Suicide Chic

I tried to find some redeeming feature of this novel. I really did. I even waited to write this review until a clever former student of mine who likes this novel had the chance to convince me the novel was not atrocious. She failed. But, I don’t real blame her. This is a really bad book.

Start here: the story ends as Esther, our narrator, boldly and hopefully steps into the room. The future awaits! How did she get to this magical place? Well, seventy pages earlier, Esther killed herself. She buried herself in her basement and swallowed enough pills to end her painful life. The message of this book: If you want to find happiness and hope in your life, first you must commit suicide.

Now I know you are thinking we shouldn’t laugh about Esther committing suicide. You are right. It is awful that Esther killed herself, truly awful. Indeed it is so awful that one might think that a book which argues that suicide is the way to make your problems go away would be a mean, nasty bit of work that we probably might not want to be celebrating.

Esther didn’t die, obviously. And therein lies the biggest cheat in the whole story. Esther gets to boldly kill herself and then she also gets to live. In the story, this is a win-win. In the real world, of course, this is a loss. Esther just dies in the real world.

To be fair, it is not the suicide that my former student pointed to as the redeeming feature of the book. Instead, she pointed to the fig tree.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

As my former student noted, the fig tree captures much of the angst of every student who has ever sat in my office. This is true. To be in college and faced with a world of opportunities is indeed terrifying. It forces one to wonder about the Big Questions. Who are you? Why are you here? What is the source of happiness? The fact that college students are perpetually faced with these questions, that these questions are real and important, is one of the greatest joys of being a college professor. I always get to have yet another conversation about things which are truly important.

If The Bell Jar had been a story about the difficulties of making choices when you are young and at an elite liberal arts college and the world is before you, then maybe it would have been a novel worth reading.

But, Plath’s solution to this problem is: Kill Yourself. FOMO-induced suicide.

Anyone want to argue that the next time I have a student in my office with that fig tree problem, that crippling anxiety arising from uncertainty about what to do with her life, then I should merrily hand her a copy of The Bell Jar and say, “Here is a book which will help you solve the problems you are having”? Anyone?

If the novel had ended with Esther’s suicide then maybe the book would have been worth reading. We could have seen the tragedy that Esther killed herself; we could have felt the pain she must have endured because of being unwilling to make a choice. Probably still a lousy book, but at least an intellectually honest one.

But, when Esther survives suicide and the suicide becomes the pivot point of her whole life, then how can anyone take this book seriously? It trivializes both the problems Esther faced and the solution she finds. Let’s make it very clear: the main function of this novel is to glamorize suicide.

It is entirely possible to write a serious substantive book arguing for the virtues of suicide. Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism is an excellent example. The Romans also believed suicide had its place. Hume wrote an essay about it too. Goethe has a famous novel about it. But in all of these cases, suicide is treated as a serious matter. In Plath, it is all just glam, like a flashy advertising spread in a magazine.

Moreover, the publication history of this novel is well worth noting. The American publisher to whom she sent the manuscript passed, thinking (correctly) that the novel was not good at all. A British publisher agreed to publish it under a pseudonym. When it came out, the reviews were bad. It turns out that nobody liked this novel.

Then Plath committed suicide. Eight years after her death, a publisher discovered that the book was not covered by American copyright, and could thus be published by anyone in America. The reason that anyone could publish it was because nobody had bothered to publish the book in America when it came out in 1963, because it was, you see, such a lousy novel. In the early 1970s, coming out when Love Story was the tale du jour, The Bell Jar hit the bestseller list. What could be better in the early 1970s than a book glamorizing depression and suicide written by a young poet who had actually killed herself?

You want a sign of cultural degradation? I give you The Bell Jar.