Red Pepper » Books

Classic book: Things Fall Apart

admin — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 10:00:45 +0000

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was a simple act of revolution. Published two years before Nigeria’s independence, it set out its clear and controversial mandate: that black people can define themselves and, crucially, define their own history. In critical race theory terms, it can be seen as one of the first ‘counter narratives’.
With Achebe’s recent death it is worth looking back at the novel that led him to be considered the father of African literature. In it Achebe did the unthinkable: he presented a Nigeria, and specifically a pre-colonial African society, that had never been seen before.
Things Fall Apart describes Igbo traditions, rites and rituals as well as linguistic customs. It explores the old versus the new, while treading the tightrope between judgement and explanation. It wonders at an internal life in combat with daily necessity. And it examines in detail one man’s descent from power.
Informed by his intense desire to be unlike his drunkard, lazy father, Okonkwo is driven by a hunger for validation and status. A farmer, he lives in a village with his wives and children. Through the strength of his determination and wrestling in his youth, he has risen from the lowest to the highest ranks of his region, Umuofia.
But Okonkwo has two major flaws. The desperation to rid himself of his father’s legacy motivates nearly everything he does, and his uncontrollable rage makes him a good warrior, but brooding and difficult in peace times. He is a strict father, a brusque and demanding husband, continually dissatisfied with his life and what he feels are his lack of achievements.
As he is grappling with the struggles of being father to a boy he doesn’t understand, Okonkwo adopts a boy from another village, who has been given in forfeit. The boy fits well into his family and is the son he wishes he had. When the elders decide, after three years, that the boy must die, Okonkwo is shaken to his core but refuses to listen to advice to not have any part in the boy’s murder. The thought of appearing weak is more than he can bear and this sets in motion the events which will finally lead to his fall.
The ‘scramble for Africa’ heralds the beginning of colonial rule. Achebe presents it as inevitable, pointing to the mutually dependent relationship between racism, religion and greed. The new force uses commerce to gain the trust of the village. Whereas the white man’s religion embraces all and has different hierarchical structures to that of the Igbo, to the villagers it seems almost childlike in its simplicity. That is why it appeals to Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, who is struggling to understand his place in his community and family. Christianity gives him an ‘answer’.
The juxtaposition of the old and the new, where traditions and customs become a site of struggle, is demonstrated by the conversation between a village elder and the missionary. White religion is cold and removed, whereas the Igbo gods live among them and through them. When it is apparent that some of the old customs are antiquated and the new religion gains ground, Okonkwo is left dismayed and disappointed.
In an accident Okonkwo shoots someone and is exiled for seven years. He dreams of a triumphant return but instead he’s hardly noticed. This and the fundamental changes that have taken place in his absence whittle away at him. The missionaries have arrived and like a tick under the skin, have taken a strong hold of Umuofia. Okonkwo laments the passing of the old ways. His is saddened daily by what he sees as the erosion of his customs, beliefs and way of life and he is furious that no one wants to fight this new religion.
The pre-colonial Igbo world is finally a lost one. The disintegration of the social and psychological structures of pre-colonial Igbo life and the forceful impositions of new ones defeats Okonkwo. All the foreboding and doom that fills him about the future turns out to be prophetic. It is Okonkwo’s disempowerment that leads to the book’s tragic end. He knows has no place in this new world.
Chinua Achebe, writing under the gaze of Discourse on Colonialism (Aime Cesaire, 1950) and Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz Fanon, 1952), popped the white supremacist bubble. He dared to be open with his criticisms of literary ‘blindness’ to racist writing. His reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness caused great controversy at the time. Could a literary classic be racist? He argued a resounding ‘yes’ and forced white literary theorists, uncomfortably, into thinking about racism and literature.
Okonkwo ends as a footnote in the story of the white coloniser, but with Things Fall Apart, Achebe created a novel that is embedded in the history of the continent. It is a part of literary thought and practice; it is part of our collective history.

Personal critique – Why are We the Good Guys?

admin — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 10:00:31 +0000

Established in 2001 with the aim of ‘correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media’, MediaLens uses a ‘propaganda model’ analysis inspired by Noam Chomsky to argue that mainstream newspapers and broadcasters are systematically incapable of challenging business and state power. In his latest book, the website’s co-editor David Cromwell offers both a critique of the ways the powerful convey propaganda through the media and a personal memoir.
Cromwell addresses several topics, including Iraq, climate change and the financial crisis, highlighting the narrow scope of media debates that rarely question the assumption of a benevolent if fallible west. He intersperses this with several formative moments of his life and his development as an activist.
Sometimes eye-opening information is uncovered. Consideration of the post-second world war Marshall Plan reveals how it was used as a cold war weapon to dissuade the Attlee government from nationalising industries. Chapters on the Iraq war and Iran expose both the media’s dissimulation of bias and distortions and the selective amnesia and hand-waving of many journalists when confronted on it.
That said, the book has weaknesses and its view of the world does not escape the good/bad guy dichotomy, with certain self-styled anti-imperialists left unchallenged. Cromwell denounces ‘the British media’ for trying to ‘silence or vilify’ Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, but does not address the rape allegations against him.
The final two chapters are the weakest, unconvincingly merging together existentialism, Buddhism and psychology to set out a personal philosophy in which social change seems to derive more from individual enlightenment than collective struggle. The result is an eclectic romanticism, in which enlightened individuals who have freed themselves from selfish indifference to others use compassion to overcome the egotistical corruption of civilisation.
This offers little obvious guidance as to how people constrained not by ‘indifference’ but by oppression can emancipate themselves. And strategic considerations as to how journalists can work within the limits of the capitalist press to speak out against power and ensure audiences receive accurate information are sidelined. Sadly, given the useful information compiled elsewhere in the book, this leaves political strategy sidelined in favour of empty moralism.

State of mind – The Invention of the Land of Israel

admin — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 10:00:46 +0000

In his much acclaimed book The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009), Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argued that the idea of ‘the Jewish people’ was a contradiction. Most Jews did not originate from ancestors who lived in Judea and Samaria. Rather, Judaism was a highly successful proselytising religion in the centuries shortly before the rise of Christianity and for some centuries after. Jews were united by religious belief rather than a common ethnicity; most of them always lived in ‘the diaspora’. There simply was no mass exile in 70 CE. The idea of ‘the Jewish people’ is no less problematic than that of ‘the Christian people’ or ‘the Buddhist people’.
But Zionists see the Jewish people not just as a nation, any old nation, but a chosen one, with a homeland given to it by a jealous God in far-off times. Even secular Zionists appeal, in some sense or other, to the bible and historical right as a legitimation for today’s Israel as ‘the Jewish state’. This is the subject of Sand’s second, equally iconoclastic volume of demystification, as he now dissects the invention not of the people as such but of its homeland.
The core of the Zionist dream as expressed today is for Jews to ‘return’ to Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel. Sand is unsparing in showing how the ambiguities of the term are exploited ideologically, for this term is found nowhere in the bible before the new testament and only emerged, hesitantly, in the rabbinical tradition after the final incorporation of Judea into the Roman Palestina. It developed as a theological concept, referring to a certain sacred space, never a geopolitical area.
Something like modern day Zionism was a Christian evangelical notion before it was a Jewish one, and the idea that real Jews should actually go to live in Palestine was condemned by rabbinical Jewry, even as a yearning for Zion featured as a centrepiece of the Jewish religion. How this was transformed, and how the war between nation-state Zionism and traditional Judaism was played out is told in great detail by Sand in this fitting complement to his first volume.

Dictating the agenda – Murdoch’s Politics

admin — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:00:02 +0000

‘I have never asked a prime minister for anything,’ Murdoch told Lord Justice Leveson in one of the most memorable moments of his inquiry into the British press. And perhaps there is some truth in it: he simply did not need to ask.
The story of Murdoch’s obsession with politics and behind-the-scene details of his manipulative operations on the global political stage are told in David McKnight’s latest book. Differing from many preceding volumes on the magnate, McKnight’s book demonstrates that politics for Murdoch was not just instrumental to his business interests and that spreading his fervent devotion to neoliberal ideology was his foremost personal ambition. As Murdoch himself admitted: ‘I am not just a businessman working in a very interesting industry. I am someone who’s interested in ideas.’
The book elucidates how the magnate communicated and infused his political credo within his crusading News Corporation and far beyond. It illustrates how his loyal executives were chosen and groomed within a deeply political corporate culture aligned with the supreme boss’s right‑wing values. McKnight demonstrates that, despite Murdoch’s efforts to create a personal image of himself as a rebel and a rival of dominant elites, he and his loyal management have always been part of the same establishment that dictates countries’ agendas and destinies. Far from being outsiders, they shared dinners, country clubs, yachts and policy ideas with prime ministers and MPs.
Besides presenting a lucid account of Murdoch’s influence, the book has another undoubtedly momentous merit: it reveals how unchecked, concentrated, and unaccountable media power can alter the conduct of democracy. It was this disproportionate power that secured Murdoch his unprecedented political leverage and led to the numerous journalistic abuses documented by the Leveson inquiry. McKnight’s account of Murdoch’s role in shaping the values of the world we live could not be better timed or needed.

Marching on to war – The March That Shook Blair

admin — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 10:00:01 +0000

The argument about the significance of the 15 February 2003 anti-war march in London has been going on ever since – and got serious again with a flurry of polemics to mark the 10th anniversary earlier this year.
Peace News journalist Ian Sinclair’s oral history is part of that argument. The very fact that he spent years producing this book shows that he thinks the demo was very important, a point he makes explicit in his introduction.
He has put in an impressive amount of work – more than 70 face-to-face interviews, dozens of email exchanges and a trawl through the clippings – and The March That Shook Blair provides fascinating insights into the thinking of a lot of the key people in the anti-war camp. This includes several who are critical of the role of the Socialist Workers Party in the Stop the War Coalition, which organised the giant march. Future historians of the British left will mine this book shamelessly.
It isn’t perfect. It could have given more space to demonstrators who were neither involved in the organisation of the march nor old hands in the peace movement and the left. The left pro-war argument gets a look-in only through reproduction of old clippings. And there’s no room at all for waverers or people who fell out with Stop the War (of whom there are quite a few).
There could also be more to contextualise the anti-war movement of 2002–5. Yes, it was primarily a reaction to the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ after 9/11 and Tony Blair’s support for it – but that’s not the whole story. Most of the key players interviewed by Sinclair had been around for ages before, but few talk about their previous formative experiences – the collapse of the Communist Party and the Labour left and marginalisation of CND in the late 1980s, the 1990–1 Kuwait war, the giant left bust-ups over Bosnia and Kosovo, the Socialist Alliance.
All the same, this is an important document of political and social history. It deserves to be widely read – even if it’s not the last word.

Two brains to rub together – Genes, Cells and Brains

admin — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 17:06:19 +0000

Hilary and Steven Rose’s new book is about the politics of biology, but it’s also about themselves. The Roses are professors of sociology (her) and neurobiology (him), both with a long-standing and vocal commitment to the left. They’re married, as the book quickly informs you with a touching reference to their meeting in a new left club on Oxford St. Such anecdotes reflect not just ways in which the personal is political but that the history of biology is both of these things too.
As junior academics in the 1960s, the Roses received an extra £50 a year on their salaries for each of their children. This was due to the influence of William Beveridge, who, as a eugenicist, wanted to encourage such bright young academics to breed. Ideologies, bodies, science and administration wrap together in the Roses’ life history, just as their book argues such matrixes of techno-science affect us all.
The book is both about the large and important abstract entities of its title – genes, cells and brains – and the institutions, people, ideologies, offices, publications and, above all, money that not only help bring such entities into human understanding but direct what we do with them. It is critical, pointed and clear in its explanations of the political economy of modern biology, and how this is significant not only for our understanding of how the world works, but how we imagine ourselves in it and how we choose to engineer it, including engineering ourselves.
The spectre of reductive materialism haunts the book, as one might expect from a Marxist take on biology. I remain unconvinced that Victorian ideologies that influenced early Darwinian concepts of evolution really explain that much about the politics of biology today. There is nothing ‘inherent’ in the sociology of science. Humans are just not so mechanically simple. Still, the Roses offer several useful lines of critique. There’s a neat passage on the ‘outsourcing of ethics’ through the structures and uses of specialist bioethicists. They raise a sceptical eyebrow at Lord Sainsbury’s £11 million of donations to Labour and oh-so-generous refusal to take a salary when he got the job he so coveted as science minister.
They also note the influence of the Wellcome Trust as ‘the ten-thousand-pound gorilla in the genomics room’, not only significantly bankrolling their own science but lobbying the government to follow their lead too. They could probably be more critical of the trust, which may have done an enormous amount of good but should not be above criticism. As Stella Creasy MP has asked, how does it justify its investment in the high-interest lender Wonga?
In some respects the Roses depict society sleepwalking into significant and dangerous changes to the life sciences. Science journalism is partly held accountable, failing in its role as fourth estate with an over-reliance on ‘churnalism’. There’s also a finger pointed at the architects of the new left for simply not paying enough attention to science.
I’d personally cast some blame on the sociology of science for a lack of public engagement, although these issues are complex and the interests that have ‘outsourced’ and obfuscated public debate on the politics of science, for neoliberal ends, have been a force to reckon with.
In some ways, I was left with a sense that the Roses feel it’s too late to save science for the people. There’s a tempting whiff of truth to such pessimism, but I’m more hopeful. For all its socialism, the story told by the Roses seems rather preoccupied by big names. Arguably this is appropriate for a book about science, which is a highly hierarchical business dominated by loud personalities, despite occasional posturing otherwise. But I suspect more social history/ethnographically-inspired empirical work, talking to the middle-ranking workers of science, would have produced a different picture. I think it’s through the building of horizontal networks between such workers that we’ll see positive change.
The book also felt slightly dated in places. It’s all a bit old-new left. What about the newer-new lefts, the ones that write blogposts, not books, that build and break networks online, make internet memes to parody Dawkins and are increasingly more worried by environmental sciences than biology? Where do these new monsters of techno-science fit into the scheme of science in society? Are there ways they might occupy scientific spaces, reclaim areas of knowledge and the very notion of techno-utopianism? Might they break the institutionalised nature of much so-called citizen science and public engagement, ignore the publication relations messages of groups such as the Science Media Centre, pick constructive fights on Twitter with Ben Goldacre and make new social movements for the 21st century all their own? I think they might. Or at least I think they have potential.
If you’re interested in science in society (and you should be, because those who are hold the keys to our futures), read this book. But don’t be taken in too deeply or depressed by its neater stories. Let it make you angry enough to want to learn from more than just the good Professors Rose.

Fighting and winning: the struggle for the Hackney Empire

jenny — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 14:04:17 +0000

If you have been to Hackney Mare Street in the last few years you’ll have noticed a square in front of the Town Hall, a 1930s building, across the road from the old Ocean music venue and what’s now the Hackney Picture House. But dominating the north side is the Hackney Empire, its name emblazoned as an assertion of its presence. Its huge brick lettering announcing itself. And it is a presence due only to the dedication and vision of Roland and Claire Muldoon and a determined collection of people who worked to re-establish the wonderful theatre built by Frank Matcham in 1901. It was their work that saved it from being a decaying bingo hall, with little prospect at the time to ensure a future except that of the grasping hands of real estate sharks who would eventually have cleaned up.

But this is not just a book about a theatre in East London and the work of Roland and Claire. It is an example which all of us wherever we live could have replicated. In a period when local government was at the mercy of a rampant Tory government, determined to unleash monetarist policies, which would attack all areas of public expenditure. A building for the public, which had huge potential, if there was money. And a Labour council that was incapable of responding to such attacks as their party became wedded to the view that in fact there was no alternative, and they had nothing to present as an alternative cultural policy to that of central government. A time when enterprise and ‘loadsofmoney’ culture was unleashed and then lauded; and developers could be found to make money through their thin dreams of gentrification. This, taking place in a working class borough where social problems required not sermons but real investment, and ways of developing services which were creative in meeting the needs of residents with input from them. In an area that needed a big, open door and popular theatre to reflect not just the different populations living there, but cultures and groups that had never had any inclusion in the theatres and venues of Britain. Where was the popular black theatre? Where was the venue that would host the increasingly popular standup and comedy nights? Where was the place which would cater for people wanting a great night out watching opera or a Shakespeare play?

Throughout the book we learn of the ones who were or became the enemy. Local councillors who wanted to incorporate the Empire in their orbit. Whose dreams were of “cultural quarters” and other such identifications of sterile plans. Arts administrators who were suspicious of the whole operation and concerned that proposals for the refurbishing and the plans for the future were too grand and incapable of being met. Members of the board who were persuaded that the city money and the financiers could be the ones who would be able to maintain the financial tightrope for the Empire. That such people would have the vision and commitment to programme the essential diverse and dynamic shows needed to maintain the place.

But there were also aides and supporters suddenly galloping to the rescue – some of those who had ways of accessing money for arts projects, after the rejections from the Arts Council and others. There were those rubbing shoulders with the royals, and old friends committing money to provide necessary safety nets and support from local boys and girls made good – Pinter, Sugar et al. And throughout, the stories of loyal friends and supporters who would turn out to help, and even at times to rescue.

And there was also Roland and Claire Muldoon. Committed socialists who never wavered from their identification with the different struggles of the day – the miners, opponents of the poll tax, supporters of anti racist campaigns, women’s issues, and gay rights. A couple who throughout their lives have worn their hearts on their sleeves. Anti Thatcher, anti New Labour and now anti Coalition (or more accurately anti Tories). But we have all had to face the fact that our history is littered with struggles well fought, but in which we have often been defeated. And yet we also know that the very fight itself has given confidence and experiences, has provided a terrain where many have been drawn in, won to our arguments and have become committed to the issues we have been advocating.

This whole story of the fight for the Hackney Empire and the way it developed will always be an example, in the teeth of an increasingly commercialized and market dominated culture, of much of the best in trying to make real a hope and a vision of a locally based people’s theatre. For Roland and Claire did more than have dreams. They succeeded for a period and have left a legacy of a splendid theatre in the heart of Hackney, but also and in many ways more importantly, have left an example of the way you can campaign for your vision of what ought to be.

Soldier Box: an antidote to the government line

admin — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:44:54 +0000

Joe Glenton is a former British soldier who, after serving in Afghanistan, refused to return for a second tour on moral grounds and went AWOL. After two years, he came back to the UK, prepared to fight the charges that awaited him. Throughout, Glenton became involved with the anti-war movement, attending rallies, giving speeches and interviews – despite direct orders from the ministry of defence to the contrary. Charges which carried ten-year sentences were subsequently dropped and he served a number of months in a military prison.

Glenton’s recently-released book, Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror, chronicles the aforementioned events and is a welcome addition to any collection concerned with British foreign policy and the ‘war on terror’. The book would be a fascinating read in itself, but details and perspectives which only a soldier could provide make it all the more so. Reading of Hellfire missiles – which cost £100,000 a piece and are currently all the rage when it comes to drone strikes – that arrived back at the ‘ammo site useless and scrawled with anti-Islamic graffiti by the loaders’ is unnerving.

Everyone has an opinion on dissent within the military – as the case of Bradley Manning demonstrates – and so it is useful to follow the journey of someone who went from being one who ‘loved the soldiering life’ to having ‘objections to the war [which] were beginning to crystallise into something impossible to ignore’, to being ‘loose in the world without the support of my comrades, in exile on the other side of the planet’ with the opinion that ‘the military was really a series of farcical comedy sketches’.

Not helping

Glenton recently appeared on BBC’s HARDtalk, during which he told his interviewer: ‘I might have a regional accent, but I’m not stupid.’ Soldier Box confirms that statement. Accusations of cowardice, treachery and plain self-interestedness are duly laid to rest. As the author himself points out, his position wasn’t down to radicalism or politics: ‘It was just a case of acknowledging that we really weren’t helping anyone – certainly not the Afghans.’

Either way, he paints a bleak picture which even the most proponents of the war would struggle to refute: ‘millions of pounds were being spent, hundreds of thousands of rounds were being fired off, women were being bombed, locals were being alienated and people were dying’. The book documents the development of Glenton’s political ideas, and his increasing conviction and determination to face down the charges brought against him.

If all of this sounds so heavy as to crush hopes of the book appealing to a casual readership, Glenton’s literary style is itself reassuring. Sentences are reeled off in a concise, matter-of-fact way (with military slang and expletives) reminiscent of Hemingway – plain yet informative sentences which whet the reader’s appetite with a desire to know more. At the same time, the book is peppered with delicate descriptions of scenery, which are surprisingly effective in conveying the stark features of a battered landscape. In this respect, one is reminded of the work of John Pilger, in that whilst informative, the prose never withers or dehydrates; rather, it is made engaging by way of the author’s perceptive, personal eye and affectionate attention to detail.

The refusal to go to war is no slight thing, and raises serious questions about what has taken place overseas in our name. That a soldier can serve in a foreign land and, on the back of what he was witnessed, refuse to return to that particular war, gives no slight insight into what has been taking place. Joe Glenton’s Soldier Box is more than a genuinely fine read, it is a well-written, damning indictment of both British military action in Afghanistan, and the ministry of defence generally. It is to be welcomed, and will hopefully be read by all, crucially the public, for whom it will act as an important antidote to the all too predictable and familiar government line.

Review – You Can’t Evict an Idea

admin — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:26:26 +0000

It has been 18 months since thousands of people came out into squares in 900 cities across the world under the banner of Occupy. As this was the last big mobilisation against austerity and capitalism in this country, Tim Gee has taken a perfect moment to publish writing from the time and since.
Even though there has been a recent resurgence in street activity, from the University of Sussex and bedroom tax protests to the street Thatcher parties, Occupy was able to bring masses of people, who don’t normally interact, together for months on end. The anger and hope that filled the squares along with people is captured in the opening chapter of ‘You Can’t Evict an Idea’. Gee details the energy people had to discuss the failings of the current system, and how we can do things differently together, through large consensus meetings (that people actually enjoyed and wanted to be apart of!) Being able to read over what Occupy was is truly inspiring and is important to remind us what we were capable of.
Gee also puts the Occupy movement in an interesting historical context – not just in relation to the dramatic events of 2011 (Tahrir Square, Indignados and more) but also to our own penchant for occupations as a tool for political change. He reminds us that whether it is military bases in Greenham Common, the G8 summit in Gleneagles or the eviction of travellers on Dale Farm, camping has allowed us to come together and form an alternative society, as well as taking direct action against the institutions oppressing us and others.
However, from this historical context comes an attempt to place Occupy as just another step in the ‘global movement’ – specifically, this is framed as Occupy almost being Climate Camp continued. Climate Camp had some achievements but cannot be dressed up as anything but acting within an activist ghetto. Occupy in contrast was an explosion of emotion that incorporated people of all ages and social class with few links to previous campaigns in the UK.
Clutching at straws for Occupy’s achievements, Gee twice asserts a link between Occupy and Boycott Workfare. Being involved in both of those groups, this attempt to once again impose some continuity is untrue. Occupy has, however, had real and solid achievements at Friern Barnet library and through homeless Occupiers fighting for housing and social space in London through squatting.
Could this confusion about what was happening on the ground in Occupy be because Gee is a writer rather than someone embedded within in the movement? But this position does enable him to give an interesting overview of both the UK and American events, capturing the diversity of the Occupy camps and actions on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘You Can’t Evict an Idea’ allows us to revisit and reflect on what was a wide and inspiring movement, that will no doubt continue to influence people and inspire actions beyond the call of ‘Occupy’.
You can download the ebook for free, or order a print copy, here from Housmans bookshop.

Classic book: The Bell Jar

admin — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:00:32 +0000

I first read The Bell Jar aged 16, eyes glued to the page until 3am. Judging from the discussions around the 50th anniversary of its publication, and of Sylvia Plath’s death, I’m not the only one. The central character, Esther Greenwood, set a new standard in fictional heroines: honest, cutting, and disillusioned, with a dark, dry wit. Plath wanted to write high art and pop art at the same time, and the novel’s enduring, intergenerational appeal demonstrates her success.
Readers argue over how far to read the novel as autobiography. For those hungry for more from a profound writer who died so young, seeing the book as the ‘truth’ of Plath’s experience offers some kind of answer to her suicide. Others reject this as over-simplifying and urge allowing the character Greenwood to exist more freely as Plath’s careful creation. Either way, The Bell Jar provides a stark portrait of 1950s America’s options for young (white) women, and conveys the conditions that 1960s second wave feminism (mainly centred on the experience of white women) rose in response to.
Esther Greenwood is torn between modelling herself on Doreen the sexy slut or Betsy the wholesome virgin. She is disgusted by the lifestyles of affluent young women, as someone who had never been to a restaurant before spending the summer on a writer’s scholarship in New York – that in fact funnels the young women into secretarial work or marriage rather than nurturing their creative paths. Esther compares her own incarceration in a mental health clinic to the restrictions on young women like her in the outside world: ‘What was there about us, in Belsize [hospital], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.’
Plath lays bare the connections between society’s norms and oppressions and her protagonist’s journey through suicidal depression. Esther repeats how it is various things around her that ‘made me sick’. Esther’s rejection of being told that ‘what a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from’ crystallises Plath’s critical analysis of 1950s US patriarchy as stifling, suffocating and indeed sickening. Esther instead notes that she ‘wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a 4th of July rocket’, but the barriers to her doing that are clearly internalised nonetheless.
I first came to read this book because it was on the A-Level curriculum, with a young teacher drawing out the finer points of feminist critique for the class. Plath lacked role models herself, but certainly raised expectations of female characters for other women readers. Amidst the 50th-anniversary debates some Plath fans fantasise over who would Sylvia be if she were a young woman today.
Some imagine her as a fervent blogger dissecting the world she sees post-radical feminism, post riot grrrl, post Prozac. Maybe links would be drawn to the impact of current cuts to Disability Living Allowance to people with mental health problems like Plath, who made little money as a writer while she was living. Or perhaps in 2013, after numerous backlashes against gains made by feminist movements, and women still suffering issues like the large pay gap and the 6 per cent conviction rate in rape cases, the outlook for women is simply another kind of depressing.
With the recent release of the anniversary edition has come a new cover and a new controversy over the meaning and purpose of the book. Faber & Faber’s original 1966 cover design, by Shirley Tucker, is a dizzying set of concentric circles, but the new edition is the reflection in a compact mirror of a woman powdering her face (see above for both). Fatema Ahmed in the London Review of Books rightly challenged this switch in focus: ‘The anniversary edition fits into the depressing trend for treating fiction by women as a genre, which no man could be expected to read and which women will only know is meant for them if they can see a woman on the cover.’ F&F contends that the ‘mass appeal’ design could bring in new readers – and it is selling fast.
Several editions of The Bell Jar have covers showing a young woman staring back at the reader. Well, read her, hear her, and share the book with others who might find solace or new understanding in this novel of a young woman’s battle with patriarchy, exquisitely described. I’ll leave it to readers of this review to act on widening the readership of such an important novel, significant to history, feminism, and the potential for political organising of understanding the roots of depression.
If I were to compare The Bell Jar to contemporary literature, perhaps The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie comes closest. In telling of the restricted situation Nigerian women find themselves in now, socially and politically, it is akin to Plath’s rendering of the predicament of white women in 1950s in the US. Plath is held in rightful renown and her story resonates today.