Extremely beautiful and powerfully poignant. The Bell Jar is the autobiographical story of a young girl with Esther's future (but shouldn't we say Sylvia?). The young winner of a literary talent competition discovers New York, its parties, demands, and futility.
But at the same time, Esther becomes aware of her cruel maladjustment. Her personality cracks through twists and turns and lets us glimpse the drama on her return home. She is carried away by a furious melancholy, and her character crumbles. Unable to get up, she catches herself in the frightening whirlwind of the psychiatric world.
A tour de force that this novel and one feels well behind Sylvia Plath's poetic soul renders with great accuracy the runaway of her thoughts, their confusions, and the loss of her momentum. It's very well written but accurate, and it is impressive how the language conveys Esther's mood and progression into madness. There are no big flights, no wrong notes; it's both testimony and almost a farewell letter.

Addictive Yet Haunting

This book actually leaves me speechless. The prose. The storytelling. The metaphors.

And I found myself holding my breath.

The Bell Jar reads like a very interesting diary. It feels real – as though you are experiencing the story.

One of the reasons that it feels real is that the story is real. Sylvia Plath is the main character, Esther.

Which makes this work all the more chilling.

The Bell Jar centers on Esther Greenwood, a bright college student in 1953. She wins a trip to New York where she encounters an entirely new set of experiences and describes the other women as almost an entirely new species.

Esther is an imperfect character but entirely relatable. She talks about being unsure how and when to tip, describing how the bellhop carried her bag to her room and proceeded to explain about hot and cold water, waiting for a tip.

When Esther returns home, she is limited by her economics and the expectations that society has of her gender. She doesn’t want to just become some man’s wife. She becomes lost, adrift, and begins her mental health journey.

The metaphor of the Bell Jar, life being shocking. That is a metaphor that I would like to sit with for a while.

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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***Accurate representation of mental health/major clinical depression***


I was just watching the character like a silent spectator as if I was her shadow following her everywhere and her every thought.

She didn't let me think about anything else but just observe her and let me get more involved in what she was getting into.

I was the one struggling here to actually let her know I was there while she was just struggling trying hard to accept and come out of what she was going through.

Help, treatment, support and care she got and she was accepting it but me and her, we knew it wasn't easy.

She's someone you want to love but she's someone you would love to not like. She was very judgemental at times and negative and unapologetic but I just had to be there for her.

Mental health discussion
Depression.
Suicidal thoughts.
Suicide attempts.
Painful treatments (during those times).

These were represented so well.
An almost autobiographical fiction of the author.

I liked how it ended

Review Are those with depression and cultural icons to be excused moral standards? I had a PM slagging me off completely about this review. Essentially it came down to how dare I criticise a feminist cultural icon who suffered from mental illness and accuse her of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. And if she really was why has no one else pointed it out? That I am biased as fuck etc. Actually others have pointed it out. That was the point of my review, separating the artist from their work. But now it is also, why are differing views not allowed?

I realise that we are living in the times where belief and feelings are considered much more important than science and facts, where democratic voting is wrong and illegal if the 'wrong party' (US) or Brexit or Scottish Independence (UK) don't go the way that people want. And that any dissension results in deplatforming, cancelling or immense campaigns of hatred against academic and public figures. Is this the right way to go? No dissension, no debate, facts are wrong if they don't fit feelings, and cultural icons for one movement or another can do no wrong?
__________

How do we separate the artist from their art if we blithely don't notice it and then excuse them with saying it was a product of their times?

It often wasn't. Dickens is excused his anti-Semitism but Disraeli was a two-time Prime Minister and was born Jewish. Oscar Wilde despite his poem in Reading Jail angry at being castigated for being a homosexual, still threw himself behind the anti-Dreyfusards who blamed Drefus for a murder he didn't commit but was blamed because he was Jewish. He was in the minority in the UK and lost his best friend over this. And then you have Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London - the White supremacist who advocated genocide of the 'lesser races' but is a school favourite - and all the other racist, anti-Semitic often misogynist authors whose art is praised and characters white-washed ('white' washed indeed!)  

With Plath, whose book The Bell Jar I read in my teens, when I read this article today, July 6th, 2022, it absolutely shocked me The Oxford Blue How could I not have noticed or forgotten? Am I so inured and hardened to White supremacist thinking - everyone else is 'other', and when I read I am reading as if was/am just white not 'other' Jews can be white or can be other, depends on the views of the writer, not me, that when reading a much-lauded 'great' author my eyes are blinded?

*"[W]e cannot discuss Sylvia Plath without approaching the subject of her blatant racism and disrespect for Black people and Jewish people."

*"Her poems crassly compare her suffering to that of the Holocaust and beyond her fiction, Plath’s diaries dating back to her high school years show a history of hateful and disrespectful white supremacist thinking."

*"The viciousness of her comments about Jewish and Black people and the insensitive comparisons of her own struggles to those of the victims of the Holocaust show her to be completely out of touch with the era of progressive and civil rights activism" in which she lived and obviously didn't agree with.

As another article says, you cannot understand Plath if you don't understand her very Germanic upbringing by the German father she loved and whose death she was never able to get over. In her diary, in 1958, she wrote of her father, "He … heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home."

Or maybe I didn't notice because I only read The Bell Jar and not Plath's poetry, I certainly would have picked it up from

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak
I thought every German was you. And the language obscene.
An Engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a jew.
A jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen
I began to talk like a jew
I think I may well be a jew.

I don't say I wouldn't read these authors or even enjoy their works - I love Oscar Wilde and certain Roald Dahl books - but I think knowing who an author was, the kind of views they held obviously informs their works, and that is important even if I decide to separate art from the artist.

When I was in high school, I was absolutely convinced that The Bell Jar was meant to be my favorite book of all time. The aesthetic of the "sad girl" "female manipulator" book appealed to me even then, before TikTok made it a trend. I never ended up actually reading it at the time, thanks to my old aversion to the classics, which I'm grateful for. I know that teen me would've taken all the wrong things about this story to heart, romanticized the fuck out of it, and I probably turned out 1000% more insufferable than I am right now (which is still plenty insufferable, don't worry. I mean, shit, I'm writing this and listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell at the same time. I'm a nuisance, as I was always meant to be).

Anyway. Fast forward, I'm graduating from college in two short weeks and I figured that if there ever was a time to read this finally, now would be it. The Bell Jar is supposedly one of THE books for every girlie in her twenties, and time may have passed but I still have a giant soft spot for reading about women vs the void. So here we are.

I don't think anything I have to say here that's going to come across as particularly outlandish. There's not really much I have to say at all, hence the three star. The writing is gorgeous, as I assumed it would be. Plath was obviously skilled with imagery and capable of creating poetry out of anything. I also found it incredibly interesting to read the book that came before so many of the ones I love now, and see what might've been used as inspiration. Lastly, I am glad I got to find all the famous quotes/scenes I've heard over the years within their context. Having the chance to underline "I am I am I am" in my dinky little paperback was satisfying, not gonna lie.

Similarly, I don't have any criticisms with any real backing. All I know is I started to rapidly lose interest in the second half and felt nothing but disillusionment by the end. Maybe that's the intended effect. Maybe if I were to analyze this like its homework I'd be able to come up with something other than 'I neither liked nor disliked it' as my final thought. But unfortunately, I read it for funsies, that was the first thing that shot through my head when I shut the book, and so far nothing else has followed.

I can appreciate this novel as a piece of good writing and an important part of sad bitch history, but if not for the fact that it is an established piece of literature I really wouldn't be giving it a second thought--or a review, for that matter.

I hated almost everything about this book.

There are 2 good quotes but so much racism, fatphobia and I apparently DNFed it before the homophobia started. I don't get the hype at all.

It made it to my worst books of 2024: https://youtu.be/8-WrZCY8qfo?si=GOv_n...

(Book 433 from 1001 books) - Victoria Lucas = The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath.

Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical, with the names of places and people changed.

The book is often regarded as a roman a clef since the protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's own experiences with what may have been clinical depression or bipolar II disorder. Plath died by suicide a month after its first UK publication.

The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, in accordance with the wishes of both Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and her mother. The novel has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. The novel, though dark, is often read in high school English classes.

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «حباب شیشه»؛ «شیشه»؛ نویسنده: سیلویا پلات (نشر باغ)؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سوم ماه سپتامبر سال 2006میلادی

عنوان: شیشه؛ عنوان دیگر حباب شیشه؛ نویسنده: سیلویا پلات (پلت)؛ مترجم: گلی امامی؛ تهران، نیل، 1352؛ در 229ص؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، نقش و نگار، سال 1381؛ در 230ص؛ شابک 9646235581؛ با عنوان: حباب شیشه؛ تهران، باغ نو، 1384؛ در 225ص؛ شابک 9647425295؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده امریکا - سده 20م

داستان دختری به نام «استر گرینوود» شیفته‌ ی پسری به نام «بادی» می‌شود؛ با گذشت زمان «استر» درمی‌یابد که او هیچ شباهتی به همسر ایده‌ آل او ندارد و ناگزیر از او جدا می‌شود؛ در این هنگام، «استر» به بیماری روانی دچار و دست به خودکشی می‌زند، حال آن که مادرش او را از مرگ نجات می‌دهد و «استر» در آسایشگاه روانی بستری می‌گردد و.....؛ «حباب شیشه» رمان شبه‌ زندگی‌نامه‌ ای اثر «سیلویا پلات» شاعر «آمریکایی» است، که در سال 1963میلادی منتشر شد، و تنها رمان ایشان به شمار می‌رود؛ «سیلویا پلات» این اثر را با نام مستعار «ویکتوریا لوکاس» منتشر، و یک ماه پس از آن خودکشی کردند؛ «حباب شیشه» شباهت بسیاری با زندگی واقعی «سیلویا پلات» دارد، و چنین به نظر می‌رسد که تنها اسامی شخصیت‌ها و مکان‌ها تغییر کرده‌ اند؛ «سیلویا پلات» در این شاهکار تحسین شده و جاودان، با چنان ظرافتی خوانشگر را به دنیای ذهنی در حال نابودی «استر» میبرد، که جنون و دیوانگی این شخصیت، کاملا ملموس و حتی منطقی و عقلانی جلوه میکند؛ رمان «حباب شیشه»، کاوشی ژرف، در تاریکترین و مخوفترین گوشه و کنارهای ذهن بشر است، و پیروزی شگرف و اثر کلاسیکی جاودان به شمار میآید، اثر به زبان‌های بسیاری ترجمه شده و با وجود درونمایه ی تیره‌ اش در دبیرستان‌های کشورهای انگلیسی‌ زبان به عنوان متن درسی استفاده می‌شود...؛

از سیلویا پلات پنج دفتر شعر برجای مانده است: «بچه غول (1960میلادی)»؛ «کلوسوس و اشعار دیگر (1962میلادی)»؛ «آریل (1965میلادی)»؛ «گذر از آب (1971میلادی)»؛ «درختان زمستانی (1972میلادی)»؛ «مجموعه اشعار (1981میلادی)»؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 07/08/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 16/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

i did not know that if you're mentally ill you're allowed to be mean and annoying. i wish i had done things differently.

i do get why this is a classic. some reasons it is, in order of niceness to not niceness:
-it is very beautifully written
-that fig paragraph is probably one of the best passages on what it is to be a mentally ill young woman ever brought into this world
-it is, in many ways, ahead of its time
-sylvia plath has the kind of compelling story that would have sealed her canonical fate whether she was talented or not.
-and:

this is often, as it was in my case, assigned reading for teenage girls, the people most likely to be willing to undergo the kind of self-centering it would take to think most of what's depicted in this book is an okay or acceptable way to be.

when i first read this, i liked it. i was 18, it should be noted, and a senior in high school fresh off the then-worst year of my life. (it has since been soundly defeated.) anyway, i didn't know classic fiction could be like this: written by a woman, fresh and relatable, about someone like me.

that wasn't my experience upon reread.

in the intervening years, i've read some of plath's poetry in other classes, and found it a little gaudy and self-indulgent for my taste. (you can yell at me if you want to but i don't think either of those are untrue. or even really insults.) so i always wondered if the bell jar would hold up if i read it again.

the answer: no, but not for any reason i expected!

this is racist and homophobic as f*ck. it's genuinely disturbing. this was written in the second half of the 20th century, in the midst of the civil rights movement. the march on washington took place in the same year as this book's publication. among legitimate intellectual and/or progressive circles of the time, this manner of thinking is grotesquely out of line.

it seems especially absurd in the face of plath's dogged dedication to the Rights Of Women. feminism is important, of course, but reading about how the greatest social issue in plath's eyes (or the eyes of plath's self-insert protagonist) was women being able to be writers and editors with as much ease as they could be secretaries (as opposed to the several editors and writers there were) is kind of insane. obviously employment access is crucial, but the lack of self-awareness is apparent, no?

this also has two of my least favorite clichéd traits of mental health depiction:
1) a protagonist that blames everyone else for their mental illness, and
2) Grand Gestures Of Depression.

baby, i wish my mental illness included me doing things like whimsically throwing shirts at the city of new york while my hair blew in the wind. it's usually a lot more of me laying in bed and watching tiktoks.

i guess that doesn't fit the seminal work criteria.

in short: i love unlikable protagonists. it's just that i hated this one.

bottom line: we all have an unpopular opinion, right? a beloved book we hate? let me have this one in peace.

--------------------
currently-reading updates

rereading this on the beach so i can be the edgiest girl there

Sylvia Plath's ability to navigate such a complicated topic and also serve us a prose that is so vivid and intense will never fail to amaze me.

it was fine

her writing style is lovely and i really felt the whole ‘descending into madness’ was reflecting in the structure, but, i was a bit bored throughout apart from a few intense moments sprinkled along the way

i did see the feminist undertones which is nice from a book written in the 60s?? but that also meant the racism was rampant and not pleasant to read.

overall, i think it’s overhyped by tiktok but one of the better “classics” i’ve read

Unlike a lot of people, I wasn't required to read The Bell Jar in school. It's one of the most influential and recognizable novels of modern American literature, and so I figured it was about time I read it. And I loved it.

Now, I might be a bit in love with it mostly because I listened to the audiobook narrated by the fantastic Maggie Gyllenhaal. (Seriously, her voice is perfect for Esther's dark & alluring narrative). Regardless of Gyllenhaal's narrative prowess, I thought the story was engaging and compelling in ways I didn't expect.

I knew it was going to be depressing, dealing with a young girl's mental breakdown. However, the writing was so lush—reminiscent of Fitzgerald's in Gatsby—and poetic (no surprise since Plath was also a poet). And the story, while listless, never lacked in interesting moments. Esther sort of flits from locale to locale and we get to see inside her head through it all. I loved her wry and judgmental voice. She's not really likeable, but you're able to sympathize her, maybe because she's so manipulative. Either way, I was a big fan of this one. I'd love to read it in print form to see how my experience differs from listening to it. But if you're curious about this one like I was, I can highly, highly recommend it on audio.

n  Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it!

t-Djuna Barnes, Nightwoodn

I’ve been side-eyeing this book for a very long time, much as I warily circle any piece of work whose chosen topics happen to lie close to deeply personal experiences of mine. It’s difficult to tell what I fear more from these bundles of paper and ink. The chance of severe disappointment? The possibility of debilitating resonance? Either one would weigh much too heavily on my sensibilities and result in time lost to regaining equilibrium.

Not that I grate against having to go through such measures to regain normal functioning in society, mind you. The fact that I have found such measures is a matter that I treasure greatly. It’s just that I would prefer to be careful with the reading material from the start, a methodology which helps me funnel the eventual after-effects into something rewarding with a quick recovery time. This review, for example.

What I found in this book was not what I had been expecting. I didn’t even like it at first, the flat and formless prose bleating mundanities and rarely breaking out into the creative bents of lurid glory that I had assumed would compose the entirety. My opinion changed as I went on, as it often does, and I have come to see this straightforward dropping of facts and opinions as a boon, a mark of brilliance almost when it comes to presenting content such as this.

For mental illness continues to have a horrid stigma in this society of ours, and it was a mere few years ago that one of my friends was forcefully taken away from a dorm room by a cop to a ‘psychiatric boot camp’, which lasted for a week and ended with her furious and shaken and landed with a bill for $8,000. All for having mentioned to her university granted and 'confidential' therapist that she had considered killing herself. As she discussed the events leading up to it, I saw the similarities between her thoughts and mine, and thought about how easily I could have found myself in the same horrible situation.

I didn’t realize it then, but this event would play a major role in my eventual dropping out of college, as well as propel me on my way to find my own method of coping with life. For I am defiantly stubborn when it comes to justifying my existence, and refuse to let anyone or anything force me on a path of ‘fixing’ me. In choosing that, I have been much more fortunate than Esther Greenwood, as I have had the time and the space to come to conclusions about my own particular brand of troubles as a female bred for academic success, and how to best deal with them. How life is full of countless little dissatisfactions, and how the mind is so wonderful at subconsciously accumulating each and every one, and how splintered it can become when it is led to believe that happiness is found one way, and then another, as it is betrayed again, and again, and again. How practical one can be in the face of all this, right alongside the absurd choices that rail against every measure of ‘practicality’ defined by everyone and everything around you that simply aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

n  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 losing 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.n

It is all too easy to think oneself into a box of ‘if I just did this everything would be alright’ and ‘why can’t I do all this like everyone else is’ and ‘oh I can’t do that because it costs money/wastes time/breaks off the path that is supposed to work for all’. It is all too easy to subconsciously realize how all these ‘proper’ pathways have failed and have led to the simple urge to end it all, when one can see all too clearly how any effort to prolong anything 'proper' is destined for failure. The hard part is figuring out exactly what you want and need. The frontier of the unknown is whether you will be given the means to achieve it.

I promised myself a long time ago that when it came to choosing whether to go back to the path that was guaranteed to end in me jumping off a bridge, or to live, I would choose the latter. Every single time. It’s required breaking off a lot of social connections, it’s required sitting down on random sidewalk curbs filled with busy pedestrians until I’ve finished my latest piece of writing, it’s required bursting into tears while reading To the Lighthouse in the middle of a university library because I could see so clearly that the only chance for happiness I had was nowhere on the path that I had been and was expected to lead my whole life on. It’s required a lot of banal events of the same flavor as the ones described in this book, and it’s ultimately required a lot of nonsensical shit that would have landed me in that ‘psychiatric boot camp’ many times over, much of which I can recognize within these pages. And while the events described in this book happened long ago, the attitude towards mental illness today is still one of distrustful hysterics, and I'll be damned if I put my faith in the impositions of the public before I've exhausted every possibility within my own voluntary grasp.

You know what? I will never be ‘fixed’, so long as I choose to live. Each day has a chance of containing small wonders, small horrors, small acts of weirdness that keep me going and really don’t oppress anyone or anything else, so long as no one thinks themselves capable of interfering ‘for my own good’ without my completely informed permission. There will be no final day where I find myself capable of living like ‘normal’ people. But so long as I can see a future that compels me on, a future that adheres much more to my own sense of worth than what society and its denizens would like me to believe, I can keep going.

To me, that’s all that really matters. And I am grateful to this book for giving me the chance to express it.