I have read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar about three times. I have also read The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren, an equal amount of times. I think prior to reading The Barbizon I did not entirely grasp the social context and period of history in which The Bell Jar is set. Sylvia Path lived at the Barbizon in the summer of 1953. The Bell Jar, borrows heavily from her own life. Esther Greenwood lives in The Amazon, a women’s hotel, with the other eleven girls who work as guest editors and with upper class girls training to be secretaries. In Bren’s book, The Barbizon she chronicles the experiences of such real life women and the hundred and thousands like them, who stayed at the hotel. More then the biography of a building, the book is an absorbing social history of labour and women’s rights in NYC. The story arc of the kind of women who stayed at the Barbizon from the 1930s-1970s to an extent mirrors my own. An independent minded young woman leaves her small country town and sets off to pursue her dream- she seeks her fortune in the big city. Except these large women’s hotels did provide that advantage of company of one’s own age. My own journey of moving to London to find work in the Film Industry, was a good deal more solitary in the beginning and is now populated with a wonderful community of friends that feel like family to me.
Did you know that the Unsinkable Molly Brown of the Titanic lived at The Barbizon? Contending with Flappers? Generations of women at different stages of the feminist movement rubbed shoulders at the Barbizon. The older generation would sit in the lobby downstairs chiding the young ones who went out the door. On the Corner of East Sixty-third Street and Lexington Avenue, a stage of films and novels, the Barbizon was a mainstay of society pages. Actresses like Grace Kelly and Liza Minnelli resided at the hotel in their formative years. It’s very existence is a reflection of the class and sexual politics of the twentieth century. Look no further then the boast of Malachy McCourt, brother of Frank McCourt of Angela’s Ashes fame. Malachy liked to boast that he had managed to get up the stairs of the Barbizon, to have his way with a resident, where no men were permitted. NYC once had more than a hundred hotels, in a time when living in a hotel was more of a possibility. Places like the Algonquin and the Carlyle- where President Kennedy kept an apartment. Most of these hotels were curiosities of long since reformed real estate and fire safety regulations- so long as guests did not have kitchens in their rooms, why not? Some such hotels opened in the 19th century, though most were built around the the time of the First World War. Living in a hotel is a novel experience that genuinely feels anachronistic. When travelling for work I have lived in Hotels. It is liberating and strange. I think one of my favourite facts about the Barbizon is that despite the redevelopment, behind a door on the fourth floor in this building- lies a portal to a different time. There are still women who came to reside at the Barbizon in the fifties and never left. Amongst the expensive redeveloped apartments, there are women who live on the fourth floor and pay around $113 dollars a month in rent. They have their original deal. That are provided with maid service two days a week, a front of desk staff to take her messages, and a private bricked terrace at the end of her hall.
A room of one’s own is indeed vital to any creative endeavour. You need to have control over your own time. The Book that I have just read for Rebel Book Club The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel reflects on how financial freedom exercates us from the mundaneness of pure survival. However, such freedom can only ultimately be obtained if we observe roughly five rules in how we think about money. One. Know what is enough. Two. Don’t be greedy. Three. Don’t compare yourself to Others. Four. Frugality Pays. Five. Small consistent gains pay off in the long run. I think that women’s endeavours for financial freedom and inexorably linked to agency in our own lives and how we get to spend our time. The greatest takeaway for me from the Psychology of Money is;
The Ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend that money pays.-P81, The Psychology of Money
I think that Sylvia has a deeply witty, observant sense of humour born out of her struggle with mental illness. I think that it must have been incredibly difficult to be that bright and to live within those societal expectations with such a narrow list of ways in which to make money and the expectation that she wouldn’t work after marriage. I am sympathetic to how such boundaries could drive someone to despair. Last year, I visited Jane Austen’s cottage where she lived with her mother and her sister before tragically dying at he age of 41. Chawton village was tiny. The Austen’s were beholden to the charity of her brother Edward. Who was adopted by Thomas and Elizabeth Knight and eventually inherited their estates at Godmersham, Kent, Chawton and Hampshire. Living in Chawton in the 19th century must have been deafeningly quiet. My friend and I reflected on how living one day at a time like that…and when your only possible way out was marriage- must have been difficult and desperately claustrophobic. There were references in Jane Austen’s letters to occasionally indulging in a drop of Laudanum in her evening tea. I don’t blame her. May I also add that Jane Austen was an excellent maker and sewer- indeed the neatest of the party.
Continuing in a feminist lease, although slightly off topic, a quote from Letters to Change The World: Pankhurst to Orwell has my soul singing.
To be militant in some way or other is, however a moral obligation. It is a duty which every woman will owe to her own conscience and self respect, to other women who are less fortunate than herself, and to all those who are to come after her. -Emmeline Pankhurst