The annotated bedroom #1

For something different: photos! (of my bedroom)

The cream handbag belonged to my Nan. The Brown one, I think, was an op-shop find. They are hanging on my wall by a drawing-pin, which is holding up miraculously.

The first one had a strange crumbling mesh inside the lining which, years ago, I thought was asbestos. I had to get somebody to burn a piece until I was satisfied it was safe. Funny, but only now. I was fairly convinced I was going to die.

Books. One of my favourite things in the world. Better, certainly, than bags. On a par with a really good, well-scripted TV series by Alan Ball. Perfect taken with tea and a comfy armchair.

My dressing table. I could say something semi-profound and cliche like “my dressing table, which is representative of all things that get more beautiful with age.” But no. I just really like it.

I also like Sylvia Plath, despite the fact that it is faddish and morbid to like people like Sylvia Plath. Too fucking bad. She is amazing. And while The Bell Jar is terrible and morbid and tragic, it is also stunning and beautiful and truthful.

But there is another reason that I love Sylvia Plath’s work. And that is that after the experiences I have gone through this year, The Bell Jar takes on an entirely new meaning.

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

I have been in that Bell Jar now. I know life as an unending nightmare. I know the stifling fear of being locked inside a world of terror.

“How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

And how do we, do I, does anybody? This fear is the fear that stays. Reminding, unable to be truly buried. These are the things that I think of, in my bedroom, on the train, at the coffee shop. Nothing has the certainty that I once took for granted. The solid world might shift and change at any moment under my own frightened gaze. This I know. This I understand. This I see, reflected back at me in Plath’s work.

If I keep up this series may well put “the bedroom philosopher” out of business! Except my musings aren’t quite as funny as songs from the 86 Tram.

The collected suicidal writers (part 1)

There’s nothing quite like the satisfying feeling of cleaning out a wardrobe, cabinet or bookshelf. After purging your life of extraneous and unwanted clutter some sort of internal cleansing seems to have taken place, only what really matters is left and you have extra space to revel in before you inevitably fill it with more clutter. What’s even better though is watching a friend or relative rid themselves of unwanted goods and being first in line to pick through the op-shop pile. Yes, this has happened to me a number of times, the most fulfilling usually occurs when Katie attempts to rid her overflowing clothes drawers of some excellent ‘last-season’ goodies. But actually what I inherited from my sister’s bookshelf last week was two poetry volumes ‘The collected poems of Emily Dickinson’ and ‘Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems’; remnants from year twelve literature.

 ’Do I really want to keep these?’ Annie asked. Then, answering her own question ‘No. Emily Dickinson was a psychopathic maniac. When am I ever going to read her poems again?’

‘I’ll take them!’ I immediately volunteered. ‘I’m partial to the psychopathic maniac female writer.’

‘Really?’ She looked surprised as I snatched them greedily. It was my first open confession of a growing morbid fascination; I had already written a research paper on Virginia Woolf and just last week finished Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar.

People sometimes describe a great novel using words like ‘gripping’ or ‘thrilling’, an experience where words ‘jump off the page’. I have to concur with some of these clichés; there were sentences in The Bell Jar that did stand out in bold for their blunt, unashamed honesty. And what struck me was reading a chapter and feeling as though the words in print were exactly what would have poured out of my own mouth at some points in my life had I had the ability to articulate them. Especially the parts about sex: ‘when i was nineteen, pureness was a great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line. I thought it would be the way I’d feel if I ever visited Europe.’

The Bell Jar is an internal monologue of a year in the life of Esther Greenwood; an intelligent scholarship student who goes from a promising honours candidate to a suicidal patient in a mental institution receiving shock treatments to try and cure her depression. Throughout the second half of the book, Esther contemplates and makes various attempts at suicide by drowning, hanging, cutting her wrists, jumping from a bridge and so on; ‘I could see that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage without any sense at all.’ Esther doesn’t succeed in her mission during the course of the novel; the last page sees her stepping into the office of her rehab clinic where a panel of doctors will determine whether she is well enough to go back to college. What is most chilling about The Bell Jar though is that Sylvia Plath’s own suicide followed only a month after the first publication, printed under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas. The book is thus branded a roman a clef, a partial autobiography, making the thoughts of Esther Greenwood frighteningly real, a mirror of it’s authors own experience. More horrifying still though is a memoir written by one of Plath’s first publishers, which convincingly claims that Sylvia Plath never intended to kill herself but rather ‘to be found and saved’ and she died ‘only because of a freakish series of accidents’.  :O

I wonder if my interest in suicidal manic-depressive feminist writers should alarm me a little. Nah. I could hazard a guess that in the last forty years millions of literature essays, poetry analysis and feminist papers have been submitted on the life and work of Sylvia Plath.

Now I have to admit that I have done little more than flick though the collected works of poetry yet; but they are safe and sound in my almost entirely narrative-based bookshelf. Makes me feel just a little bit smarter having them there in between Maggie Alderson and Meg Cabot.