HOLLYWOOD – Famed action star and feminist Steven Seagal presents Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar in Steven Seagal’s Feminist Book Club.
Hi everyone. Steven Seagal here, star of On Deadly Ground and Machete.
One of my best friends in the film industry, Woody Allen, once said some harsh words about Sylvia Plath in his wonderful film Annie Hall: ‘interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality’.
Although he was spot on about her posthumous reputation, Plath is an astonishingly vibrant novelist and her first and only novel is a touchstone roman à clef for the feminist movement.
Published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, the book tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a young woman who is trying to make her way in New York city at the time leading up to the Rosenberg executions. An independent woman, she struggles with her career and at the same time her mental problems, depression and a feeling of being trapped under ‘the bell jar’ of the title. She is helped or hindered by psychiatrists, friends and her mother, but finally resorts to electric shock therapy which we are led to believe has helped in some way to lift the bell jar and allow her to breathe.
Although it is almost impossible to disentangle this book from the Plath’s suicide which shortly followed, it must be remembered that there is a lot of wit here, as well as an indictment of the stifling post-war American consensus. Patriarchy takes something of a battering, especially in the figure of the self-satisfied psychiatrist Dr. Gordon. However, that said, no one else gets a battering and -although this risks becoming a refrain – I for one would have liked to have had a few fight scenes, especially in the hospital towards the end. It’s one thing kicking against the pricks but how about kicking some of them in the pricks.
So, to sum up:
Feminism: 8
Martial Arts: 2
For a total of: 5