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A copy of The Bell Jar has gathered dust on my bookshelf for at least a decade—that old Bantam paperback, with a black-gloved, feminine hand and a dark, dying rose melodramatically unfurling on the cover. The review quoted on the back is from The New York Times Book Review: "The Bell Jar is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath's twentieth year: about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue." This Bantam edition was released in 1972, nine years after it had been pseudonymously published in England, and nine years after Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven and killed herself.
This edition of the novel concludes with a biographical sketch of Plath by Lois Ames. Ames tells us bluntly what, exactly, that distorting, suffocating bell jar was: "As she became increasingly conscious of herself as a woman," writes Ames, "the conflict between the life-style of a poet/intellectual and that of a wife and mother became an increasingly central preoccupation." One does not actually have to read The Bell Jar to know that Sylvia Plath (and her fictional alter ego, Esther Greenwood) cast a long shadow over subsequent discussions about how women should go about shaping their lives.
Sylvia Plath was not the only storied woman suicide of the era. A less ballyhooed death was that of Anne Parsons, gifted psychoanalytic thinker and daughter of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, perhaps the most influential social scientist of his generation. Anne Parsons, whose essays were posthumously published under the title Belief, Magic, and Anomie, has never gained anything like the cult following of Plath (or fellow poet-suicide Anne Sexton), and indeed is almost entirely forgotten except by those who knew her, but her 1964 suicide has nevertheless been elevated to metaphor by feminist sociologist Wini Breines.
Breines's Young, White, and Miserable investigates the origins of feminism: how did a generation of middle-class girls, raised in the 1950s to be Harriet Hausfrau, turn into the bra-burning radicals who, in the 1960s, pioneered the movement for women's liberation? Breines, one infers, finds unsatisfactory the increasingly narrow focus on the "radicalization" of women via their participation in the civil rights movement and the New Left, dominant in many current accounts of women's liberation. Instead, she retrieves the premise that white, middle-class girls growing up in the 1950s were, well, miserable—a view that would be scorned as "undertheorized" by many feminist academics—and attempts to give it greater depth.
The misery of talented but oppressed females who grew up in the 1950s, Breines suggests in her last chapter, found tragic expression in Parsons's suicide. That chapter, the reward for the stalwart reader who manages to stick with Breines's otherwise whiny and unpersuasive book, is riveting. Breines quotes extensively from Parsons's writings, and, without too much editorial intervention, tells a stunningly sad story. Born in Cambridge in 1930, educated at Swarthmore and Harvard, the brilliant young Parsons won a Fulbright to Paris, where she wrote a thesis on psychoanalysis and studied with Lacan, Piaget, and Levi-Strauss. She returned to Boston and "desperately wanted to get married," but found herself too old (at 25!) and too intellectually accomplished to find a mate. She began training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, only to be dismissed two years into her program. In 1963, she was hospitalized at the Yale Psychiatric Institute, where she stayed until killing herself nine months later.
Breines convinces us that Parsons labored under "the familiar feminine conflict between work and love," and that she was, in some sense, "a victim of the … culture of the feminine mystique that considered marriage and motherhood the only legitimate goals for white women." One can go along with Breines's suggestion that many white women in the 1950s wrestled with that same conflict, and perhaps even that their "misery … was a central factor in the development of the women's liberation movement." The argument comes apart, however, in the last step: that second-wave feminism provided the solution to this marriage/work problem that had made young white women miserable and caused Anne Parsons's suicide. If only Anne had been born 15 years later, everything would have come up roses!
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