Much more widely known for her confessional poems, most of them lashing out at her husband, father, and males in general, Plath’s sole novel stands testimony to the fact that she was equally competent in prose writing. The highly graceful, slyly autobiographical and entirely emotional work will prove to be a catharsis for any reader who is willing enough to slog through to the end. For it is a mighty difficult book to read, not due to its vocabulary or philosophies but merely due to the vitality, the nervous energy and restlessness that the writer packs in each word. And which threatens to tumble out and spill over any moment.
The first sentence of the novel is an excellent example of this fact – “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” What a wealth of information, what a mine of edginess crammed carelessly into a single sentence! And thus the story plunges directly into the troubled life of our heroine Esther Greenwood, without so much as an introduction from her side. It is 1953, and Esther, much like the prodigious Plath herself, has won an internship at a New York fashion magazine, thanks to her skillful writing.Initially ecstatic at having seemingly gained a foothold to her dream of being a writer, Esther realizes soon enough that something is wrong in her world. And that something, the readers are allowed to realize soon enough, is depression at not being taken seriously and at par with males following the same vocation of writing. What exactly triggers this off in Esther, there is no sure way to know. We realize it only when she talks stranger and grows more reckless and heedless until we just wish we could get into the pages of the book and save her – from the cruel people that crush her literary dreams, from her annoying relationships; but most of all, from her own alarmingly and increasingly dangerous self.
Of course, as stated earlier, Esther doesn’t begin that way. She is at first just a talented, ambitious girl who has come up the hard way and still finds beauty in a place-card “with a wreath of frosted daisies around the edge.” Her days are whirlwinds of scholarships, editing college magazines and having youthful fun in between. And then she lands in New York, hoping for even better fun, and for a while she does seem to have it all. But then, her life begins to unravel so fast and so completely before our eyes that we grasp it much, much earlier than she is aware of it.
And then this feisty, peppy girl turns into such a pitiful relic that it is painful to watch the transformation. When she says, “It was my last night,” and lets her entire wardrobe drift down in the wind, it is a chilling sight to imagine. And then this girl, who was once such a brilliant student that she fooled her dean so she could take only the subjects she liked and skip Chemistry, says, “I peered at the writing, but I couldn’t read it.” She fears she has become a zombie, and her mother realizes this too, for Esther is then taken to psychiatrists for whom she proves too “clever.” Then begin the torturous days of shock treatments and psychological jargons and neurosis and, inevitably, the talk of hara-kiri, sleeping pills and the knife slit across the wrist.
Long before Esther reaches this stage, readers will want to scream and rant at their own hopelessness, for not being able to protect this wonderful girl who sees her “life branching out before me like the green fig-tree.” For this is not the plight of Esther alone. She may have lived more than fifty years ago and felt oppressed by the then-society, but there are still innumerable talented individuals (read females) living today who can identify with her. For females, it seems, very little has changed. Esther tried to fulfill her ambition and was trapped down a dreary path; it is no less easy for seriously career-minded females today. And that is why this work will strike a chord with every female who has found her simple aspirations crashed, again and again, while bravely surrendering to the pressure of having to remain a “good” girl – who has been more or less warned to let go of her dreams if she wants to hold fast to her sanity.
The other reason to read this novel is that it is beautiful. Period. Everything is described as it happens before the eyes, as it appears to Esther’s mind. In a couple of dozen of words she explains, “Then in the cold, black, three o’ clock wind we walked very slowly the five miles back to the house where I was sleeping in the living-room on a couch that was too short because it cost only fifty cents a night instead of two-dollars.” And at another time she flippantly plans, “And one day I might just marry a virile, but tender garage mechanic and have a big cowy family.” Amiable, likeable, and very original.
So, by the time this initially fast-paced novel goes slacker and then whines down to a halt, much like Esther’s life, the readers are completely in love with her. For her grit, her spunk, and walking with head held high into the parlor that spells instant doom.
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