The Rosenbergs

One of the things that struck me as strange and a little morbid about the opening of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was Esther’s obsession with the Rosenbergs. Reading more of the novel and doing some additional research has added more dimensions to this detail, with worrying implications.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were a married couple who lived in New York City and were executed on June 19, 1953 after being charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and transmit information regarding military technologies to the Soviet Union. The method used in their execution was the electric chair. It is not immediately clear why Esther is so empathetic, but throughout the following chapters we see her describe herself again and again as an imposter in New York City. She’s been presenting herself for years as the smart, hardworking student who aspires to go to graduate school and write poetry, and feels like she’s been exposed as a fake when she realizes in her conversation with Jay Cee that that’s not who she is anymore. She even says when thinking back on the conversation later “I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicious I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer” (29). Esther also describes herself as having an acute awareness of how to present herself as someone she’s not.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and witty. (27)

It’s possible that Esther’s feelings of being an imposter and not belonging in New York City are connected to her empathy towards the Rosenbergs and fascination with their execution.

            There might also be some dark foreshadowing here. Knowing that The Bell Jar is semi-autobiographical, I learned a little bit about Sylvia Plath to see if that would provide any insights into this scene. Much like Esther, Plath was studious, excelled academically, and spent a month in New York City as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine after her junior year of college. It was during this experience that Plath first experienced the depression that would affect her for the rest of her life. She began electroconvulsive therapy to treat her depression, but would still make her first documented suicide attempt later that summer. I wonder if these events will be depicted in the novel, and if Esther’s fixation on what electrocution would feel like is connected to this treatment that the person her character is based on undergoes.

            I might be reading too much into this opening scene, but given how Esther is feeling like an imposter and that Plath, who was treated using electroconvulsive therapy is depicting Esther, a character based on herself, as obsessed with electrocution, it seemed like too much to ignore. The opening paragraphs were disturbing when we read them the first time. Rereading them with this new information, I am getting even more worried about Esther.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath 

Learning how to Fly

In this blogpost, I’m exploring a different interpretation of the Dedalus/Icarus dynamic in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

            Everything that Stephen is trying to escape in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be boiled down to one word: monotony. He is very romantic, intellectual, and has an innate sense of being different from and superior to everyone else. Stephen (even if he doesn’t always recognize or admit it) feels he has to go soaring above and beyond what anyone else can do much like his namesake soars above the labyrinth designed to constrain him. Connected to this, Stephen is constantly on the look-out for mysterious, enlightening experiences and goes through several of what seem to be these transformative moments. However, in nearly every case, Stephen’s attempts to transcend end with him plunging back into the ocean of monotony.

            The first major example of this is Stephen’s desire for an encounter with a Mercedes-like woman in which “weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him” and how he goes about encountering such a woman. At the end of chapter two, Stephen “wander[s] into a maze of narrow and dirty streets” and a woman reaches out to stop him, much like in his fantasies.  If we ignore the identity of the woman and the reason she stopped Stephen, the scene in her room can be read as a beautiful, transformative experience for Stephen in which he briefly soars above the maze of dirty streets outside. However, this doesn’t last long. Even on the next page, Stephen’s “wanderings” to the neighborhood containing the brothels are no longer sugar-coated, and in addition have become simply part of his regular routine.

            Stephen experiences something similar when he confesses at the end of chapter three and turns back to the Church after fancying himself for some time to be the worst sinner who ever lived. Immediately following his confession, Stephen seems happier and more connected to something emotionally than we have ever seen him. “The muddy streets were gay. He strode homeward, conscious of an invisible grace pervading and making light his limbs … His soul was made fair and holy once more, holy and happy.” However, Stephen again immediately takes this religious epiphany and reduces it to routine. A page in a half later he has his prayers reduced to a list of tasks to be done at specific times, is completely detached from them emotionally, and sees religion more as a way to get out of going to hell than anything else.

            Although Stephen’s decision to leave Ireland and pursue art looked like it might end in the same way, it was instead what finally broke the pattern. We don’t know this from the book, but based on our discussion of Joyce’s life after he left Ireland this feels to me like a reasonable claim. Joyce creates art as Stephen defines it, and never reduces it to merely a routine. Throughout his career he was constantly pushing to do something new, and each of his four books was dramatically different from the others. Much as Dedalus used his art to escape from the labyrinth, it is art that finally frees Stephen from the monotony that had previously defined his life.