The Bell Jar

The first time I read this was in high school. The only thing I remembered about it was the bloody sex scene--which terrified me. Now, many -- many years later I've reread it. I kept waiting for that scene, and as I got to the end of the book, I began to think I had mixed this book up with some other book, because shouldn't it have happened early on? Well, it is in this book, and while unpleasant for the narrator, it is on some level, humorous. Actually, a lot of the book is rather funny, I had forgotten that. The various ways she contemplates killing herself is, despite the horror of what she is doing, quite hilarious. Sylvia Plath's novel is an amazing balancing act between comedy and tragedy and well worth reading. It is worth show more emphasizing that what may seem trivial or laughable to most people, looks very different from inside the "bell jar" where everything is distorted and confining. Plath manages to convey this very well. show less

Sylvia's semi-autobiographical novel comes across to me like a time capsule for another era. In that time it seemed women were corraled into a superficial appearance of independence and intelligence. As Plath's main character seems to get lost in the struggle between that artificial world and her own spirited if unformed individual direction I find it difficult to connect with her, but also sympathetic for her accident of placement in time while also enjoying a story artfully told.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Genre: Roman à clef

How do you rate a book that you liked and didn't like too? A book that doesn't leave you even after you turn the last page, and yet a book that you don't think you can read again? A book that is as intellectually stimulating as it is emotionally exhausting? Honest answer: I don't know.

As Sylvia Plath's only published novel, The Bell Jar has been in my TBR since a long time. Especially as I'm not much into poetry, this book seemed to be a great way of knowing the troubled poet intimately. I'm glad that I waited all this time before attempting the book because I wouldn't have been able to appreciate the dark beauty of this painful story in my younger years.

Esther Greenwood, the leading show more character of this semi-autobiographical novel masquerading as a fictional bildungsroman, is an intelligent college student with dreams of becoming a poet. After being selected for a summer internship at a women's magazine, her mind slowly start unravelling and she struggles with her identity, her place in the world and the meaning of her life. The book unveils her slow, steady descent into the dark pit of mental chaos, where everyone and everything seems hopeless and the only solution seems to be an escape from life.

The bell jar is something we have all seen in our school labs, an inverted glass jar generally used to display some scientific object. For Esther, the bell jar symbolizes a kind of entrapment by her mental struggles. It's like her mind is enclosed by a bell jar. She can view the world from inside her jar, but she can't escape it. At the same time, people can view her through her bell jar but cannot touch her, and I don't mean touch in the physical sense. There is always a barrier between her and others, and she can't find a way out of this invisible cage.

Considering the fact that Sylvia Plath herself struggled with psychological ailments in her adult life, there is bound to be a big question mark over how much of this book is just fiction and how much is an indication of the ghosts in her mind. Add to this the fact that she finally succeeded in her attempt to commit suicide a month after this novel was published, and you become even more uncertain of the hazy boundary between fact and fiction. But no matter what the truth of the matter is, there is no denying the fact that Plath captures the pandemonium of a suffering mind perfectly. As a reader, I just felt helpless because I could see the path of self-destruction that the protagonist was on, but I couldn't do anything about it.

The Bell Jar is a book that has left me with deep thoughts and no answers. With the topic it covers, there is no way I can say that I "enjoyed" this book, and yet I couldn't help but continue reading it. I'm feeling as muddled as its protagonist because I'm at sixes and sevens about whether to recommend this book or not. So let me just leave this review without a rating, and without an open recommendation. It's a book not meant for everyone, but for those who do read it, it's a book that will not leave you easily.

My rating: No idea.

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Plath has created a wonderfully written story of a young woman's descent in the pit, the absolute pit, of depression and madness, and her painful recovery. The book is presented as the slow warping of Esther's point of view into something seriously skewed. Also very, very funny. Interesting note: Plath didn't like this book.

The Bell Jar is a hard book to read. In reading it, I felt like I was trapped in Esther's bell jar myself. Her words, so achingly real--almost certainly related to the book's semi-autobiographical nature--evoke the struggles of not only women but also any overachiever and any loner. Throughout the novel, we see how the bell jar encaged Esther and we see how slowly, very slowly, she lifts it off of herself.

I think the reason I appreciated this book so much is that the problems Esther faced are problems I've faced, and although I'm better than Esther, I've felt so low sometimes I felt like breaking. She showed me that she wasn't crazy; there was nothing wrong with her besides these social circumstances that she just couldn't cope with, show more try as she might. I love reading books where I feel like the narrator expresses my thoughts in a more tangible and eloquent way (and Plath can write!) The only reason it wasn't perfect for me--although this rating may change upon more reflection--was that mental illness is, well, pretty boring. The repeated suicide attempts and the monotony of life in the asylums are not particularly gripping, but I understand their necessity to the story.

I just wish I could read this story with Esther walking into her final interview with the psychiatrists and walking out of the bell jar, however, it is impossible to read that last page and then not remember Plath's suicide shortly after this book's publication. Because of this knowledge, instead of ending with a sense of hope, the book ends with the feeling that bell jar is forever, it always exists, floating right above our heads, ready to collapse upon us again. show less

An astonishing book in all sorts of ways, tipping preconceptions about gender, sexuality, mental health, and all sorts of other things into Boston Harbour with relentless determination. But also astonishing in the way it demonstrates just how much the world has moved on in the last sixty or seventy years (in no small part thanks to books like this). The description of the month Esther spends as a guest editor (=student intern) on a women's magazine reads like surreal social satire to us now, a description of a privileged world of show-kitchens, celebrity poets and haute couture millinery we can't even begin to take seriously, but of course it's directly based on Plath's experience at Mademoiselle in summer 1953.

With the perspective of show more half a century, a lot of the doors Plath was kicking against are standing wide open (but not all: growing up is still just as challenging as it always was, and there are still lots of difficult areas around mental health), and it's perhaps rather easier than it was in the early sixties to take exception to her narrator's very entitled, middle-class way of looking at the world. Although there were people who were aware of it even then: in her biographical note to this edition, Lois Ames quotes an evaluation of Plath's application for a grant from a literary foundation, where the assessor points out that Plath is exactly the sort of person who always wins scholarships and bursaries and it wouldn't do any harm to give one to somebody else for a change.

What doesn't change, and what will always make this a book you should read, is the radical way Plath's language cuts through to the absurdity of the world around her. Every image she deploys is even more precise and unexpected than the one before it, and you keep having to stop and ask yourself whether you really heard it right. show less

And what did you do today, my darling?

Fol de rol. I had such a rewarding day, my darling.

I only made breakfast for you and then breakfast for the children; and did the washing up. Dressed the children and started rinsing all the diapers; started a separate laundry tub for all the clothes that weren't diapers. Hung all the clothes on the line; and by then the baby was hungry again, so I started preparing something for him. And then the girl child came in muddy and mad from the garden, so in between making lunch for them both, I gave her a quick bath and change of clothes; then went out to bring in the laundry from the line, and hung a separate line of the bedsheets and linens I had a quick chance to do; I started the ironing of course, show more while the children took a brief nap, and then I remembered I hadn't eaten a thing since dinner the night before, so I grabbed a piece of cheese and tried a quick tea; which only meant that just as the water came to a boil and I was swallowing my dry meal, the girl child woke up and started teasing the baby, and then all hell erupted, because I just couldn't cope anymore. But of course, I had to, because the ironing was still all over the kitchen, and the kids wanted a quick snack AGAIN. (I swear they must have worms), and I had to hustle to get dinner on the table, knowing you'd be home soon. At which point, I realized I had to run to the shops to get something for dinner, and of course it only took the wink of 40 minutes to get the children dressed and rounded up and sufficiently quiet to run to the shops with them, where I bought a couple of chops for dinner, and came home to prepare dinner, and bathe and feed the kiddos before bed, so you and I could have a nice quiet evening, my darling. Oh, and I baked you a cake, my darling. But, I have to admit to doing something so shameful, I'm afraid to voice it. On the way to the shops, I stopped at the library. And dammit ... we're sleeping on a bare mattress tonight, my darling, because the bed linens are still out on the line, and now that the dew has fallen, they'll be damp, and oh, my darling, may I whip you up a quick martini. It looks like you had a trying day, working out that poem of yours.

It was all so easy for her, and it would have been a fine day, if only she didn't have a mind.

The Bell Jar does not represent for me the cri de coeur that it did when I was 15; nor does it approach that melancholic angst that occurred when I was cool and hip and 19, and we all discussed it ad infinitum late into the night in our coffeehouses and 3rd story walk ups ... but just the remembrance of those times brings back traumatic stress of what those times meant to generations of women.

We understood Sylvia Plath. We lived in the aftermath of her life and death. We were close enough to the fire, that though we were not burned, many of us were certainly singed.

Our mothers, and aunts, and older sisters were Sylvia Plath. Caught in a cat's cradle of apron strings and laundry days, whistling while they worked, many of them went stark raving mad. Neither convention nor tradition was working anymore for at least half of the population; both convention and tradition were giving rise to one of the worst mental health crises known before or since. Literally and figuratively women were jumping out of windows in outsized numbers, in a sometimes hopeless, sometimes hopeful attempt to take flight.

That is Sylvia Plath's story from within the bell jar.

There could be no lifting of the lid, in the end, for her.

The only choice that seemed to be left to her:

to pull it down even tighter, suck out all the air, and give in. show less