Eleanor Bergstein and Sylvia Plath -- Part 9

This post continues from Part 1,  Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

You can select all articles at once by clicking on the Sylvia Plath label (tag) in this blog's right margin.

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In Part 8, I argued that Baby Houseman displayed the following indications of suffering from manic-depressive (aka bipolar) disorder, Type 2.

* Her parents perceived that she was a danger to herself.

* She was perceived as intending "to change the world".

* She intended to read a lot of thick, serious books during her vacation.

* Her appetite was sometimes voracious.

* She remained mostly alone during her vacation's first week.

* She chased after Johnny Castle in an bold manner.

I wrote that Part 8 two months ago. Before I wrote this concluding Part 9, I wanted to develop the idea that Baby's conduct in the movie Dirty Dancing is largely unethical. Today I completed a two-part series (Part 1, Part 2) on that subject, and so now I will use that idea to elaborate my argument about Baby's disorder.

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In my Part 6 about Sylvia Plath, I provided the following video explanation done by Dr. Manuel Astruc, a psychiatrist specializing in mood disorders. Watching this video explanation again would be a good preparation for your reading my following discussion.

Manic-depressive disorder commonly develops at about Baby's age, which is 17 years old. At around this same age, normal adolescents begin to rebel against social conventions and parental controls and also to act more sexually. Therefore it's difficult to distinguish the disorder from normal adolescent development.

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One good indication of the disorder is the recurrence of depressive episodes. In the movie Dirty Dancing we never see Baby suffering from depression. If we study the story's chronology, however, we can determine that the story has a blank gap from Sunday, August 11, through Saturday, August 17. On the evening of Sunday, August 18, Baby is walking alone through a woods. She sees Johnny Castle and follows him boldly. In order to continue following Johnny, Baby boldly grabs a watermelon out of Billy Kostecki's hands.

The fact that Baby was walking alone on that Sunday indicates that she has been generally alone during the previous days and perhaps has been suffering a depressive episode.

On Sunday evening, however, this alone young woman is acting quite boldly. The contrast between several days of depression and an evening of bold action indicates that the movie is showing her mood swing up into a manic episode, which will continue through the following days that we see in the movie,

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Although adolescents' behavior changes as they become more independent during their late teens, each individual maintains his or her normal personality. For example, an individual who was extroverted at age 13 will still be about as extroverted at age 19 -- or introverted or risky or careful or funny or serious or whatever other personality trait might be considered.

When an adolescent develops a mood disorder, however, there are episodes when that particular person's behavior goes outside his or her normal range.

Baby's normal behavior is sedentary, self-controlled and bookish. People who knew her for many years would be surprised to see her acting in the energetic, spontaneous and emotional manner that is displayed in the "Wipe Out" scene.

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Baby was perceived to be a reliably honest person, but in the following (largely deleted) scene, she acts uncharacteristically in a deceitful, manipulative manner.

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For me, however, the most important indication of Baby's mood disorder is her unethical behavior in her sexual seduction of Johnny Castle.

Adolescents rebelling normally will criticize, for example, their parents for supposedly being hypocrites. When Baby criticizes her father in the following scene, she is acting like a normal, bratty, nonsensical, 17-year-old girl who is rebelling from her father.

When she sexually seduced Johnny, however, she was potentially causing him a lot of trouble in order to enjoy personal benefits. Her reckless, selfish exploitation of Johnny was outside her normal character, which was to be thoughtful, ethical and self-sacrificing in relation to other people.

Whereas Baby's rebellion against her father was motivated largely by a normal drive to become independent from his parental control, she had no such need to cause turmoil in her relationship with Johnny, who intended to terminate his relationship with her after the Sheldrake performance.

Of course, Baby was motivated by her sexual desire for Johnny, but I nevertheless judge that the deceitfulness, recklessness and selfishness of her actions went far beyond her normal character.

Baby was in a manic phase from the evening of Sunday, August 18 (the watermelon scene), through the morning of Saturday, August 31 (the "Love is Strange" scene).

Then Baby was in a rather normal mood phase until the end of the movie.

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Sylvia Plath -- in her novel The Bell Jar -- described how she herself (the novel's heroine Esther Greenwood) had changed from a prim, scholarship-winning student into a sexually reckless, self-sabotaging fool during one summer of her late teens.

I speculate that Plath's personal life and novel interested Eleanor Bergstein from the early 1970s. Baby Houseman is not derived directly from Esther Greenwood, nor is Dirty Dancing derived directly from The Bell Jar. However, I think that Plath planted some literary seeds into Bergstein's mind.

Esther and Baby both are bookish young women -- about seventeen years old -- who go uncharacteristically crazy during a few summer weeks away from home. This is a story that is told often by many writers, but I think that Bergstein was influenced somewhat specifically by Plath.

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This post concludes my series about Sylvia Plath.