The Bell Jar (original 1963; edition 2006)

I read this book instead of studying for finals in my second semester of college. Which was a good idea, I think.

I love Esther's cynical, and sometimes derisive, attitude toward the world. In her eloquence, she makes everyone around her appear insane, which might very well be the case.

"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." ( )

Not as bad as I feared, but I don't know that I'd ever reread it, and I still can't forgive Sylvia Plath for her poetry, in particular "You're". "My little loaf" indeed. Blegh. ( )

I read Bell Jar because I wanted to know more about suicide, especially the path that leads to it. The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath’s life in the summer and autumn of 1953 (college time), addressing her initial on-set of depression and her first major suicide attempt. She ultimately ended her life by sticking her head in an oven while her two young children slept, one month after this book is released in January of 1963. (Gruesome. Somehow attacking the little veins in her wrist is too cruel, but sticking her head in the oven is acceptable. Her version of poetic justice perhaps.) With these facts in mind, I found myself reading this book honing in on her sadness, self-deprecation, inadequacies, and exhaustion. Before reading, I wondered if the book is her last cry for help or does it represent her ‘brain-dump’ before she proceeds with her plans.

For a book that should be sad, perhaps difficult to read/digest, the first portions flew by. I enjoyed the references to the 50’s (what is a pocketbook cover?), the beginnings of feminism, the ideals of the parents upon their children, marriage, perspective on sex and virginity. I found the writing to be honest, crisp, and direct, even though she jumped timelines as needed to address back stories. The later chapters were harder to process as the spiraling of this intelligent woman deepened – covering her shock treatments and institutionalization. I resonated with her writing style, ex: regarding the bad things in life: “But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”

I underlined numerous details about her disappointments, rather it is at herself, the people around her, the society then, the expectations upon the female sex, and wondered when/how do these add up to be too much. The book doesn’t attempt to explain. It’s just her facts, her view of her life, and the evaluation of herself. This book, when interpreted with a current mind set, may represent the struggle of women to fit in and define an equal say in this world (still a huge gap) . She hated the idea of serving men in any way (via her job), doesn’t want to become a floor mat and to be brainwashed because of marriage. I find she expressed a lot of strength in her convictions. After reading the book, I think she simply succumbed to her demons one day. Despite one’s life successes, rather in the home and/or career, the sadness dominates us. Then we cave in, especially when we think our death doesn’t mean anything to anyone.

Some Quotes:

On Success but feeling empty and not in her control:
“Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

Tired of the rat race at the age of 19:
“After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.”

On Physics – this made me smile as physics was the first science class I had to really study to understand:
“Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn’t stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.”

The view on women, as expressed by Mrs. Willard:
“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security. What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”
And Esther’s response:
“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

More on Feminism:
“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equals time and let s equal the total distance.”

Marriage and Feminism:
“This seemed like a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.”
“And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.”
“I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

In indication of much worse ahead, throwing her clothing away on her last night in New York:
“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

On Suicide, and the depth of it:
“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

On Death: Do all women whose fathers died early have deep laden issues?
“Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father’s death.
My mother hadn’t cried either. She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn’t have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen.
I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”

The Bell Jar – To be suffocating in it, selected references:
“I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
“But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” ( )

recommended for: young women, everybody who enjoys really good fiction

I first read this book when I was 19 and I loved it; it immediately became one of my favorite books, even though I went through a long bout of writers’ block that I attribute to my reading of it. I think that it’s a truly brilliant novel (and I really felt for Sylvia Plath when I found out that upon publication it got scathingly poor reviews). It’s hilarious and tragic and I so empathize with the protagonist. Like many first novels, it’s a thinly veiled biographical work. I know that a lot of people pick up this book because they are fascinated by Plath’s suicide, but I think that it stands on its own, even without any knowledge of the author. Incredibly well written story of a talented young women going through a mental breakdown. ( )

From The Book Wheel:

Considering how much I love the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, I’m pretty surprised by how long it has taken me to finally read The Bell Jar. I think it is because I have heard so much about it’s depressing nature that I was wary. How could such a depressing book be so wonderful? But since it is on my 2013 TBR Challenge list, Classics Club challenge and 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list, I finally read it. And now I know why it’s such a hit.

A semi-autobiographical book, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath tells the story of Esther Greenfield, a high achieving young woman who spirals downward into depression and insanity. What surprised me about this book is that I didn’t find it nearly as depressing as I expected it to be and was able to follow her rationalizations for her thoughts and actions. This is one of the reasons for the book’s long-term success, but experiencing it firsthand is a totally different ball game. It reminds me of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s book More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (she also wrote Prozac Nation), where the reader jumps headfirst down into the rabbit hole with the author.

Prior to reading this book, I had never really paid much attention to Sylvia Plath. I considered her an author that I would get to someday and finally, years later, I am reading her for the first time.

For the full review, click here. ( )