The Bell Jar and The Passion According to G. H. by Sylvia Plath and Clarice Lispector explores the theme of Retread and Precursor by using the bell jar and cockroach as symbols. Both books center the life of the narrators, G. H., as she sits in her servant’s room to thinks and Esther Greenwood in her Bell Jar. The texts invoke questions like is giving up a revelation? Esther Greenwood and G.H experience ideas and inertia – how do they find balance? Esther suffers from deep depression over time and G. H’s profound reflections in a matter of few hours leads to the question what is the humility of being human? Do we try to hide imperfections by wiping it clean? Does that make it pure? Both texts also explore what the ultimate literary affirmation and denial is, Hope. For Esther it is breaking free from the bell jar and for G.H. it is witnessing a miracle. Plath’s focus in The Bell Jar seems to depict the harrowing reality and inner turmoil of a worsening mental condition when Esther Greenwood is beginning to lose contact with the world around her. One impressive technique is the distorted descriptions of everyday life. Lispector’s narrator presents a woman who communicates in the first person and reveals a severely introspective adventure of self-discovery and deconstruction of life and reality. Esther attempts to kill herself because life was nothing but a nightmare. She thought drowning was the kindest way to dies and burning the worst. In, The Passion According to G. H. a seemingly trivial event, the killing of a cockroach, leads G. H. to a detailed self-examination not only of life, love, hope and existence but also how everything that humans are might not be nothing more than linguistic justification of a nonreality. Both conduct a detailed self-examination of life, love, hope and existence. They also highlight the humor in pain and suffering. In literary criticism, streams of consciousness are a narrative mode or method that attempts to depict multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. Lispector and Plath make language the medium for both imprisonment and liberation.
The Bell Jar is a fiction that cannot escape being read in part as autobiography. It begins in New York with an ominous lightness, grows darker as it moves to Massachusetts, then slips slowly into madness. A thin layer of glass separates Esther from everyone, and the novel’s title, itself made of glass, is evolved from her notion of disconnection: the head of each mentally ill person is enclosed in a bell jar, choking on her own bad air and deep thoughts. She becomes obsessed by the idea of suicide, and it makes real the subtle distinctions between a distorted viewpoint and the distortions inherent in what it sees. Conventions may contribute to Esther’s insanity, but she never loses sight of the emptiness of these conventions.
The Passion According to G.H. opens with G.H., a well-to-do resident of Rio de Janeiro penthouse, reminiscing on what happened to her the previous day, when she decided to clean out the room occupied by the maid, who just quit. G.H is appalled by the sight, but she is trapped in the room by the irresistible fascination for the dying insect. Staring at the insect her human personality begins to break down; finally, at the height of her mystic crisis, she famously takes the matter oozing from the cockroach – the fundamental, anonymous matter of the universe, which she shares with the roach – and puts it in her mouth.
The Bell Jar and The Passion According to G.H presents a completely secular description of a spiritual rebirth. Every end is also a beginning – something that accompanies Plath and Lispector’s pattern of time and eternity. The narrators aren’t important as a human subject but rather as a mode to express ideas that are beyond and above human. Both texts evoke a sense of profound reflection, growth through pain and suffering and the emptiness of conventional expectations.
The Bell Jar tells the story of a young woman’s coming-of-age, but it does not follow the usual trajectory of adolescent development into adulthood. Instead of undergoing a progressive education in the ways of the world, culminating in an entrance into adulthood, Esther regresses into madness. Experiences intended to be life-changing in a positive sense—Esther’s first time in New York City, her first marriage proposal, her success in college—are upsetting and disorienting to her. Instead of finding new meaning in living, Esther wants to die. As she slowly recovers from her suicide attempt, she aspires simply to survive. Esther’s struggles and triumphs seem more heroic than conventional achievements. Her desire to die rather than live a false life can be interpreted as noble, and the gradual steps she takes back to sanity seem dignified. Esther does not mark maturity in the traditional way of fictional heroines, by marrying and beginning a family, but by finding the strength to reject the conventional model of womanhood. Esther emerges from her trials with a clear understanding of her own mental health, the strength that she summoned to help her survive, and increased confidence in her skepticism of society’s mores. Esther observes a gap between what society says she should experience and what she does experience, and this gap intensifies her madness. Society expects women of Esther’s age and station to act cheerful, flexible, and confident, and Esther feels she must repress her natural gloom, cynicism, and dark humor. She feels she cannot discuss or think about the dark spots in life that plague her: personal failure, suffering, and death. She knows the world of fashion she inhabits in New York should make her feel glamorous and happy, but she finds it filled with poison, drunkenness, and violence. Her relationships with men are supposed to be romantic and meaningful, but they are marked by misunderstanding, distrust, and brutality. Esther almost continuously feels that her reactions are wrong, or that she is the only one to view the world as she does, and eventually she begins to feel a sense of unreality. This sense of unreality grows until it becomes unbearable, and attempted suicide and madness follow. In the end she describes herself, with characteristic humor, as newly “patched, retreaded and approved for the road.”
In depicting G. H.’s epiphany, though Lispector draws on Christian imagery and citations available to her from her upbringing, she presents the situation nondenominationally. She translates religious terminology into a secular vocabulary. In G. H.’s moment of truth, the name of God frequently comes up, but “God,” G. H. explicitly states, is a word she is using to name the constantly emergent life force of the world, not a higher being attached to some religious creed. To someone like G. H., who has lived out of touch with nature and her own animal side, an awareness of this life force strikes with as much power as a religious revelation. Part of the reason for Lispector’s desacralization of this experience is to remove it from its doctrinal trappings.
Above all, she wants to bring spiritual ecstasy down to earth and make it seem achievable for anyone. Through such techniques as the use of homely details and realistic characterization, Lispector strives to indicate that every person who has ever thirsted for a richer life has the potential to undergo a genuine rebirth. Stated obversely, the book argues that no one has the right to shrug off such intangible events as are captured in the volume, since every person is liable to vital renewal. Metaphysical experiences are often described in unconvincing and unsatisfying ways by those who went through them. Lispector confronts the issue of the possibility of representing near imperceptible happenings head on by having G. H. keep a written record. Everything in the text describes the events of the narrator’s extraordinary morning, but without revealing what has occurred since then, G. H. tells the reader that it is the day after her revelations; she is trying to write down what took place so that she will never forget the particulars. She runs into manifold problems in trying to find the words to embody what are resolutely nonverbal experiences. This is where redefinition comes in. Many words that she used to use, such as “God” and “love,” no longer seem meaningful according to her new understanding of reality. Also, her wrestling with expression provokes her to constantly draw on biblical imagery, as when she describes the maid’s room as a desert where a saint is tested. She does this not because the experience is especially Christian but because this imagery accurately conveys the subtleties of mental nuance felt by those undergoing spiritual ordeals. Thus, though Lispector is intent on showing readers how close anyone is to mystical discovery, this does not persuade her to downplay the complexity or ambiguity of such discovery. The writer is unflinching in accepting the challenges of attempting to put the ineffable into words. The Passion According to G.H sets off on a quest for self-knowledge that makes up the rest of the book. The Bell Jar symbolizes madness. The maid’s room is G. H’s bell jar. Everything happens in the maid’s room at the back of the elegant apartment.
On the face of it, she has everything going for her. She is attractive, intelligent, and talented. She is a straight-A student. The magazine arranges concerts, dances, celebrity interviews, fashion shows, and luncheons galore for the twelve college student women who won positions as guest editors. Why is she feeling depressed? Esther’s boyfriend Buddy is in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis. She is discovering that her feelings for him are fading. She feels free to date other men, but somehow those dates are not turning out as well as she expects. She and the eleven other young women from colleges across the United States are living in a hotel for women. When her stint as guest editor is over, in a gesture of her feelings, Esther throws all of her new clothes off the roof of the hotel. In the morning she leaves for home. Her mother meets her at the train station. Esther hates their small house and the suburbs and plans to escape by attending a creative writing seminar at Harvard. She is not accepted. The rejection, in addition to her recent experiences, sends her into depression. She cannot concentrate on writing her honors thesis. She tries to work on a novel, but disappointment and despondency lock her in lethargy. Esther’s apathy worries her mother who, at her wits’ end, suggest they see a psychiatrist.
One of Esther’s college friends, Joan Gilling, is also at the hospital Esther is admitted in. Joan, like Esther, tried to kill herself. In addition, like Esther, Joan dated Buddy Willard, but at the hospital Joan confesses that she prefers women to men. Initially disgusted with Joan’s homosexuality, Esther nevertheless continues to befriend Joan. Eventually, Esther and Joan are allowed town and overnight privileges from the hospital. On one of these outings, Esther has her first sexual experience with a professor she meets. Esther’s experience is another misadventure. She begins to hemorrhage. The professor, in a panic, takes her to the apartment where Joan is staying. Joan, upset, takes Esther to an emergency ward, and a doctor repairs the damage. One in a million, he says.
A few days later, Joan hangs herself. Doctor Nolan, worried that Joan’s suicide will throw Esther back into despair, assures her that no one is to blame. A sign of Esther’s newly gained stability is that neither her sexual misadventure nor Joan’s suicide casts her into depression. Buddy then visits Esther at the sanatorium and tells her that she is no longer a suitable marriage prospect. Esther is not disturbed. In fact, his pompous announcement frees her. Buddy, from then on, is out of her life. It is another sign of her recovery that she responds in a healthy way to his announcement. Esther is well. She has the strength to face the panel of doctors, who, if she passes their examinations, will discharge her from the hospital. She will take charge, once again, of her destiny.
A wealthy woman, G. H., finds herself alone without a maid, and without a lover. She is thinking about what had occurred the previous day, when she decided to clean out the small maid’s quarters at the back of her Rio de Janeiro apartment. However, the room of her former maid, Janair, already was clean and was almost devoid of material possessions. G. H. remembers the following: The only signs of previous occupancy in the quarters are simplistic black etchings on the white walls that represent a woman, a man, and a dog. G. H. believes these drawings represent the maid’s disgust with her and her overindulgent lifestyle. G. H is resentful of this evaluation. G. H. then opens a wardrobe and finds a cockroach scurrying out. Repulsed, she quickly slams the door of the wardrobe, cutting the insect in half in the process. She watches the viscera of the cockroach trickle out of its still-living body. Unable to look away, she starts a philosophical monologue that questions everything about her existence up to this moment. She says, in addressing her fear in life, that her fear was not the fear of someone who was going toward madness and thus toward a truth—my fear was the fear of having a truth that I would come to despise, a defamatory truth that would make me get down and exist at the level of the cockroach. Finished with her monologue, she puts the oozing innards of the cockroach into her mouth and consumes it. The mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. From the moment absurdity is recognized it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.
You have this anticipation knowing what both Clarice Lispector & Sylvia Plath were going to do but at the same time you want every single nuanced detail explored and illuminated. Plath lived and wrote at the beginning of a period of great social change in the United States. The 1960’s ushered in the growth of the Civil Rights movement and the emergence of the women’s movement. People began to question traditional values, resulting in considerable experimentation in forms of family life, religion, sexual mores, and drug usage. The Bell Jar and Plath’s life highlight a number of these issues. For example, Esther felt that marriage was a form of brainwashing in which women were conditioned to believe that they should serve men. Plath questioned the personal value of religion, which she saw as cold and stressing sin. She was for most of her life a Unitarian, although she thought about becoming a Catholic to counter her suicidal thoughts and inclinations. Through Esther’s struggles, The Bell Jar also addresses Plath’s attempt to come to terms with her sexuality. Plath did marry, but her loneliness, depression, and the demands of their small children led her to separate from her husband, Ted Hughes, who later became poet laureate of England. She was a single mother when she committed suicide. In many ways, her life and her work became example for the turbulent, value-testing, social experimentation of the 1960’s.
Though Lispector is intent on showing readers how close anyone is to mystical discovery, this does not persuade her to downplay the complexity or ambiguity of such discovery. The writer is unflinching in accepting the challenges of attempting to put the ineffable into words. Lispector is considered not only one of Brazil’s most innovative writers but also one of the giants of twentieth century fiction. Born in 1925 in the Ukraine, she emigrated to Brazil with her parents and two older sisters when she was two months old. The family settled first in the Northeast of Brazil but moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1937. From the time she was a child, Lispector read widely, starting with Brazilian classics such as José de Alencar, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Graciliano Ramos, and gradually adding such foreign writers as Fyodor Dostoevski, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.
The ancient Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu told a story to show why explicit consciousness was not always such a good idea. A centipede was once asked by a frog how she walked, since it must be very difficult to control one hundred legs all at once. The centipede thought about this and found that the more she thought about it the less she was able to walk. She twitched a bit and then fell over. Lying in her back in the ditch she begged the frog not to ask any other centipede this question. Important Quotes: “Does it pain you that the goodness of the God is neutral continuous and continuously neutral? But what I once wanted as a miracle, what I called a miracle, was really a desire for discontinuity and interruption, the desire for an anomaly: I called a miracle exactly that moment in which the true continuous miracle of the process was interrupted. But the neutral goodness of the god is still more appealable than if it were not neutral: to have it all you must do is go, to have it all you must do is ask.”
“And I shall not wander from thought to thought, but from mood to mood. We shall be inhuman – as the loftiest conquest of man. Being is being beyond human. Being man does not work, being man has been a constraint. The unknown awaits us, but I feel that this unknown is a totalization and will be the true humanization for which we longed. Am I speaking of death? No, of life. It is not a state of happiness, it is a state of contact.”
“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. 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 Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
“How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”