So, according to Storygraph, this is my...fourth read of The Bell Jar. I recall maybe two of those reads, and not very well. I'm going to ramble here, so don't take this for a review, but just a gathering of thoughts I've had while reading.

One is that I briefly looked over some reviews and I'm honestly feeling a little bit defiant, so here we go: A mentally ill person doesn't owe you anything, not their kindness, not being palatable. They are not vying for your sympathy, or in this case they wouldn't have put so much of themselves into a book and then shortly after vanished off the face of the earth.

"Why would you be so horrible as to throw out the mother's roses?" Because the mother walked up to a suicidal person and asked them to not only remember, but also to celebrate their birthday. And not just a suicidal person, I might add, but one that has been institutionalized for months. She threw them out. I would have burned them first.

Two: Plath's self-insert character, Esther, suffers from a kind of 'melancholic' depression, where she is deprived (of words, thoughts, feelings, decisions, desires). But there's a difficulty in sensing whether or not Esther's misanthropy, racism and self-hatred are character traits or depression-specific. It would be unfair, I think, to say that only the miserable find themselves thinking this way, but perhaps I simply have too many experiences with character-miserable people, who aren't depressed. So I think it's important that we separate how ugly someone can behave from how miserable they are, while also acknowledging that deeply miserable people are legitimately uninterested in masking for you.

Three:  I kept noticing that when asked what was wrong she never mentions the failed relationships, the career choice paralysis, but she emphasizes over and over again that she cannot read and she cannot write, and these two things must make up some of the most important aspects to her understanding of her personality. She doesn't say how she feels, almost ever. Her actions become extreme after encounters that point to her failing as a writer (with little evidence of it? She was clearly motivated and accomplished as she grew up).

Yet her writing is beautiful. It's stark, it's sharp, and it's ugly - just as she sees herself, the world, but there's true talent in her work, the kind of prose that can only be written by a poet, I feel.

I do really wish the racism wasn't in here. The generalized kind of misanthropy I can vibe with, but it gets more specific and gross. Perhaps if it was a single occurrence or two I could overlook it or whatever (not that anyone should), but there's at least a dozen instances of her violently attacking a black person, calling them disgusting/ugly, highlighting over and over again the blackness, the whiteness of things. She doesn't single anyone out either, Esther hates all POC (Latino, Asian, Black, Indian, you name it). However, she's clear to point out that when a white person is pale, they are beautiful, and when they are tanned or "so tanned they almost look black" that they are of course also beautiful. Anyone else vaguely not white is subject to removal of a name ie: "the negro", to grotesque descriptions of their bodies (I think, she does this generally, but there's a specific emphasis on the non white folks) and to contempt.

Four:  I was thinking of Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation as I read. Of course, I read The Bell Jar decades ago, and then again and then presumably again, but I read My Year… two or three years ago and so I notice the deliberate influence. I'm tempted to give Awad's All's Well a go as well and see how much it does that resembles both of these.

Last thoughts: I sort of forget that public institutions were a thing. Like, she wasn't paying to be in there, she was hospitalized, observed, and then treated (granted: not the kinds of treatments we'd take lightly now). It reminds me of the Overton window again, how much things continuously move right, and some of those are how much we're willing to fund literally anything, how much is continuously getting removed from the public sphere or availability as society moves further and further to the right.

I've seen a lot of commentary in recent years about wanting a return of institutions for the visibly/publicly ill, and I've also seen commentary on why they were ended and removed in the first place. For one, huge amounts of abuse and mistreatment, but I would imagine that just like the USA's prison system, it largely favoured the punishment of POC and LGBT (as well as women generally).

I wonder if a humane, effective and safe version can still come back, such as that Plath expresses (not always, but mostly) or that Susanna Kaysen does in Girl, Interrupted (again, not always) and yes any kind of imprisonment is inherently violent, but I won't deny that we need to talk about what does and doesn't work in those places, and consider milder versions.