The Bell Jar Descends upon the Left
Robert Oscar Lopez
Esther Greenwood
says of the summer of 1953: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they
electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” So
goes the opening sentence in the classic novel The Bell Jar.
A political
event—execution of two Jews accused (apparently, fairly) of treason—ends up
being all about Esther. The execution is a metaphor for her identity crisis as
a middle-class white woman surrounded by docile females and egotistical,
inconsiderate men.
The Bell Jar was the thinly fictionalized
account of Sylvia Plath’s journey through the suffocating 1950s. Sylvia/Esther
moves from a highly prized internship with a women’s magazine to her suicide on
February 11, 1963. Writing under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, she relates
the oppressiveness of blue cornflower arrangements and being forced to learn
German, as she staves off Latin American gigolos, mocks her womanizing boyfriend
for getting fat as he recovers from surgery, and hemorrhages upon losing her
virginity to a professor.
Educated in
pristine colleges and expected to conduct herself with a modicum of ladylike
decorum, Plath rebelled by writing a trove of popular poetry in the 1950s. She
became a favorite of smart but wisecracking young women who might find Jane
Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett interesting but not edgy enough. Many an Ivy League
girl still bitter from her days at Deerfield or Choate Rosemary has loitered
under centuries-old elms gracing ancient quadrangles, wearing thick-rimmed
genius glasses and some kind of countercultural hairdo, immersed in Plath’s poems
like “Daddy” and “Lorelei.”
Fans of intersectionality
must, of course, take issue with her uncritical experience with “white
privilege” and her demonization of lesbianism. But there’s so much to rebuke
beyond that.
As a
conservative I find Plath grossly immoral, given that she committed one of the
evilest of sins in Christianity—murder of self—by sticking her head in a gas oven while her helpless young children were
in the house (gentle biographers remind us that she stuffed the cracks around
the kitchen so the gas would not escape and kill the little ones.)
Every time a
famous person like Robin Williams kills himself, we hear a loud chorus of
advocates for mental health warning us not to condemn people for suicide, but I
have never accepted their premise. The suicide rate in the United States keeps
skyrocketing the more we try to affirm and understand everything people feel. Would
that humanitarians could figure out: if we tell people the truth that suicide
damns a soul to eternal separation from God, we could encourage just enough of
them to give us time to nurse their minds back to functional health. I digress
but not really.
Her poetry is
good the way well-crafted Danish pastries are good. Anyone who’s ever been to the
little Denmark in Solvang, California, knows you can respect a chef’s artistry
while still acknowledging that cholesterol and triglycerides will make you
gluttonous and kill you. But this is where liberals get things twisted. To them
Sylvia Plath is good both for her artistry and
for her effects on the human soul. They see the march toward Plath’s suspension
of hope as transformative. To them it’s enlightenment, the very aim of higher
education itself, the discovery of the meaningless malaise hidden beneath
layers of puritanical Christian delusion. In my recent book Wackos Thugs and Perverts, I describe
the ideal state for the American left as “a cultivated state of confusion,
dysfunction, anxiety, and ignorance, which academia deploys in order to
maintain its power.”
The four phases
of this cultivated state are important, if we are to understand the left and
also the academy that the left both mirrors and molds.
First comes
confusion with an onslaught of crazy notions and nobody brave enough to contest
them.
Next comes
dysfunction, as people start basing their life decisions on their confused notions:
for example, they decide to spend their twenties not on courtship but on working
long hours and trying to publish bad novels, because their muddled judgment has
told them life will be totally happy if they never get married or start a
family (and if they change their mind in, say, their fifties, anybody can start a family with egg
donors, surrogate wombs, and sperm donors.) Because of such poor judgment, they
do self-defeating things like hang all their hopes for self-worth on getting a
literary agent. They look for emotional closeness from co-workers and a shrink
who charges $200 an hour to do what a husband would have done for free: nod,
listen, and say, “yes, you’re so right.” (The difference is that a husband will
also provide some good old-fashioned lovemaking—and babies!)
Next comes
anxiety, as people immersed in this blurry world of nonsensical values find
their waking hours plagued with stress, doubt, uneasiness, worry, fear, and of
course blind rage. Having mismanaged and sabotaged the most important
relationships around them, they cling foolishly to people who hate them. They
spurn people who would love them. As they realize that they’ve made bad
decisions, they start racking themselves and doubling down, excoriating
themselves for not doing enough of
the confused decision-making that got them there in the first place. “Maybe I
shouldn’t have broken down and put up a profile on OKCupid! Maybe I just need
to sign up for more writing workshops
run by arrogant lechers who tell long-winded stories about how they got their
novel published in 1982! Maybe I should try harder to be like Diane Chambers in
Cheers.”
Finally arrives
ignorance, the all-encompassing state in which this tragic process culminates
and to which, like the Via Appia pointing to Rome, all of the bad thinking
leads. Confusion has made knowledge unattainable, while dysfunction has made it
impossible for the victim of this rhythm to discipline their lives for true
study and actual learning. In a crippling state of anxiety, the mind is unable
to focus. The ultimate result is the lack of any perspective and inability to
gain it. Life becomes nothing but outbursts, reactions to provocations,
obsessions, and increasingly violent ideations. Ignorance is not bliss. It is
deadly.
Never forget that
Sylvia Plath, after writing about the tragically disoriented and suicidal
Esther Greenwood, stuck her head in a gas oven and endangered the lives of her
small children.
To liberals,
despite all their trucks with ideologically driven Black Panthers and ACTUP and
pink pussy hats, Sylvia Plath epitomizes what they stand for: embittered
observations about how annoying the world is, total inability to suggest
anything better, sarcasm, whining, mental illness, self-absorbed neurosis, and
suicidal politics with zero regard for what they do to children. The
proliferation of talk therapy options, psychotropic drugs, and self-help books
(including a boom in Christian sects structured around “healing” and “pastoral
care for the whole person”) seems to have had no impact on the main problem
facing the American left: They are profoundly spoiled, unhappy, and
destructive.
The bell jar
itself—a glass container—serves as Plath’s overarching metaphor for two
reasons. Beautiful roses are placed under bell jars to deprive them of oxygen,
so that they die but remain in their lifeless but beautiful state. Also, dead
babies used in science experiments are kept in bell jars, immersed in liquids
that preserve them for investigation.
Like the
liberals of today, Plath sees herself as the victim of the bell jar in both
respects. She pictures her own beauty as a forced commodity blocking her from
what she presumes would be a far more exciting and visceral experience full of
grit and danger. She also sees herself, half-correctly, as an infantile human
being, like a fetus trapped in an overprotective womb, and killed by
claustrophobia before it could reach real maturity.
There are
countless reasons to express alarm about the left of today. My book’s title was
intentionally provocative: Wackos Thugs
& Perverts, to encapsulate the trivium of nihilistic tendencies that
predominate in academia. You have wackos peddling wildly implausible theories
about the world as if they are unquestionably smart. You have thugs on all
levels, from the party racketeers who move trillions of dollars in tax-free
holdings and student loans for worthless degrees, to the angry youths
shattering windows and tweeting vile insults at people in the name of causes
they barely understand. And at last you have the perverts who have declared war
on every form of bodily dignity, striving to force their pornographic
imagination into every nook and cranny of society.
But there is
room for compassion if we understand that the left is defined not by its
politics but rather by its mental illness. They live in bell jars that they
cannot understand or trace back to any clear person to blame. Thus they find
wild monsters hidden behind everything that provokes them. They think Donald
Trump wants to rape them and Mike Pence want to electrocute them to make them
heterosexual. They think Vladimir Putin caused Hillary Clinton to lose an
election. They think the Koch Brothers plot to sell them into slavery and Steve
Scalise is a white supremacist.
In such a state
of hyper-anxiety and ignorance, they seek emotionally affirmative relationships
with oversimplified human abstractions: illegal immigrants, black youths shot
by police, sexual assault victims, Muslims, transsexual
fifteen-year-olds—people with striking stories to tell, but people whom they do
not know personally at all. Since they feel like fetuses trapped inside bell
jars, they need distant and two-dimensional characters to populate their
emotional landscape, because their dysfunction and confusion will only be
aggravated by the complexities of real-life individuals. And they fear, most of
all, people who disagree with them and who aren’t as mentally ill as they are.
They cannot endure any intelligent beings who do not mirror the tumultuous
fancies they hallucinate all around them.
At their core
they suffer from a powerfully suicidal urge, reminiscent most of all of Sylvia
Plath’s own psychological afflictions. Freud defined ambivalence as the
simultaneous co-existence of a wish and counter-wish, neither of which can
overcome the other. The left’s relationship to its bell jar is one of
ambivalence. They want to smash it but fear that if they do, the world outside
will be impatient with their neuroses and they will be adrift forever. They
want the sensation of being oppressed and contained, because it gives their
lives meaning. But they know, also, that they cannot live inside a bell jar
forever, so they lean dangerously toward suicide.
Perhaps the most
blatant Plath-like wing of the left is the LGBT movement, which wields threats
of suicide repeatedly to get what it wants. But the fascination with the gas
oven in the kitchen is wide throughout the left. Their nihilism vacillates
between wanting to shatter the world around them and wanting to cease to exist.
If you can understand Sylvia Plath, you know what we are dealing with, when we
confront today’s left.
Robert Oscar
Lopez can be followed on English
Manif, Twitter, and CogWatch.
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