all of this sounds morbid and depressing, that’s because it is. But it is my belief that one of the key reasons that we see such a spike and rise in suicide, drug addition, depression, anxiety and other mental health problems in this country and abroad is because people aren’t comfortable talking about it. So they ignore it and it festers. Talking about mental health is difficult, depressing and uncomfortable. Especially in the American South, where conservatism and deeply held religious Puritanism translates to it being weak or “soft” as my students suggested in class. But the reality is that around 300,000 adults in the United States suffer from mental illness and that’s only the numbers that have been reported (Risher 2017).

The same student who told me he hated The Bell Jar also told me that he while he acknowledged that depression was a real disease he thought the majority of people who claimed to be depressed were “faking it”. The Bell Jar, for those who aren’t familiar with Sylvia Plath’s only work of prose is a semi-autobiographical novel that chronicles Esther Greenwood’s descent into insanity after she goes on a summer internship to a fashion magazine in New York City but is unable to engage or feel anything. It takes place in the 1960s when mental institutions were often frightening, ineffective hospitals where blanket treatments for any sign of disturbance were given such as electroshock therapy, insulin treatments and lobotomies.

My student assured me it wasn’t just him that “hated” the book, that he had gone as far as to show the book to his mother and she had “thrown it away”. I was tempted to tell him that his mother wasn’t the first person to throw away a book because the content and its ideas were upsetting, disturbing or offensive. Instead I asked him why he thought there might be value in teaching such a depressing book. He responded, “I have no idea.”

My student does have a point, when teaching heavy material like The Bell Jar or Native Son it is important to aim to end each lesson on a positive note, something I could definitely work on. However, if you can’t talk about difficult subjects like mental health in a world where suicide amongst young people between the ages of 10–24 has increased 5.7 percent in the last three years with around 4,600 youths killing themselves each year in America, then where can you talk about it (Welch 2017)?

I chose The Bell Jar for a few reasons. One, Sylvia Plath is a genius, master of the English language and her character of Esther is poignant, relatable, despite her odd behavior, and affecting. The candor of the first person narrative makes you want to reach out and hug not just Esther but Plath too, who had almost exactly the same experience as a young intern at Mademoiselle magazine in NYC. After attempting to overdose on her mother’s sleeping pills she, like Esther, was institutionalized and subjected to electroshock therapy. Plath eventually recovered and went on to win a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge in England where she met and married fellow poet Ted Hughes. When she was just 30 years old she committed suicide. The Bell Jar was published at first under the name Victoria Lucas as everyone in the novel was loosely based off of real people in Plath’s life, but after it came out in the United States her real name was reinstated on the book and now it is one of American literatures most enduring coming of age stories.

Though mental health facilities have radically changed since 1963 (the year The Bell Jar is set), it remains relevant because too often people like Esther and Plath feel isolated and alone, as if they are “sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [their] own sour air” (Plath 185). The American university system owes it to its undergraduates to tackle difficult subjects that are still incredibly relevant like mental health, rape, incest, abuse, race problems, LGBT issues, etc. so anyone who feels alone, trapped, friendless, desperate, or lost can have a platform to talk and can see a champion in their professors.

I’m teaching The Bell Jar so that my students can feel heard. I’m teaching The Bell Jar so they can feel safe. I’m teaching The Bell Jar so that when these youths get a bit older and are integrated more so into society they might be able to talk about mental health issues with empathy, understanding and awareness. And besides, if college was meant to be filled with facile material consisting of only sunshine and rainbows it would hardly be deserved to be called challenging.