Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar wavers between being a novel and an autobiography depending on how you read it. “It’s a story about a young woman trying to find her voice,” explained Teresa Griffiths, the director of the new film Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar. Chatting to Lamia Dabboussy today at Hay, Griffiths and Kendall delved into the author’s life and book, highlighting its current relevance to a new generation of women.
Griffiths’ film tells the story of Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, as she navigates life as a young woman, suffering and recovering from crippling depression along the way. In the talk, the pair unpacked the factual significance of the fictional chapters, peppering their analysis with trailers of the film due to be aired this summer on BBC2.
Greenwood, like Plath herself, is a smart, ambitious writer in the novel who feels trapped in the cage of the society of double standards in which she finds herself. Griffiths’ film weaves Plath’s prose together with testimonials from 85-year old women today who worked with the writer in New York City, and who contribute harrowing stories of insecurities, injustice and unwanted pregnancies.
What transpires is that Esther Greenwood’s story is Plath’s story and Plath’s story is that of thousands of women. Her daughter, Freida Hughes, said, “To give a voice to an experience is to let it go. The words remember it for us.”
“People care so passionately about Sylvia Plath,” said Griffiths, before discussing the depression and suicide that are inevitably mentioned in relation to the American author. “I was trying to touch on other things [in the film],” she said. What she portrays, in fact, is the stunning mind of a funny, brilliant and troubled woman who once wrote, “Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences”.