But it is 1953 and not 2013 in the novel, The Bell Jar and Esther Greenwood is interning at Ladies Day magazine writing copy for their glossy pages.
It is the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide.
Esther Greenwood (Sylvia Plath) resided in a time when it was not hip to be a big hot mess.
June Cleaver was not portrayed as an angry woman and Tammy was probably not telling us the entire truth and what was Gidget really doing in Rome?
Now we have Nurse Jackie and Hanna Horvath and let us not forget, The United States Of Tara and Chelsea Handler who seems to have invented the term: one big hot mess, while endorsing different brands of vodka to her loyal viewers.Personally, I delight in this adage but there are women who find this kind of candor to be disparaging towards women.
Michelle Weldon one of them.
Why Do We Admire Women Who Are Hot Messes?, XX Factor.
she asks in her article that appeared on April 5th in the
I can’t wait until women like me are in style except I know it will never happen. Toasting the trainwrecks is too much fun.
Every time I witness a public or media display of girl cray, I find myself not envying their outrageousness, but sad even scared for them all.
Maybe, women are just really uncomfortable with their anger and as Freud told us depression is nothing but anger turned inwards.
Seeing Sylvia Plain With New Eyes, by Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times, discusses the new wave of interest in neurotic women as heroes in literature.
Plath is one of the first poets a lot of young women find who they can really claim as their own. What she does is give them permission to express a particular kind of rage that is not self- annihilating and is not simply bitchy. It’s something deeper and more significant and more important.
This idea that is expressed here gives us remarkable insight to the cultural phenomenon of The Desperate Housewives syndrome and Snooki and her friends on The Jersey Shore.
Being a bad girl is our outlet for our rage.
Cutting ourselves, barfing our brains out and into the toilet and being a slut, numbs our pain but only for the moment.
I am not implying I am perfect, though I know I sound judgemental. But this kind of behavior doesn’t go well forever. For every wild girl tale of redemption, there is an Amy Winehouse, Weldon writes.
I find her choice of the words judgemental and perfect in this particular case very interesting or ironic as Alanis Morissette, a formerly troubled girl would cry.
Ms. Dunham continues, Plath’s rhythmic, angry language rang in my head as I walked to class. She wondered, if Plath have been saved had she been born in a different time: in a time when psycho-pharmacologists are no more shameful to visit than a hairdresser.
When women or anybody behaves badly, it is always a cry out for help.
We learn this lesson as children.
A crying child is a child whose needs are not being meant.
Yes, I am 54, but at any age, being a hot mess would not have helped me during the chaotic spells in my life. I’ve buried my parents, survived cancer, watched friends dies suddenly and friends die slowly, and raised three boys alone from toddlerhood to graduate school after a divorce. Without indulging in girl crazy, I managed to put the clothes in the dryer, write books and fill the car with gas before it sunk below E.
Whoa, Nellie.
Or whoa, Weldon.
That precise attitude is archaic and doesn’t help us find a solution to the problem.
That is the problem.
I applaud you for your achievements but I have at times been unable to brush my teeth while maintaining a vertical position and I have also drank a little too much chardonnay while putting those clothes in the dryer but your attitude only perpetuates the myth of women as superheroes leaving us with no safety net if we fall from the highwire.
Some of us fall.
And some of us just scrape our knees.
And some of us never get back on our feet again.
Two months after finishing her internship, Plath would creep into the crawl space under her mother’s house in Massachusetts and swallow a bottle of sleeping pills.
She survived the suicide attempt.
The poet Sandra Beasley convened a panel of poets on the plight of Plath.
Part of it is wanting her to be taught in a way that resists the biography. Ms. Beasley explained.
But another part of it is shaping what future generations think of her, as opposed to what I myself have internalized.
I think America has a hangup with the biography of the tragic woman in literary culture. I’m really interested to see what happens if that woman survives.
Back to Dunham; who asked her Twitter followers how they felt about The Bell Jar.
Her favorite response was a simple; it made me feel less alone. Because that’s how it made me feel too. And that’s what art is for. Sylvia was just like us . Only she didn’t have the Bell Jar.
Sylvia Plath took her own life on February 11th, 1963 .
The cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning.
She was found in her home.
In her kitchen.
A woman’s place.
Isn’t it ironic?
It’s like rain on your wedding day.
Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder is available in bookstores now.
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