Author: Oliver Grimshaw

Sylvia Plath

 It makes sense to start with the theory’s namesake, I think. For those of you who haven’t read The Bell Jar, it’s a thinly  disguised autobiography about one girl’s spiral into depression including suicide attempts, hospital stays and shock        treatment therapy.

The bell jar is used as a metaphor for the feeling the main character has when she’s going through her depression –  she feels like she’s trapped under a bell jar, stifled and numb. Sylvia predicted her own future when she wrote from the  perspective of her protagonist – “How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell  jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

Despite marriage, children, a successful career as a poet and a promising one as a novelist, Sylvia’s own bell jar did  descend again. On February 11, 1963, she killed herself by putting her head in the oven with the gas on.

Every life has its secrets and many have their lies. For the most part, they go to the grave with us. But in the case of the creative geniuses who transmute the dross of their day-to-day experience into the gold of enduring art, it is vital that posterity should have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There is a story about the death of Sylvia Plath  that goes like this, after six and a half years of marriage, of shared creativity, great poetry and the birth of two children, Ted left Sylvia for Assia Wevill  and from then on Plath was alone with a toddler and a baby in the freezing winter of 1962. She gassed herself in the small hours of 11 February 1963, making sure the children were safe.

 

“In cabaret shows and musicals such as My Beautiful Black Dog, performers at the fringe are breaking the taboo of mental health”

I believe that  as a nation, the UK has never excelled at talking about its own state of mind. From discussions about depression to frank admissions of unhappiness, such matters have mostly remained taboo in favour of maintaining that very British stiff upper lip.

Bridgett Aphrodite says that people don’t want to talk about this stuff,  so  “I thought by putting it in the format of a musical it almost lures them into a false sense of security until they realize what the songs are about. I do feel like things are maybe changing a little but I know from experience there is still such a huge stigma attached when anyone even mentions depression.”

Grandeur, with humbleness. Pride, with soberness. Gladness, with regret. Peace, with finality. Understanding, with incompleteness. So many things are conjured in my mind as I hear this.