Inside The Bell Jar

From what I understand, impressionistic writing requires you to talk about your impression of a work of art, how it makes you feel. But what if it is the decision of the artist not to let you feel? What if, rather than taking you on an emotional roller-coaster, you are merely taken aboard, let’s say, a train? An empty train with no particular destination. Unlike on the roller-coaster, you feel no extremes. You are boxed in and cut off from the real world and as the train moves steadily forward your world becomes increasingly unreal. Yet you still cannot feel anything. You are just numb.

 Sylvia Plath is one such author. And her ‘train’, The Bell Jar, allows us no reprieve from this numbness, not even to feel pain. Indeed, on closing the book, I sat feeling nothing but despair and after a while I just broke down, releasing all the emotion that she had not let me feel. She suffocated me the way modern society suffocated her. This is why she is so insensitive to the reader, because we play both her and society, both of whom she cowers from and despises.

 Every element, down to the very syntax, language and sound that forms its structure, is fat with pent up grief. Every word trembles. But rather than bursting fourth, it is buried deeper and deeper, until she is no longer human but more like a robot, “a numb trolley-bus” that has no control over anything in this dream-like world. At one point she says:

My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp. I forced it towards the receiver again, but again it stopped short.

 The novel is written in the style of a confession, but her lack of control (as exemplified above) seeps into this style and removes the blame from her. But then whose confession is it? What is the point of these floating, disowned confessions? The point is that everything is floating: her, the reader, the words on the page, the whole story is floating, unanchored by a beginning or an end. We are meant to feel detached and futile at every turn.

 So how did this train make me feel? Well, it made me feel quite vulnerable as I wondered who was steering:

 I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself.