![]() "But now we see that this distortion has two dimensions: distortion due to the fear of life and death and distortion due to the heroic attempt to assure self-expansion and the intimate connection of one's inner self to surrounding nature." However, transference is a distortion of reality. In Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, the author talks about transference and how people need this in order to attempt to make themselves whole from their fears and anxieties. And even though we might say that everyone has this and that anyone might succumb to it, given the right set of circumstances, some people - for example, Plath - have this instinct pervasively and continuously, and rarely does the life instinct overpower it. Perhaps this is truly the death instinct. This is some kind of love for, or addiction for, one's own end. This is more than merely a fear of death, or a fear of life. ![]() By not expressing this and giving vent to her feelings, in some attempt to declare the validity of her reality, her life, she is thrust back to her fears and then to the ultimate fear: fear of dying. And Esther, like a child, is fearful of life. The fear of death is the backside of the fear of life. She buries those too, and thus with her lack of courage, she leads herself straight to depression. Her fears and anxieties keep her from even expressing her own honest emotions. Yet she expresses none of this, even to Buddy. And she is angered by the attitudes of the male doctors. For example, when Buddy asks her how she liked watching the birth of the baby, she hedges, "Wonderful, I could see something like that every day." Yet she is, in reality, quite overcome by the "awful ordeal" that the woman must go through. Esther, in fact, is so stricken with fear that she often can have no reaction at all to things that happen - except to lie. Likewise, Esther's anxiety about death takes precedence over all other of her anxieties about life. Plath's immersion in thoughts of death pervades the book, and, indeed, there is a great deal of death in all of Plath's work. Even when Buddy undresses before Esther, she tells him that she's only seen nude men as statues in museums, and her reaction to Buddy's genitals is that they look like "turkey necks and turkey gizzards" this is humorous, but it reminds us that Plath has picked a death metaphor again, for she sees Buddy's life-giving genitals as being similar to pieces of dead, gutted birds. Thus it is not really strange, thematically, that Plath's book soon starts to center on Esther's thoughts of suicide, on thoughts of death, for death-like images take precedence early in the book's plot, and they have been foremost in Esther's mind all along. She describes the baby as looking like a blue plum and is bothered by the fact that the mother is drugged into some, supposedly, painless state of oblivion. Later, watching a baby being born does not give Esther any sense of birth and life. Esther is proud of how calm she is when observing these "gruesome things." She even nonchalantly leans her elbow on Buddy's cadaver while he dissects it. When Esther wants Buddy Willard to show her "some really interesting hospital sights," this excursion includes a look at four cadavers and a number of glass bottles filled with dead babies. Consider the first page of the book with its reference to the execution of the Rosenbergs and the speaker's inability to get a cadaver's head out of her mind - all these images and ideas point to what is perhaps the main preoccupation in the book: death. Even the bell jar itself is a suffocating tomb, an airless place where the soul dies, if not the body. One of the first observations one might make about The Bell Jar is that it is a book filled with fears about death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |