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This essay began as a plea which turned out, as desires sometimes do, to be a little psychic (“That woman, I conjured her,” says Gwyneth Paltrow’s overwrought Plath in the failed 2003 biopic Sylvia , discussing Assia Wevill, the infamous “other woman” in the Plath-Hughes marriage disaster). In early March, gearing up to watch The Bride, I wrote a hasty note on my “Loving Sylvia Plath” Substack entreating director Maggie Gyllenhaal to adapt The Bell Jar and give us “the beautiful, disgusting, disturbing film full of poison and puke and violence that it deserves to be.”
The enthusiastic response I received on that usually tepid platform heartened me. People cheered; some hissed. Kathleen Connors, co-author with Sally Bayley of the groundbreaking Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, wondered, “How do you get to her, Emily?” which sent me briefly Googling “Maggie Gyllenhaal contact info” before my return to sanity. Perhaps I would conjure her. Despite my best efforts to disabuse the literary world of its witchy ideas about my favorite writer, the gothy teen who first fell in love with Sylvia’s work in the 90s still lives inside of me. And the truth is, in Plath world, the uncanny abounds. I fingered the jagged slab of concrete I once filched from the basement where Sylvia tried to take her life in August of 1953 and entreated her to hear me. The next day, it was announced that The Bell Jar was being adapted for the movies—by director Sarah Polley and starring Billie Eilish.
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You would think that a writer with Plath’s marketability and staying power would long ago have been seized upon by Hollywood, but Sylvia is famously hard to adapt. Other than the handful of scholarly documentaries about her ( this one from the Annenberg Center in 1989 contains haunting performances of Plath’s poems by the actress Ellen Tobie; a more recent BBC documentary called Inside The Bell Jar includes revealing interviews with Plath’s closest childhood friends), Plath is either absent from cinema or badly portrayed, with emphasis on caricature over character. In the aforementioned Sylvia, Gwyneth Paltrow stares moodily into the void or shrieks at Daniel Craig’s skulking Hughes for coming home late. In a 2021 episode of Dickinson, a show that excelled at lending nuance to another leading American woman poet, the usually excellent Chloe Fineman gave us a Plath whose primary inspiration seemed to be Pia Zadora’s beatnik in John Waters’ Hairspray (“When I get high, I am Odetta!” Dig.).
And while “They should never make a movie of The Bell Jar ” is an apparently universally acknowledged internet truth, it doesn’t account for the fact that a movie of The Bell Jar already exists. Ted Hughes sold the film rights to the book sometime in the mid-1970s; it was released by Avco Embassy Pictures on March 21, 1979 to universal disclaim (check out this episode of Siskel and Ebert where Gene Siskel calls the film “a cross between All My Children and Hee Haw ”).
Bringing Plath to the screen has the power to show her for what she was, what she showed us—a white woman being exploited who was nonetheless capitalizing on her racial power in a moment when women felt especially powerless.
It’s also a sentiment with which I profoundly disagree. The Bell Jar’s deep interiority; its repeated veering into elaborate flashback; the way Esther Greenwood’s precise inner monologue steers the book into madness as effectively as the private car she laments not driving in the book’s opening pages: all of these things present the particular problem of reproducing Esther’s powerful narration with anything other than a pat voiceover. It’s a problem Gyllenhaal is uniquely suited to solve, having narrated The Bell Jar audiobook to long-running, continuous acclaim. For Plath fans in a perpetual romance with the novel, Gyllenhaal’s husky-voiced Esther Greenwood makes for a sardonic ménage à trois, highlighting the novel’s coquettish plays for the grotesque.
Plath famously spent years trying and failing to master formulaic, commercial short fiction for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. Her fiction finally succeeded when she turned that formula on its head. In The Bell Jar, the protagonist and her cohort of women’s magazine interns attend a luncheon for Ladies’ Day, a lightly fictionalized Ladies’ Home Journal, where they are given compact mirrors engraved with their names and wreaths of white daisies, and ptomaine poisoning from bad crab salad. Plath ends the scene with eleven All-American college girls simultaneously shitting and barfing all over the shared bathrooms of their chaperoned hotel.
The barest glance at The Bride, Gyllenhaal’s latest film, shows how adept she is at handling this kind of material, binding elegance, artifice, and abjection into a caduceus of the feminine. Reviews of The Bride abound with references to its predecessors; none mention Plath, but watching the movie, her influence seemed clear as the bell jar at one point housing our leading lady’s head (Ida, played by Jessie Buckley in her usual fine form). Just before her murder, Ida’s low-life mob boyfriend forces her to eat an oyster, which she immediately throws up all over the table (perhaps a nod to Esther’s poisoned crab, one of the novel’s many symbolic deaths and resurrections). In another, she is given botched electroconvulsive shock therapy without even a muscle relaxer.
Although in The Bell Jar , this first round of ECT is a catalyst for Esther’s suicide attempt, her next round of it, done in-patient at the asylum, saves her life: The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. Gyllenhaal’s Ida, murdered in the opening scenes, is brought back to life through a combination of electric shock and a mysterious solution that splatters and scars her face, as if she’s been tattooed by a Rorschach blot, branding the film, like Plath’s novel, with so many of mid-century psychiatry’s pitfalls.
It’s evident that Plath is all over The Bride; but I want the The Bride all over The Bell Jar. Gyllenhaal’s movie took heat for wanting to be too many things at once, but this is one of The Bell Jar’s central metaphors. “If wanting two mutually exclusive things at the same time is neurotic then I’m neurotic as hell,” Esther tells us, reminding us that she is both mad and driven mad by a world that pathologizes her desire. In The Bride, Gyllenhaal turns that neurosis into a bloody criminality that is also inherently Plathian—as Ida murdered her second victim, I scribbled “Now she’s not just killed one man, she’s killed two” into my notes. Plath finished The Bell Jar just prior to the famous implosion of her marriage, one that kicked her writing into the murderous ferality of Ariel, but I want that ferality transposed onto The Bell Jar . I’m reminded of Jamie Hood’s masterful introduction to Trauma Plot, where she wrote that whatever the political problems of the Women’s Marches were (and are), in 2017, she needed to be surrounded by a pack of snarling, howling women, women who took as their symbol Artemisia Gentileschi’s image of Judith beheading Holofernes.
I know that Plath is almost never associated with this kind of blood and gore, is instead enshrined in culture as a reserved death goddess (Janet Malcolm’s Silent Woman, Alvarez’s “priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult”). But there is a murderous wilderness in Plath’s life and work that we undercut because it causes such discomfort: “I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood,” she wrote in her diary in 1958. “I can kill myself or – I know it now – even kill another. I could kill a woman, or wound a man.” This is the same ugly, messy reason some critics came for The Bride . Tongues are cut out, dead women dug up. Men rape and husbands conjure a fantasy marriage of ideals—a “matched pair,” as Diane Middlebrook wrote of Plath and Hughes—rather than one of violence and rage and deception. We don’t care for this, as a culture; we want the kind of tidy romance Hughes gave us, right down to the girlish heroine dying her tragic death, forever beautiful, a sanitized Plath which is also a sanitized Esther, dying her sad death in the crawlspace with none of its accompanying rage and comic blood and gore.
It’s evident that Plath is all over The Bride; but I want the The Bride all over The Bell Jar.
This sanitized interpretation of The Bell Jar is part and parcel of its place in today’s popular culture. You can purchase fig tree postcards on Etsy and Instagram abounds with #IamIamIam stamped upon pictures of a blond and grinning Sylvia Plath, but the truth is, the book is hideous and also funny as hell (“There’s nothing like puking with someone to make you into old friends,” Esther says of a co-worker she had previously disdained). The Rosenbergs are electrocuted—Esther imagines being burned to death along your nerve endings, “the worst thing in the world”—just prior to the young fashion magazine acolytes barfing all over each other in the back of a New York City cab. An impromptu blind date with a handsome rapist ends with Esther punching him square in the nose, his blood gushing through her fingers. When she wakes from her suicide attempt, maggots crawl in the gash she has opened below her left eye by banging her head against the concrete. Later, attempting to “unburden” herself of her virginity, she nearly bleeds out and requires stitches, an internal version of Hollywood’s Frankensteinian monsters.
Plath herself is the art monster characterized so brilliantly by Claire Dederer in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Plath shows up in Dederer’s book about (mostly) men who make great art and live monstrous lives (and what to do with them), but only as a woman who turns her violent tendencies against herself. But The Bell Jar is also fraught with the monstrousness of white supremacy and homophobia. Encountering herself in the mirror after a brutal night out, Esther sees “a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face.” This moment partially inspired But The Girl, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s retelling of The Bell Jar, a book she characterized as being about the problem of “loving literature that hates you.” When Esther is institutionalized after her suicide attempt, she abuses a Black orderly for nothing other than the sadistic pleasure of it. Later, relocated to a posh private hospital, she tells Joan, a friend trying to confess her queerness to Esther, “You make me puke, if you want to know” (Joan hangs herself in the woods shortly thereafter).
A bad adaptation will write these scenes out of the script (a kind of Hollywood version of Puffin’s “new” editions of Roald Dahl which dispense with his racism and antisemitism). A better one would work them skillfully into the film, not as a way to judge Plath’s racism and homophobia in absentia , but to show how white feminism works, where it fails, where Plath failed, what her limits were—what ours are. Done well, this could blow that conversation up in a way that calls for the kind of reckoning Plath has been due for, for decades, now. Plath’s fans are legion and span people of every race and nationality; they deserve an answer to Zhan Mei Yu’s vital question about “loving literature that hates you.” Do it wrong—which is to say, don’t do it at all—and you fail to meet the political moment, insist on maintaining Plath’s status as dead girl beauty queen, an icon of the worst of white feminism.
This Plath—the white feminist icon—is not a Sylvia (or an Esther) that deserves, or needs, to be resurrected, is, in fact, the one time I would concur that they should never make a movie of The Bell Jar. Let white feminism die, or rather: put a stake in its fat white heart. Bringing Plath to the screen has the power to show her for what she was, what she showed us—a white woman being exploited who was nonetheless capitalizing on her racial power in a moment when women felt especially powerless. A film of The Bell Jar can show us how hideous that is, so that maybe some of us might really see it, and stop doing it ourselves. The Bride is right on the edge of this kind of political fluency—giving Gyllenhaal The Bell Jar might tip her scales. So, go ahead, Maggie. Reanimate her. I dare you.
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