Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Sylvia Plath was a brave soul—and perhaps it helped to live in Britain while writing her novel at a time when in America “important” books like Michael Harrington’s condemnation of poverty, The Other America, and Rachel Carson’s environmental Cassandra cry, The Silent Spring, were the real publishing news. Civil rights and the Bay of Pigs and covert operations in Southeast Asia and Kennedy’s assassination were the real political news. To imply, even in fictional form, that the plight of a Smith-girl basket case was worthy of anyone’s attention in this charged, “serious” climate was quite a statement. Even Ken Kesey and, thereafter, Milos Forman had to make One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest something of an exposé of mental institution mismanagement—and his characters were seriously sick, not just depressed college girls (or should I say “college girls”?): Kesey wrote about men—ailing men, macho men, deranged men, delusional men—and not sensitive sappy little poetess types who suffer from nothing that couldn’t be cured by a husband. Failing that, they could be calmed and balmed with Valium or Librium or Miltown, a housewife pandemic of pills that became a rock music commonplace when the phenomenon was documented in the Rolling Stones’ song “Mother’s Little Helper.”

  While The Bell Jar is beautifully, carefully and agilely written, full of tart edge and detached bewilderment at Esther’s ineluctable disarray—“I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done”—it can be diminished as not quite the achievement we would expect to receive from a more mature, more developed (and presumably undead) Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar as a novel can be reduced within the Plath oeuvre to the status of precursor: what The Colossus was to Ariel, so The Bell Jar would have been to her later lengthy fictional offerings, the ones obviated by her early death. In Ted Hughes’ 1970 correspondence with Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia Plath, initiated in hope of enlisting her support for a United States publication of The Bell Jar (he needed the proceeds in order to purchase a house in Devon), he denigrated the novel as a mere “curiosity for students.”

  But to view The Bell Jar as simply part of a progression, as consequential only in context, is to be an idiot: it is a failure to see that to render a nervous breakdown honestly and truly as it happened, to write in accessible language that richly renders the pathetic minutiae of a mind come undone—“The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly … It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next”—is a worthy and proud accomplishment. Its message about the limits women feel is daring and rebellious, perhaps even now: when Courtney Love sings, “I want to be the girl with the most cake,” the demand she is making for, frankly, her just desserts is not so different from the lust for life that Plath was wishing would be permissible for the narrator of The Bell Jar; Love’s desire to gobble up the most of the most is close to the sense of entitlement Plath wanted for herself. As Mrs. Greenwood urges her daughter to learn shorthand and speaks of what an in-demand secretary she will be if she can take dictation with dexterity and ease and “transcribe letter after thrilling letter,” the poor girl just feels horror at the stymied smallness her role in the world seems fated to be. “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way,” Esther explains. “I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.”

  At the time, Plath could not even contemplate wanting all or even most of the cake—she was having a hard enough time getting a piece of her own. And the image that she creates to vivify the famine of her future does not have the richness of anything yummy at all—it is instead a fig tree, the Edenic bearer of fruit that the still-graced Adam and Eve ate from and inadvertently prompted their fall (it was not, contrary to common belief, an apple that tempted the first couple; the expression “fig leaf” is derived from what it was that Adam first grabbed at to cover his newly discovered nakedness): “From the tip of every branch, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and future, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out,” Plath writes, imagining Esther’s future possibilities and impossibilities. “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one they plopped into the ground at my feet.”

  Sylvia Plath suffered from wanting so much in a world that did not allow women to want anything at all—anything, that is, outside of their allotted roles as unmarried women in the steno pool and married homemakers in the neighborhood coffee klatch. In The Bell Jar and in a good bit of her poetry, Plath is the voice of one who wants to be allowed to want—she wants the luxury of not just one desire, but many. And in Esther Greenwood’s fig tree future, the girl who wants so many things that no Santa Claus could ever deliver—the kinds of life-choice combinations that women today struggle to juggle, though we take for granted our right to try and often enough, to succeed—becomes a woman who ends up needing so much more. Denied the delicious nourishment of all that is happy and hopeful in what she desires, she is drained and empty, an emotional wreck. The need is a burdensome absence whose weight is so much greater than her brilliant presence: in the end, it is psychic starvation that kills her.

  Courtney Love is a controversial figure for a vast assortment of reasons that touch on all aspects of sex, drugs and rock and roll, and still, I think that ultimately the scariest thing about her is that she wants. She wants and she’s not afraid to say that she wants and what she wants. She is not afraid of her own desire, and that desire is huge: she wants everything, the most cake and the most of the most. She wants the freedom to be who she wants to be whenever without reprimands and reproaches from those who are not so bold. She wants to attend all the fashion shows in Paris and New York and Milan, she wants to wear ladies-who-lunch respectability in the form of a Chanel suit and a Garren bob, but she wants artistic integrity, the true grit of a girl rocker who is angry and achy and has the hedgehog hair and torn-up tatters of sweaty threads to prove it. She wants to be accepted in the White House and the whorehouse. “Rock is all about writing your own script,” Love told Vanity Fair when the magazine put her on the June 1995 cover in full seraph gear, feathered wings caped out of her shoulder blades. “It’s all about pioneering.”

  When Freud asked, “What do women want?” he felt safe knowing that none would dare to say. “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” asked Muriel Rukeyser in the poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” published, as was the American edition of The Bell Jar, amid the women’s movement’s 1971 heyday. “The world would split open.” But in truth, it would more likely derogate such “truth” by reducing it to no more than a silly girl’s excessive emotionalism before it could even create the kind of threat that actually would cause the earth’s faultlines to crack. Sylvia Plath herself dismissed The Bell Jar as a “potboiler,” and when the British edition was published by Heinemann in 1963, she chose to use a pseudonym. Though The Bell Jar received fine reviews upon release in England, the novel by unknown “Victoria Lucas” was rejected out of hand by Knopf—the American company that published Plath’s poetry was baffled that they’d even received such an objectionable submission by a complete unknown talent from Heinemann—and editor William Koshland wrote that he was “knocked galley west” to discover that the true author was Plath. Koshland explained that he and his colleagues at Knopf felt it was just a typical first novel that the poet had to “get out of her system,” and that it read “as if it were autobiographical, flagrantly so”; Harper & Row, which would ultimately publish The Bell Jar
in 1971, rejected it at first because “the story ceases to be a novel and becomes a case history.”

  Speculating on the novel’s presumed unpublishability in John Kennedy’s America, Paul Alexander, author of the Plath biography Rough Magic, posits that “The Bell Jar seems to be a victim of its time. Society allowed a man to write about going mad—Salinger and Ken Kesey did, to name two—but when a woman approached the subject, she was disparaged.” But to see it as a case of a failure to be fashionable fiction is not quite fair. Certainly, things are a lot better thirty-five years after Plath’s book was shunned by the very publisher that would eventually see it spend six months on The New York Times best-seller list when it was finally loosed onto an American audience. But I’m not sure we ought to be too optimistic: it’s not as if women today who try to be blood-and-gory-guts honest and unabashed with their emotions are greeted with great reverence by arbiters of culture. Excessive displays of emotion are always reduced to merely “manipulative” or “artless.” Though the screams of Nirvana and the Sex Pistols could be easily dismissed as no less infantile than the cries of a baby in his crib desperate to get his mum’s attention—which is not, by the way, how I feel at all; I love both bands—each of these groups has a permanent residence in credibility heaven. Meanwhile, Sinéad O’Connor’s public displays of aggression have practically destroyed her career, Alanis Morissette’s raging debut American album is undermined by repeated reminders and gibes at her earlier teen pop star status in Canada, and Courtney Love’s temper tantrums and crying bouts both at her husband’s funeral and onstage are just annoying, just inappropriate: there she goes again.

  Of course, Courtney Love has certainly become a force and a figure in pop culture, and she has surely got record sales and movie roles to reckon with. But her prodigal and prodigious talent is often ignored in favor of lumping her in with the likes of image geniuses like Madonna, a woman not to be trifled with—just as the gift for perpetual persona reinvention should not be denied in a culture where were it accessible to all, everyone from Deborah Harry to Sheena Easton to Pat Benatar would continue to have viable careers—but a woman with none of Courtney’s audacious artistic abilities. Love, despite her great gifts, is more renowned for being a “potboiler”: when Rolling Stone finally put the whole Hole on the cover—and not just its overfocalzied front woman—the tag line read: “Hole is a band (Courtney Love is a soap opera).” But the sad side of watching such a talent as Love’s eclipsed by bad behavior—calculated or otherwise—is that it is just not fair: Kurt Cobain, her deceased husband, was every bit as much the it-boy of grunge with his changing hair hues, his dress-donning for videos, and even his willingness to be half of a very public pair of junkies heading for the junkyard; but in the collective consciousness, his talent takes precedent over his image.

  Meanwhile, Love’s train wreck approach to her public life has incurred professional penalties with regard to recognition for the work itself: it is simply unthinkable that Love was not nominated for an Oscar for her role in The People vs. Larry Flynt—and the fact that she was in the running in the category of supporting actress when she so commanded that film is almost worse. I might add that, after being dissed by the Academy, her need to conform to some imaginary standard of respectability—all the plastic surgery she has plainly had, the exchange of a silk charmeuse thrift shop nightgown and Carrie-in-spired prom queen tiara as an Oscar outfit in 1995 for unironic Versace elegance in 1997—is baffling: when Cher was overlooked by the Oscars in 1986 after a blustery performance in Mask, at least she countered the oversight by showing up in Bob Mackie’s idea of an Indian chief outfit—complete with gold lamé detailing and sequined feathers for a headdress—and preceded her presentation of an award by saying, “This is my serious actress look.” (Cher did receive not just a nomination but the Oscar itself for her part in Moonstruck, just two years later; obviously, chutzpah is no object.) But when Love acted as a presenter, she read straight and without expression from the Teleprompter, and she did not seize upon the opportunity to deliver a silly and disrespectful (as if an institution that gives Forrest Gump as best picture award really deserves respect!) counter-dis. Her model of decorum in the face of such undeserved unrecognition spoke Twelve Step volumes: Hi, my name is Courtney, and I am ready to play your game.

  It’s not that Courtney Love should not be encouraged to grow up and outgrow a junkie existence of wardrobe by Salvation Army, but both Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando have won Oscars and commanded artistic respectability while behaving in ways that are completely outside the system. To court Hollywood, Courtney seems to have recast herself; this may well be simply what she genuinely wants to do, but the impulse is such an about-face from her previous projected persona that it seems one or the other must be false. I mean, Dennis Hopper is no longer the nutcase who could only be marginally employed playing marginal characters in Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now, but he is still patently eccentric, he’s still weird and proud.

  It was cool, it was gutsy—it was even ballsy—when Courtney could boast to Vanity Fair back in September 1992 that she was starting her own Hole fanzine called And She’s Not Even Pretty because “a lot of the anti-Courtney factions say, ‘And she’s not even pretty.’ Here’s this new rock star—Kurt—and he’s supposed to be married to a model and he’s married to me.” It was great that she took pride in her unconventional beauty—or the lack thereof—and strutted the seductive sex appeal of her dangerous mind. But now—no more. I am happy to see such a talent as she on the cover of the crucial, telephone-book-thick September 1997 issue of Harper’s Bazaar as one of “America’s Most Stylish Women,” but I’d have liked it a lot better if she’d done it on her own terms, in her own kinderwhore dresses, or even in Vivienne Westwood or Anna Sui—but not, dear God, in Ralph Lauren!

  But as much as I am sickened by what appears to be a hard survivalist calculation that has turned a woman who made music that—at least for me—expressed a rage that was frightening, honest, upsetting, sickening and ultimately rather beautiful into someone who just wants to incorporate all that into a marketable act, doing lunch with Demi, playing the Hollywood shuffle and generally fleeing from the kinds of intense and honest emotional experiences that made her talent thrive, I finally have to shrug and ask: What choice has she got? She simply could not have gotten anywhere at all without reigning that stuff in. “It’s preposterous to say, ‘We love your personality. We love what you are doing and who you are in front of the camera—but when you step off the stage, you have to be one of us!’ It doesn’t work that way,” Milos Forman, director of Larry Flynt, perspicaciously observed of his female lead in a Premiere cover story on Courtney. “You want brilliance? Don’t expect you’ll have it for free.” But Hollywood does not want brilliance—it wants box office, and Forman notwithstanding, the only thing the powers that be in the movie world are likely to indulge are the special Scientology holiday schedules of its biggest stars. Courtney Love wants what she wants and she will behave properly to get it. She has become, in this way, a model for the New Post-Depressive Woman: saving her tears and hangovers for her private life, in public she is harsh and hard, like Roseanne, Carrie Fisher and other rehab refugees and loony-bin-trip survivors making a Hollywood living, she is witty, overweeningly wise and wise-cracking, smug and smart—but not that smart. Courtney Love believes a career will set her free, and she is not dumb about doing what it takes.

  And when we get away from show business and get back to Plath’s world, the world of letters, it seems worth noting that while at long last women have been given credit and granted success by writing memoirs of breakdowns—both Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Kay Redfield Jameson’s An Unquiet Mind were big best-sellers—the plentiful array of novels women have churned out about losing their minds are largely ignored. In fact, the only fiction I can think of that deals very directly with depression that has had any cultural impact—The Prince of Tides and She’s Come Undone—has been written by men, as if the ri
ght to artfully redraw madness into a creation and not just a personal history that can be granted the forgiveness for mistakes in metaphor or purple prose has been left only in the hands of men. That both Conroy’s and Lamb’s novels are dishonest accounts—the vulnerability of the characters they create is well within the boundaries of what readers can handle, the ugliness of emotional illness is drawn in such a way that the audience believes it is receiving revelation when in fact it is just a canned version of what the distasteful state is really like (the tone is that of one of a racist who apologetically says, “I have nothing against black people but …”)—is, I think, what makes them accessible in a way that women’s work is not. With such a dearth of novels that re-create that state of misery, it is no wonder that Sylvia Plath has not lost her relevance or reason for readers today.

  The thing to know is that people tend to think of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton as victims of that fifties prefeminist Feminine Mystique culture that wanted Smithies and Cliffies to take shorthand and change diapers, and not read Proust and compose sonnets. People think of Zelda Fitzgerald as a frustrated artist of the freer flapper era, a victim of her husband’s literary success, his second fiddle with a few strings missing. We’re meant to believe that feminism was what these women needed, not lithium. And it may be so: things are a lot better now that women no longer must marry and have children lest they be old maids at twenty-three. Depression is more prevalent than ever, but the voices like Plath’s have been silenced. We now have loud women, difficult women, forthright women, impossible women, shocking women—but we do not have sad women in the public view. Feminism seems to have erased that possibility. Courtney Love has chosen noise over nausea of the Sartre variety; she has opted to be a “character,” a “personality,” instead of a tragedy. Feminism occasionally seems to have silenced the silence of depression: it’s not that it by any means denies the existence of this obvious malady, but by politicizing it, it has destroyed the personal possibilities—and the political is not always personal. Which is why the prospect for artistic expression drawn from despair for its own sad sake—which was the task of confessional poetry—no longer seems useful in women’s creativity if defiance and anger do not accompany it; and, as is well known, once defiance and anger are part of the picture, depression abates and subsides. The whining is over—let the fighting begin! No more Joni Mitchell or Janis Ian or Joan Baez—bring on Hole and Veruca Salt and Alanis Morissette!