Plath — A raging feminist
Women telling women’s stories — It’s a line one of my favorite film critics Sucharita Tyagi exclaims with immense joy when she critiques any movie that has pulled off this extremely rare event of a woman narrating a woman’s story entirely from a woman’s perspective. Yes, the word woman has been intentionally emphasized in the last line because most stories, despite including narratives on women, distort or miss out on so many key aspects about women’s lives and perspectives. You end up getting ubiquitous stories involving men and women whose lives revolve around these men. As I put down the book Bell Jar written by Sylvia Plath, I blurted out with satisfaction, the aforesaid line in bold.
Despite the book presenting a very dark glimpse at the harrowing mental illness that descends upon the protagonist at a very young age, we as readers get to read about the raw emotions a woman dealt with especially in a time(the 1950s and 1960s) when women used to be berated for speaking their mind. Women were especially prohibited from expressing ideas and ambitions that did not fit the societal archetype of those times. What society had expected of women is rightly captured by Sylvia Plath in the following quote from the Bell Jar, “What a man wants is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from”. The protagonist of the book Bell Jar, Esther refuses to fit into these shoes and she beautifully expresses her desire through the words, “That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.” It is not that men and their roles in Esther’s life have not been mentioned but they don’t occupy an all-consuming space in her life’s ordeals.
In one particular instance, she appropriately points out how men usually turn blind to the trauma and pain women feel. When Esther witnesses a woman giving birth amidst excruciating pain, her then doctor boyfriend Buddy Williard very offhandedly remarks that although the woman is shrieking in pain at present, she will be given a drug to forget this painful episode and will be willing to conceive again. Plath through her protagonist Esther ponders elaborately “I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.” I cannot agree any less with Plath on this. We as women undergo pain in so many ways all our lives, the least we expect from people is to not show absolute disregard for it and the most we expect is empathy. A marvelous dialogue along similar lines from the TV series Fleabag comes to my mind, “Women are born with pain built-in,” she says. “It’s our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t. They have to seek it out.”
Esther refuses to buy the narrative that sexual intimacy is something to be explored only after marriage. She observes in her times that men beseech women to marry them with all kinds of flamboyant gestures and charms but later after marriage, women are reduced to being trodded upon as doormats by sacrificing their ambitions. She is appalled by society's double standards, which seems to seamlessly accept men losing virginity before the marriage. In Plath’s words, men are allowed to have double lives, one in which they are pure and one in which they aren’t. Sylvia through Esther tells the readers that a woman can never attain sexual freedom like a man because the fear of pregnancy encumbers her from doing so. Esther so vehemently yearns for this freedom that she gets birth control fitted in her and feels that she has gained freedom from the fear of sex and the fear of marrying the wrong person. We as women so strongly resonate with this yearning for freedom even after 60 years from when this book was written. Before you jump at me, I am not stating that we haven’t progressed at all in terms of attaining freedom but there is no denying that there is still a long long way to go.
In an interesting exchange after referring to some possible lesbians, Esther asks her female psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan, “What does a woman see in another woman that she can’t see in a man” to which she replies “Tenderness”. We as women, by nature, are truly inclined to exhibit the virtue of tenderness in innumerable instances of our lives. At the same time, let’s not forget to be fierce when we need to be and put down our foot firmly on all sorts of oppression and discrimination. This is the first time I have come across Sylvia Plath’s work and I wish to read her poems too as I am sure they will enlighten me with some brilliant ideas. Till then, to being tender and fierce and everything else about being a woman!
