Eleanor Bergstein and Sylvia Plath -- Part 6

This post continues from Part 1,  Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

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Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar was published in the United Kingdom in 1963 but was not published in the USA until 1971.

Eleanor Bergstein's first novel, Advancing Paul Newman, was published in 1973, so Bergstein probably finished writing the manuscript during 1972. So, in the early 1970s, Bergstein was beginning to develop the story for her second novel.

In the early 1970s, two books about Plath were published.

* The Savage God, by A. Alvarez, published in 1972, was a book about artists (primarily poets) who committed suicide, and much of the book was about Plath.

* Sylvia Plath, by Eileen Aird, published in 1973, was the first book-length biography of Plath.

In this series of posts, I have been speculating that in the early 1970s Bergstein, the wife of poet Michael Goldman, was influenced by these books by and about Plath as she began writing her second novel. Because Bergstein abandoned that novel to write the screenplay for the movie It's My Turn, released in 1980, I can only speculate about that second novel. The screenplay, perhaps derived from the abandoned novel, was about a female mathematics professor.

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The books by and about Plath provided several possible themes.

The experience and treatment of mental illness

Plath and her character Esther Greenwood suffered so much from mental illness -- manic-depressive disorder -- that they were hospitalized.

Suicide

Plath and Greenwood tried repeatedly to commit suicide. Plath's friend Alvzarez wrote a book about artists (primarily poets) being suicidal.

The struggles of poets and other writers

Extraordinarily talented writers (e.g. Plath and her husband Ted Hughes) are inadequately appreciated and paid for their hard, enterprising work.

The disadvantages of women in relation to men

Plath got stuck giving birth, raising children and providing emotional support while her husband was free to devote himself to writing and to having sexual affairs with other women.

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Sylvia Plath's mental illness was manic-depressive (aka bipolar) disorder. This disorder is classified into two types.

Type 1 is more severe and includes psychosis. (See my previous post's videos of Samantha Adams.)

Type 2 is less severe and does not include psychosis.

In my previous post, I provided a series of videos made by Samantha Adams, who has been diagnosed with Type 1 (she prefers the term manic-depressive to the term to bipolar).

Although Plath was suicidal and so was hospitalized for her disorder, she was not (as far as I know) psychotic, and so she seems to have suffered from Type 2.

The symptoms of Type 2 manic-depressive disorder have been summarized as follows:

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Several of Bergstein's heroines in her novels and screenplays seem to suffer from Type 2. I will explain this impression of mine in my following post, especially in regard to the character Baby Houseman in the movie Dirty Dancing.

My explanation will focus on those characters' hypomania phases. I will write relatively little about the depression phases. The following videos explain hypomania.

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This article is continued in Part 7.