'The Bell Jar' & 'The Catcher In The Rye' have me MESSED UP 📚

I’m reading The Bell Jar with the same enjoyment I read The Catcher In The Rye – one of my all time favourite novels. Sylvia Plath writes from the perspective of Esther; a cynical and depressed young lady who insists on sporting people around for her own enjoyment. The clever use of stream-of-consciousness and unreliable narrator is so fascinating. With a combination of blended imagery, absurdism and double entendre, I am astounded with 20th century literature and modernism. This style of writing crawls up my skin and follows me into my dreams, where I am the antihero trying to navigate this ‘crumby’ world with my own sick sense of humour and embedded sonnets. The inner worlds of Holden Caulfield (Catcher), and Esther (Bell Jar) are so similar, written so-alike despite their different experiences and gender. Every experience is different, the events are different, however their inner monologues are identical and they both don’t like anyone. Every so often, you’ll get a glimpse of their past when they brush past somebody or have a conversation. In steering away from their focus at hand, they retreat back to their home life in which we understand the strains on their family life, and how desperately alone they feel. 

The writing is accessible - it’s not overly complex, however the perspective of the mundane is what sets both books apart from 21st century literature. For example, in Catcher In The Rye: “The bus driver opened the doors and made me throw it out. I told him I wasn’t going to chuck it at anybody, but he wouldn’t believe me. People never believe you.” Holden speaks with excess; a simple moment became extreme as he motioned his own hurt and mental instability. Holden believes he is completely alone and constantly sabotaged by those around him, including a nameless bus driver. In The Bell Jar: “I knew chemistry would be worse, because I’d seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminium were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. If I had to strain my brain with any more of that stuff I would go mad.” Esther finds the ‘ugly’ and inexcusable in the many mundane and ordinary things like the periodic table. She compares learning chemistry to madness, which sounds off-the-cuff because I sometimes do too, however she buys in to this concept of ‘insanity’ which is quite overused in women’s literature. 

In a similar way, Holden Caulfield overuses the word ‘mad’ and constantly reiterates this: “I swear to God I’m a madman.” With such absurdity, both protagonists tell the readers that they are losing the plot, whilst avoiding their real lives in search of a higher power or motive. They both believe they are destined for greatness and pursue negative habits to gain it. They lack attention to their own lives whilst culling other people down, and paying attention to everything else. This hyper-vigilance we could argue is a result of trauma. We see this in Holden’s life when his younger brother Allie passes away, as a result there is excess description and a highly-observant focal point. Esther also suffers from the loss of her father at an early age – again, begging excess description and a highly-observant focal point. She revisits the past through mundane things which trigger her memories. Esther is triggered by the death of her father and she fears the possibilities of her life, she thinks there are too many options and she wants to be everything, all the time, all at once. “I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone. I saw my life branching out before me like a green fig tree…” Esther feels trapped by too many possibilities, she fears her death is near. She’s unsure which way to turn for fear of disappointing others and herself, which causes her to standstill until she becomes a shell of herself unable to complete anything. 

The irony in the fig tree is a split version of how Esther views herself; “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….” Plath goes on to detail the complacency of sitting and watching this fig tree sprout, all the while never touching it or making use of it, until it dies. Esther feels she has died too, in the extended metaphor of the fig tree and through the suffocation of ‘the bell jar’ she is trapped in. In Catcher, Holden does not sleep for three days, and Esther claims to have not slept for ‘twenty-one days’ and is admitted to an asylum. The similarities between Esther in The Bell Jar and Holden in Catcher In The Rye is unequivocally uncanny and I have lost sleep over it. I am enthralled with both novels and authors, and have sought to find out if J.D Salinger (Catcher), and Sylvia Plath (Bell Jar), hooked up and thus, shared their secrets over twisted sheets and mulled wine. 

There is a bigger question here on the basis of characters – Holden is similar to his author J.D Salinger as he perpetrated isolation; Salinger hid in New York City until he died. He HATED the fame his novel bought forth: ergo, weirdo. Sylvia Plath mirrored her protagonist Esther, a poet who felt she was destined for everything all at once, she was so torn between all the possibilities of a modern woman that she was driven to insanity. Plath on the same spectrum, experiences such insanity that she gassed herself to death, with her head in the oven. At least Salinger enjoyed a lengthy solitude. 

I’ve taught the Freudian psychoanalytic theory on how the brain stops maturing when a person experiences significant trauma. Plath briefly mentions this concept through Joan, a measly character who wants to be a psychiatrist and rambles on about the Ego and Id. This concept is not obviously explained in The Catcher In The Rye, although an analysis would conclude that Holden’s Id was haltered when his brother died, thus his state of mind is hindered and quite premature. This coincidence is interesting and reading up on it, I realise that Plath took inspiration from J.D Salinger, and Holden. Plath admired the focal point of Holden and sort to recreate this in her own writing. I wonder if this focal point was merely a fitting idea, as Plath finds herself in her protagonist and lives through similar experiences. In the New Statesman, Robert Taubman called The Bell Jar “the first feminine novel in a Salinger mood” and that hits the nail on the head. The Bell Jar itself is to stop someone in their tracks, to look blankly at life as if it were a bad dream. No one ever goes through anything alone, and Plath exhibits authentic feelings of not being good enough, feeling like a failure and uncertainty for the future. Plath paints a perfectly ugly picture of depression, one that most of us can relate to. In doing so, she gives me hope for my future, she also gives me fear, that I might be stuck in this 'bell jar' forever. In feeling unanimous with a 20th century writer who committed suicide, I feel my life is complete (sarcasm). 

This novel is complex in plot, character development, and context. I love a piece of autobiographical apprentice work, especially when it’s given no time of day at publication but relishes post-humorous. So, I answer my own questions: do all protagonists mirror their author in some way? Do authors find themselves in the same stream-of-consciousness as their narrator, using their own lives as stimulus? There’s a saying which goes: it takes one to know one. So all authors unknowingly or perhaps knowingly write their own truths in characters for the readers to truly know them. Are these novels a plea for help? Are we readers so egotistical that we take this writing as purely a work of 20th century fiction? Should we look into the authors just as much as we analyse their protagonists? I’d say the proof is in the pudding and everyone needs to read these novels – so you too can be thrust into an unreliable mind (one that is not your own), and be left wondering if you made the right choices in life. So, cue an E minor and  fall down the deep rabbit hole of self-destruction because it takes absolute breakage to rise from the ashes (no pun intended). 

Haley x