There is this scene in Chapter 10 of The Bell Jar where Esther Greenwood decides to write a novel.

n  "My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing."n

I cannot help wondering, is that what Sylvia Plath thought when she wrote The Bell Jar? Did she, like Esther, sit on a breezeway in an old nightgown waiting for something to happen? Is that why she chose the name Esther? 6 letters - just like in Sylvia. For luck?

It's impossible to read The Bell Jar and not be affected, knowing what happened to Plath. I mean, it's everywhere. She is everywhere. All of Esther's musings are Plath's own. It's eerie. There's hardly any comfort even when Esther is freed from the bell jar; on the contrary, it's a brutal reminder that this book is ultimately, part fiction.

Plath's poetic prowess shows through her writing - especially the descriptions. They are so simple yet so fitting. There is one in particular I loved, where Esther compares her life to a fig tree (See the first status update). Here's another:

n  "I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three...nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth."n

The writing is remarkably unemotional and I don't mean that as a bad thing. Esther's (or Plath's?) commentary dwells entirely on thoughts and perceptions, never feelings. Depression is so often mistaken as a form of sadness. This woman, however, is not sad. She is empty. She is a shell. She contemplates killing herself with a kind of ease that's unnerving.

The Bell Jar did not make me cry but I wish it did. What I'm left with now is a deep sense of unhappiness that I don't think tears can fix.

Why is it that the most talented always fall prey to the bell jar? It's such a waste.

Seriously, I cannot believe this book is heralded as another catalyst for the feminist movement. Contrary to pop culture and the Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature, writers such as Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, Dorothy Parker and Kate Chopin were not feminist. In actuality, they were spoiled little brats who justified their actions by telling people they were artist who chose to live like men in order to give the finger to the system. Harsh, but no less true. And speaking of harsh, hopping beds with people you don't care about on a personal level, don't care if they're committed to another person, and have no desire to see in the future really does make you no better than the man you called a "filthy, whoring dog". If anything, it makes you worse because you know better. It also doesn't make you a feminist.

Being a feminist is more than simply bitching about the establishment and how it aims to keep you down. It's about more than keeping an ever-vigilant eye on the media, the people in your circle, and anyone else you choose to blame for holding you back and cry misogyny to anyone who will listen. And, in case no one told you, it is about more than using sex as a weapon. And finally, being a feminist is not whining about your inability to rise higher than men will allow... it's about having the courage to break the glass ceiling on your own regardless of limitations put upon you.

Ladies, you better recognize!

As for the story, it was beyond disappointing. Filled with a cast of feminist archetypes exaggerated to the point of being caricatures, Plath never fully delves into the deterioration of Esther nor the people surrounding her. Esther simply goes from being a shallow, neurotic hypocrite with no discernible personality of her own to a hot mess without rhyme or reason. Is it because she had some time off from school and actually had time to examine her life? Is it because she couldn't actually pick one singular path or goal? Did she have pretty-girl guilt? Is it because she was on her way to loosing her spot in wealthy society? The world will never know and I no longer care.

If feminist reading is what you interested in, I suggest Maya Angelou, Naomi Wolf, Kate Millet, or Betty Frieden.

DNF at 50%. Just not my cuppa tea!
Found it to be slow and boring. I read a lot of reviews saying they loved the first half more than the second half, so since I disliked the first half, I decided to DNF it.
I am not going to write a full review since I didn't finish it and I am not going to rate a book I did not finish.

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”



It had been a number of years since I last read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. What I’d remembered most was how well Plath had established the mood for this story by weaving the electrocutions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg with the mental breakdown of her heroine, Esther Greenwood. But the story is definitely about Esther, her ambition, and her own feelings of inadequacy, even though (viewed from the outside) Esther would be seen as a success.

What is amazing about this writing is its immersive quality; you feel Esther’s restrictive choices and alienation from her world because you ultimately realize the world she has been striving for was never in her grasp. The repeated questions (after she is being treated for her depression) about who will marry her now only reinforce the notion that for the intelligent and talented Esther Greenwood, there had never been a good way to extricate herself from a trap that she had always seen coming. Very compelling narrative!

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world."

I started reading this book at about 3 in the afternoon one day, and by midnight, I had finished it. I have never read something so utterly compelling and literally could not put it down. It was quite terrifying how often I read something the narrator thought or felt and found myself thinking, "I know exactly what you mean."
Also, to all the people who call this a female version of Catcher in the Rye: shut up. You have no idea what you're talking about. Holden Caulfield was a whiny bitch with nothing real to complain about. Esther Greenwood was brilliant, witty, doomed, and had GENUINE reasons to feel like crap about everything. She makes Holden look like a snot-nosed preschooler throwing a tantrum because someone took his crayons.

L’INVERNO DI SYLVIA


Foto MD’O.

Uno di quei libri che mi è rimasto appiccicato – storia, temi, stile, mi sono entrati dentro – un’esperienza di lettura in qualche modo anche dolorosa - un maledetto colloso processo di fusione - difficile recuperare la giusta distanza, mettere insieme una riflessione...

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

Un’opera che deve avere coinvolto anche Plath ben oltre il consigliabile, se è vero che la prima bozza risale alla metà degli anni Cinquanta, ma fu solo grazie a una borsa di studio vinta nel 1961 che riuscì a dedicarsi a questa scrittura per completarla e darla alle stampe all’inizio del 1963.
Coinvolgerla tanto da affermare che ‘La campana di vetro’ era an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past
Coinvolgerla tanto da ricorrere a uno pseudonimo, il nom de plume di Victoria Lucas, tanto era forte l’autobiografismo di queste pagine: al punto che la madre ne ostacolò la pubblicazione negli States riuscendo a postporla fino al 1971.



Si liberò così bene del passato che tre settimane dopo l’uscita del romanzo nelle librerie, Sylvia preparò pane e burro e due tazze di latte che lasciò al sicuro sul comodino per i figli, sigillò porte e finestre, infilò la testa nel forno a gas e riuscì laddove Esther, l’io narrante di queste pagine, aveva fallito.
Continuando a sentirsi sul lato sbagliato della vita, come Holden al quale questo romanzo è così spesso accostato, Lady Lazarus portò a termine il suo suicidio, gesto già tentato in pratica, e dettagliatamente esaminato in tutte le sue svariate possibilità in queste stesse illuminanti pagine.

Silvia Plath è stata prima di tutto e soprattutto dedita alla poesia: è con quest’arte che è rimasta nella storia. Questo è il suo unico romanzo, l’unica opera in prosa (diari a parte).


Foto MD’O.

Eppure, La campana di vetro è scritto dimenticando la poesia, senza cercare lirismo, con uno stile diretto irriverente spiazzante, e agghiacciante, intriso d’ironia fino al black humour, che mi ha particolarmente colpito per come sembra volare basso e per come non cambia registro nonostante la storia si trasformi e passi dalle esperienze e avventure di una giovane studentessa a una caduta nel baratro della depressione (o quello che era – a me sembra che la depressione è un’etichetta che si appiccica un po’ ovunque - da un po’ di tempo lo si fa anche col bipolarismo).

Continuando a scrivere nello stesso modo, dissacrante e non convenzionale, Plath divide la sua storia in tre fasi piuttosto ben distinte, che racconta in perfetta unità di stile pur passando dalla pazzia del mondo al mondo della pazzia.
Il risultato è ben più che notevole, è il primo regalo di questo romanzo molto molto bello.



Tre fasi: la prima è ambientata a New York nell’estate del 1953.
La "campana di vetro" è resa ancora più manifesta, percepibile, quasi visibile, dall’afa estiva che avvolge la città.
Esther, non ancora ventenne, sta facendo uno stage presso una rivista femminile. Alloggia in un albergo insieme ad altre ragazze, cerca insistentemente di liberarsi della sua verginità, vissuta come parte dell’oppressione, fa vita modaiola, aspetta di essere ammessa a un corso di scrittura creativa, sta vivendo il suo rito iniziatico, accumula incontri ed esperienze, ma più di tutto accumula scollamento.
Infatti, ciò che dovrebbe essere non corrisponde a ciò che sente: e quando scopre di non essere stata ammessa, si libera di tutti i suoi vestiti in una magnifica scena dal forte sapore simbolico, e inizia la sua caduta, comincia a disgregarsi (la “smarginatura” di Elena Ferrante).



Qui inizia la seconda fase, col ritorno a casa, a Boston, percepita come luogo molto provinciale, nella casa di famiglia, a stretto contatto con la mamma, e si sa che l’amore è responsabile di molti misfatti – in questo caso, è certo che la presenza materna, il suo modo di voler bene alla figlia, la completa integrazione dell’adulta alle regole imposte dalla società, offrono a Esther una buona spinta verso un tentativo di suicidio e quello che poi succede nella terza fase.
Il momento saliente, prima ancora del tentato suicidio, si manifesta quando Esther si accorge che la sua grafia è diventata illeggibile, storta e distorta come la sua mente e il suo modo di guardare la realtà delle cose.

La terza fase è dedicata alla cura e alla faticosa risalita verso la "normalità".
Da una clinica all’altra, da un intervento medico all’altro, Esther sembra farcela, mentre invece Sylvia, che conosce il male di scrivere e quello di vivere, non ce la farà.



Esther non vuole sottostare alle regole, si sente un pesce fuor d’acqua (in questo, certo, ricorda Holden), continua a ribellarsi alle scelte rigide e definitive (vedi il matrimonio, il promesso sposo) che le vengono imposte dall’ambiente.
Esther vorrebbe poter provare tutto, non essere ingabbiata, e Plath sceglie un’immagine molto bella per esemplificare: l’albero di fichi, dove ogni frutto rappresenta una vita diversa, e il desiderio di avere tutti i frutti paralizza Esther fino a che i fichi marciscono e cadono per terra.

Più che brividi, dà la scossa leggere degli elettroshock ai quali viene sottoposta la protagonista, sia nella forma massiccia che in quella più blanda (omeopatica?).
E non si può non cogliere l’agghiacciante parallelo con la vicenda dei Rosenberg giustiziati sulla sedia elettrica (riguarderò il film di Lumet).



Sembra riduttiva una lettura femminista di quest’opera, che trascende l’identificazione con la sola sfera femminile, come non è solo l'America spietata, borghese e maccartista degli anni Cinquanta ad apparire spaventosa, ma gli schemi sociali in genere: la campana di vetro che schiaccia la protagonista sotto il peso della sua protezione, togliendole l'aria, stritolandola nell’ingranaggio di una normalità che ignora la poesia, non riguarda solo Esther.

Così come, nonostante qualche analogia, a me sembra forzato il paragone con Holden, capolavoro a se stante che troppo spesso viene tirato (ma soprattutto stiracchiato) in ballo: in questo caso non c’è neppure l’adolescenza in comune, Esther per quanto frettolosa di liberarsi della sua (tardiva?) verginità, è più grande di Holden, e si sa a quell’età della vita tre anni sono una differenza di secoli.
Non basta l’impossibilità di ricomporre un ‘io diviso’ per giocare nella stessa squadra.
Anche se non è difficile capire che per le lettrici Esther possa aver significato quello che Holden ha significato per i lettori.



I am only thirty
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.

"Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

The Bell Jar has been on my tbr since before the term tbr even existed. That being said, I'm so thankful that I didn't read it sooner, that I read it now, at this exact particular time in my life. My younger self would not have had the life experience to understand this story on such a profound level.

Plath's writing is beyond reproach. I found myself reading many passages over and over again so that I could completely absorb and digest the feelings they invoked in me.

"I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t..."

This story is without any doubt the single greatest fictional achievement in capturing the mind of a person drowning in depression. It's not endless crying or any of the other dramatics displayed in the movies.

It's quiet.
It's subtle.
It's stealthy.
Until it's not.

"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."

This was a Traveling Friends group read and I couldn't be more thankful for the ladies that shared this read with me. Not one of us was left unscathed by this story.

“because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

4.5 to 5 stars

This was a very powerful and only partially fictional tale from Sylvia Plath. Perhaps the genre should be called autobiographical fiction (is that already a thing?). Because of this, I was very glad that the book included a short biography of Plath at the end to compare her life experiences and her experiences with writing it to the final product. While now it might only seem somewhat shocking and controversial, at the time I am sure it was a book that people may have had to sneak so that others did not realize they were reading it.

The first half focused a lot on the main character’s (Esther, and therefore Plath’s) experience with the questionable behavior of men in her life. I believe what she deals with is what would now be called “toxic masculinity”. The men she meets just treat her so very wrong and they don’t even realize it. It’s as if she is not even a person, just a personality-less flesh puppet to ply with drinks and “mansplain” things to. For those who watch the show Mad Men, I was reminded of the characters Peggy and Joan in the first few seasons who are trying to breakthrough to do the work the men do but are often talked down to as they are expected to be secretaries and housewives. I imagine if a traditional “manly man” in the 60s found his wife reading this he would have likely done something drastically inappropriate to her and thought nothing of it.

The second half of the book deals with depression, mental decay, and suicide. I felt so bad for Esther. She had issues, she needed help, and the help she received was so wildly inappropriate, it was infuriating. I was reminded of stories and movies from and set in that time period (Rosemary Kennedy and Angelina Jolie’s character in the Movie Changeling to name a couple) where the answer to a woman experiencing mental struggles in the 50s and 60s might be to nonchalantly toss them into a sanatorium or have them lobotomized. Men who had the same issues were not treated the same, even some that were truly mentally disturbed, while a woman battling with what might have only been mild depression or manic behavior might find themselves locked away and receiving shock treatment. If this part of the book doesn’t get you riled up, I would be surprised!

It should be very telling that Plath originally released this under a pseudonym because she was afraid of the response she would receive. If you have to hide reality behind a fake name and fictionalization, then I think that proves there is something very wrong with reality.

The Bell Jar is a must read. Some of the content may be hard to swallow, but it is a very powerful statement that will help humanity learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating them.

n  At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.n

These chilling lines from 'Daddy' played inside my head time and again like the grim echoes of a death knell as I witnessed Esther's struggle to ward off the darkness threatening to converge on her. And despite my best efforts to desist from searching for the vestiges of Sylvia in Esther, I failed. I could not help noting how effortlessly Plath must have slipped into the mind of an ingenue like Esther, a thinly veiled version of her younger self, while letting her true disenchantment with life and its unkept promises manifest itself in the iconic poems of Ariel. That she could work up the intellectual rigour to create a body of work unanimously regarded as her very best during a period of tremendous upheaval in the domestic sphere is a testament to her artistic spirit. The personal lives of very few writers have been subjected to a scrutiny as unsparing as Plath's life invited after her suicide and yet her creations have managed to wrest the spotlight from more sensational subjects like a bad marriage and her lifelong battle with a fatal depression.

n  People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.n

I had expected a kind of solipsistic navel-gazing to occupy the thematic core of this semi-autobiographical novel but instead what I found was a masterful portrayal of a shared reality of many women of the 50s. For instance, this is evident in Plath's depiction of an attempted rape scene which she describes as drolly as conceivable, with nary a mention of a word suggestive of sexual assault. Such must have been the way of life before second wave feminism wedged its way forcefully into the 20th century zeitgeist.

Thus, the bell jar does not merely symbolize death or even the decay of intellectual faculties of an artist which Esther Greenwood equates with death. It also represents the metaphorical prison that Esther and undoubtedly many of her compeers may have wanted to escape - the dilemma between attempting to preserve selfhood at the cost of defying societal conventions and submitting to the patriarchal injunction against female autonomy.

n  I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.n

Even though Esther lacks Plath's cold fury and resentment as reflected in many of the 'Ariel' poems, she betrays a subliminal fear of her own sexuality and the world she has only just begun unravelling like a mystery. In the last stretch when she contemplates likely methods of ending her life without much ado she does so with an unnerving ease, emotionless as a wax sculpture. Death is like the ultimate remedy to the problem at hand - her inability to cope with her own life any longer. Death also saves her from the tyranny of indecision.

n  The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.n

'The Bell Jar' is deeply reminiscent of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, a recent read, which also contains a very disturbing but matter-of-fact autobiographical account of a young girl's brush with the American mental healthcare system. Sadly the parallels between both narratives end at Kaysen's adoption of a distinctly TBJ-esque mode of narration. While Kaysen eventually managed to silence the voices inside her head and went on to pursue a fulfilling writing career, Plath couldn't stand life long enough to leave behind a more voluminous, more enriched oeuvre.

n  All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to circulating air.n

I don’t know why I have this 4 stars in 2018. I finally had to skim through it this time and I don’t even remember reading it before

La novela o yo hemos, en cierta manera, fracasado en el intento. O bien ella no ha logrado transmitirme el horror de ese fondo del hoyo que es una depresión o yo no he sido capaz de concebir la profunda desesperación que, pienso, debe sentir la protagonista dentro de esa campana que la envuelve y que le impide relacionarse y encontrar su sitio en ese mundo de hombres en el que la mujer sigue sujeta a roles y comportamientos establecidos por ellos.

En realidad, no sé si hay que buscar razones, no sé hasta qué punto la depresión es consecuencia de las circunstancias que rodean al sujeto o solo bastan las circunstancias internas. Lo que sí sé es que esa enfermedad determina completamente la relación que el individuo establece con esas circunstancias. Y esto es lo que más me ha gustado de la novela, la forma tan honesta -se supone que es autobiográfica- en la que describe sus relaciones con las amigas, con los hombres, cercanos o desconocidos, con su madre y, por encima de todo, consigo misma, su insatisfacción personal, su bajísima autoestima, su ansiedad por abarcarlo todo o, al menos, abarcar en su totalidad algo importante. Si hubiera que buscar una de esas razones, que quizás no sean suficientes para explicar nada, estarían perfectamente descritas y resumidas en una de las famosas citas de la autora:

n   "Quizás cuando sintamos que queremos tenerlo todo, será porque estamos en peligro de estar cerca de no querer nada." n

n  

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

n The Bell Jar is honest, disturbing, powerful, and poignant. It opens with "the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs," as if it were an omen of what is to come. Conspicuous and beautiful, it tells a story of despair as a young woman falls to the pitfalls of depression.
n  

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”

nSylvia Plath's death haunts every page as depair vanquishes life. Was there ever hope for Esther/Sylvia? Perhaps... However, helplessness and doubts drifts all over as a constant companion while she tries to hold to shreds of her life.
n  

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

nSo, there remains a small desire to survive, a desire for freedom to gather strength again to sail with the wind and fly away. And, fragments of realization that we are not alone in our despair.

Sylvia Plath with her superb, alluring and somber writing, holds the reader spellbound and has the power of drawing us into her tale. Her words may hurt, it’s almost impossible not to do so. But Esther/Sylvia also made me laugh with her honest descriptions of the world and the people around her. She made me her accomplice in her hilaraty, in her secrets and in her honesty. Thus, the reader empathizes and is grateful to share with her her pain without appearing miserable or demanding any form of solace.
n  

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. 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
The beauty of The Bell Jar, packed with bleak truths, difficult topics and wryly dark humor surprises and teaches us that our sorrows are simply us being human. This uncovering, if nothing else, should make us grateful.
___