Vol. 6, Issue 2, Part C (2024)

In the 1950s, Albert Ellis asserted that depression is the outcome of the ideal ‘should’ and ‘musts’ a person is supposed to adhere to in a society. A depressed person encounters an incessant ‘societal gaze’ adjuring her/him to fit into the ableist world. Though not in its prevalent form but ‘depression’ has always been a curious subject of inquiry among academicians, historians, philosophers and men of medicine. Earlier known as ‘melancholia’, depression’s first mention can be traced in Second Millennium B.C. Mesopotamian texts. In its primal speculations depression was deemed to be demonic possession and was cured by the priests. From the times of Aristotle, it had been associated with intellect and creativity. The World Health Organization claims that more than 264 million people are depressed worldwide, still, we have not been much vocal about depression. It took a lot of struggles on the part of ‘depression’ to get the recognition of a disability. Unlike today, in disability studies too, depression was submerged under the bipolar disorder. But it is interesting to note that literary texts have articulated depression from its initial days and explored almost all the vistas even when it was not considered problematic by the world.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was probably the primordial representation of depression in a literary text. Even if not in its outright sense but still Goethe’s novella has touched many aspects of depression. It was decades ago the publication of Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Green’s Looking for Alaska, Warga’s My Heart and Other Black Holes, Hopkins’ Impulse, and Khorram’s Darius the Great is Not Okay that Sylvia Plath gave the world an exceptional literary gem on depression in the form of her renowned novel The Bell Jar (1963). The novel takes its readers on a journey to understand how Esther, the protagonist, suffers while dealing with depression. Though writing in 1961, Plath has unearthed the ‘mirage of normalcy’. This paper is an attempt to disclose how dauntlessly Plath’s protagonist turns society’s gaze back on itself and points out how much courage it takes on the part of a disabled person to survive in a world of ‘non-disabled’ people.