The Bell Jar is a fictional written response to Silvia Plath’s depression and how she developed this mental illness. She originally wrote the novel under an anonymous name - Victoria Lucas, this was the protect the people she was writing about and also as she knew her mother would not be happy about it. She told Plath to act as if all her troubles were just a bad dream and to try and go back to where she left in her career. Which, as a few critics have mentioned, is possibly the reason behind it being called ‘The bell jar’, she looked back on this time through a bell jar and made it a sort of fictional story.
‘To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream’ - The Bell Jar, Silvia Plath
This quote from the book is a sort of response to her mother’s suggestion, in a way stating that mental illness itself is a bad dream, one in which is it impossible to wake up from.
Her writing is very intense and very well written, it is quite easily relatable especially if one has been through these depressive states and thoughts, which I have.
The type of poetry she writes is similar to what I would like in my photobook, something strong and intense to describe what these feelings are like.
‘The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. (2.37)’
For me, this quote from the book hit hard as I have always been told to hide away my feelings and problems because people will only ‘use them against me’, the fact that I have had to silence my depression for such a long time that now I am unable to talk about it and have just suppressed it to a point that I feel anxiety and depression, and I am screaming so loud, but nobody can hear me because I constantly reassure everyone that my life is amazing and so much better than before. I am not sure if this quote was meant for this response, but this is how I saw it.
This is sort of what I would like for people to do when looking at my work, to be able to have their own response to the poetry and connect with it in their own way. I want the poem to be connected to my issues and feelings, but I want it to be closely worded so that people can create their own concepts based on their experiences.
This book is so powerful and very relatable, but also so sad. But seeing how the author wrote these words and got her feelings and depression onto paper has inspired me more to create this project.