I don’t get it. Lol. It felt like an episode of Seinfeld, entertaining yet there’s no rhyme or reason.

Sylvia Plath makes going crazy sound so rational! I loved Esther (or Plath), I love how she never seems to lose her sense of humour even in the worst time.

No tengo palabras para expresar todo lo que siento justo ahora. Solo puedo afirmar que leer este libro fue simplemente maravilloso.

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whoever said this was about feminism is lying. the racist comments really ruined it for me. i have no idea how this has such a high average rating.

No one could have written this book without having had experienced themselves this disturbing journey into a mental breakdown. Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiography in which she shares her pain is highly emotional, but brilliant.

Her book brings us back to the way women were treated in her day with any signs of mental illness - shock treatment. This was very prevalent during the fifties as I well know - my aunt having been in and out of McLean Hospital in Boston (Belmont) from age 15 till her death.

Quite eye opening was Plath's thought process regarding women's sexuality and suicide. Her attitudes and issues are very relevant today.

Look for Dr. Nolan, Esther's psychiatrist. Loved her way with patients.

With a wonderful drop-back of New England (I'm a Boston gal).

Everyone should read this book.

4 out of 5 stars.

|| 3.0 stars ||

This wasn’t bad, but I don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about either.
I get that this was likely a very progressive and revolutionary entry for female mental health fiction in the 1960s, but compared to modern books on the subject this is by no means anything extraordinary or special. If anything, I mostly think it stands out for its historic value; it’s interesting to see how mental illness was treated in the 50s and 60s, and also to see what was considered as feminist back then.

Although still not perfect, mental health prevention and treatment has progressed immensely, and the creepiest part about this book for me really was the casual use of electrotherapy. And the fact that this book actually makes it seem like it worked...? Yikes. I mean, it was obvious that our main character didn’t like the shock treatment, but in the end, she does get better because of that. So, the book kind of makes it seem like a necessary evil? Which, obviously, it’s not. It’s absolute bullshit. But yea, they didn’t seem to think so in the that day and age.

I found it quite annoying that the feminism in this book mostly meant that our main character hated every single woman she encountered. She judged everyone and everything, but meanwhile she had no idea what she wanted either. She didn’t want to get married, but she didn’t really have the drive to become a careerwoman either... She was in limbo. She felt pushed in a lot of different directions, which eventually meant she had no passion to truly take any of those directions for herself. I suppose the book is trying to tell us that the pressures and expectations that are put on women can be very damning and can make it impossible for women to succeed. Which is a good point, but I don’t feel like the ‘hating every woman’ approach is the best way to show that.

All in all, this was an okay read (for the time it was written), but I’m not a big fan or anything. It doesn’t stand out to me at all.

There’s only about a handful of novels (so far) that I would not be able to read at all if not for their audiobook counterparts. The Bell Jar is one such a book. In a big and meaningful way. I had tried many times to read this one and found myself either distracted, sleepy or altogether disinterested. After having it among the very first batch of books I added on GR, I totally gave up on ever reading it.

Then I got hold of the audiobook narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal and by the time the prologue was finished, it was ON.

I still cannot say that I fell in love with the book but I can certainly see why it hit hard for a lot of people. I loved the New York part the best but found it floundered a bit after she got home, much like Esther herself I imagine.

Originally published in 1963, The Bell Jar must have been revolutionary for its time. A well-educated and witty young woman by the name of Esther Greenwood descends into depression after moving to New York. Along the way, she rejects the advances of male suitors, and as she spirals further and further out of control, she lampoons society's constructions of gender as well as the use of shock therapy within the mental health system. Her narrative flows in and out of time, pushing us forward and backward amidst her struggle to stay afloat in a sea of melancholy.

The Bell Jar raises questions still relevant today. It asks us to examine the intersection between feminism and psychology, such as how the confinement of women damages their mental health. Sylvia Plath provides us with a voice that is not altogether likeable, but relatable enough to sympathize and empathize with. I feel like all readers will react to Esther differently - some with indifference, some with a strong sense of solidarity, and others maybe an outward dislike. Still, I would recommend The Bell Jar to anyone interested in the subjects of feminism or psychology, because it delves into both in a time period that we might not all be familiar with.

The Bell Jar is a first person narrative about one woman's total alienation - from the self, from society, from the world - with the cold war as a backdrop (the references to the the Rosenbergs, the UN, Russians). She is a sort of female 'underground man' of the new age.

The story is told simply, though complex in structure and themes. Sylvia Plath writes with a clear direct style that is ironic, funny, and poetic.

Esther, a young woman of the 1950s, is in New York for a brief, glamourous job at a magazine. New York! the centre of the world, the jazz and push of New York, the dark heart of New York. Clothes and parties and men. Esther finds no excitement in this: her mind is on the Rosenbergs, and "being burned alive all along your nerves." She feels empty. It is a crisis of identity, but of course it is more than that. Her sense is that society has placed her under a bell jar, where she is stifled and unable to act.

Magazines, the media of the day, had a large influence on women and their self image. On the one hand, they showed how exiting life could be with a career and travel. Yet they also sanctified motherhood and the good wife. Esther uses an allegory to show how this type of doublethink fragments and paralyzes her :

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.

The moment of total alienation comes when she crawls into the underground - a dark gap in a cellar - to take her own life. From this lowest point she is rescued and brought to recovery, and again able to listen to the old brag of her heart, "I am, I am, I am".

She can breathe and live. The bell jar is lifted, at least for a time.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

I read this with the compulsive speed of a runaway train. Sylvia Plath's only novel written shortly before she committed suicide is braided into the story of her tragic life, and told through through the character of Esther Greenwood, a young woman struggling under a tremendous hopelessness and depression.

It begins with what should have been an inspiring time in Esther's life - a month in New York and a writing internship. Instead, she finds falseness and absurdity in everything, her mind often turning to emptiness, silence and death.

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

She toys with ideas of suicide much of the book. Her life is cloaked in a claustrophobic solitude, well described by the idea of being under a bell-jar, which suffocates and immobilizes.

The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

Her descent to madness, and her fight against life bring her to an asylum where she receives electroshock treatments and psychotherapy.

Certainly because she was writing from experience, Plath captures in a painfully realistic fashion the mindset of someone teetering on the edge of of the world. Esther is swathed in a thick cotton through which no one can touch her, mummified in airless despair. The book is terrifying in that aspect and sickened me, because this was reality for the author, and for many others suffering as she did.

Plath also touches on the societal constrictions which, like a straightjacket, bind a woman's identity. Esther can't bear the thought of a conventional 1950's life "when you were married and had children it was life being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state." The men in this book are mainly oppressors, despite being her intellectual inferiors. She dreams about being a writer of books of poetry, but this doesn't seem to match up with what she sees as an inevitable, doomed path laid out for her.

It's written so well. It's very readable, with glittering insight and imagery into the interior world of Esther Greenwood, and the uncomprehending people around her. It makes me wish that somehow this insight could have translated into a different ending for Sylvia Plath, for a lifting of the bell jar. As for Esther, we are allowed a glimmer of hope.

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

"I saw my life branching out before me like a 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 was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor.."(TBJ)

Esther Greenwood's story is told in flashbacks, shifting in time as rhythmically as the rise and fall of her moods, as she narrates her young adult experiences interning for the summer at a fashion magazine in New York, where she becomes conflicted by society's expectations, and the pressures to conform to established gender roles in the 1950's. "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." (TBJ)

She conforms to the acceptable ladies' attire: black patent leather shoes with matching black patent belt and handbag; she plays the acceptable dating game but remains wary of men and their 'turkey neck and turkey gizzards'. Her pristine image is destroyed like her black patent shoes - cracked and crusted, and flowing with the unstaunched rivulets of a virgin's sacrifice: the blood jet is poetry/ There is no stopping it (K). She is lost trying to sculpt out just who she really is or what she wants, sinking beneath the waves of schizophrenia, suicidal attempts and clinical institutions where she becomes an anesthetized 'nobody' to the doctors. The laboratory jar descends, oppresses, suffocates in its perilous air, denying oxygen; flows of red transcends to black, thumping through fevered Tulips opening and closing to the beat of 'the old tattoo...I am...I am...I am.' (FL, T, SOER). “Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.”(TBJ)

The Bell Jar is Plath's 'I' novel confession of her personal and emotional experiences, an examination of her struggles for creative visibility and a meaningful place for herself (she needed the rich rewards of a quiet Woolf's den, perhaps). In completing TBJ, Plath gave voice to the opposing and shattered features of her personality at a time when women were still typically silent; she began to understand and like her 'self'. She seemed to have laid to rest some dark demons, and though she received high praise for her poetry collection Colossus (1960), she had hopeful aspirations for a famous literary name as a prose writer.

The genius of Plath is that she has brilliantly preserved the political, the feminist, the visionary, the hopeful, the death and rebirth themes of her stunning poems - like the perfect specimen - for all to scrutinize in the eponymous Bell Jar: a compelling reason to peruse this (posthumous) Pulitzer Prize winning poetess's oeuvre.

Plath was, like Esther at the end of this novel, a woman who came to terms - and learned how to live - with herself:
Esther viewed the newly dug ground where lay her dark mirror image that, not too long ago, had hung above it. Lucky for her, dying was an art, like everything else - she did it exceptionally well (LL). She felt a sense of renewal, luminous in a thousand blue sparks, awakened like Lady Lazarus - so ravenous for life she could eat men like air.

So what happened between the publication of The Bell Jar on January 23, 1963 and Sylvia Plath's suicide two weeks later on Feb 11th? Biographer Linda Wagner-Martin (Sylvia Plath- A Biography, 2014) describes a progressive physical and psychological decline from the rejection of the book under her real name - presumably unable to cast off the shadow of her successful poet laureate husband, Ted Hughes - prompting her to publish under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She and her two young children (abandoned by the adulterous TH) were constantly ill with the flu, lonely and often isolated by terrific winter storms; as her depression worsened, she had difficulties caring for them and home, and had little energy or opportunity to write. The last poem she wrote before she died can be read as an epitaph:

Edge

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to that sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.


Key:
TBJ- The Bell Jar

FL-Face Lift
K- Kindness
LL- Lady Lazarus
T- Tulips
SOER- Suicide Off Egg Rock

Poem mixology referenced above are in The Collected Poems- Sylvia Plath, 1981, ed.Ted Hughes

“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.”

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, talented and successful, but she is slowing going under - possibly for the last time.

Unfortunately I did not fall head over heels in love with The Bell Jar as I had hoped to, but I HAVE fallen for the writing of Sylvia Plath - and even Plath herself. My Pinterest board has recently been covered with her quotes, and I even bought a copy of her unabridged journals following a recommendation from @yleniareads That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy The Bell Jar, I really really liked it, it just wasn’t as life-changing as I had perhaps anticipated.

I resonated with Esther in a lot of ways - I lost my father at a young age and, without sounding entirely egotistical, I also have achieved a lot of academic success in my life, which ultimately leads to me expecting more and more, afraid of failure. The expectations I place upon myself are high, and my mental health will suffer when things don’t go as planned. So it was easy for me to relate to some of the feelings Esther has. And that’s always nice when we read!

Plath’s description of the bell jar itself is genius - that our protagonist feels suffocated, as if she has been placed under one. And every now and again she has moments of clarity, when the bell jar is lifted. Of course there are a lot of parallels between Plath and Esther, and I found it hard to dissociate the two at times. Reading this knowing Plath’s fate is almost uncomfortable, it feels as though you are reading her diary. It just made me feel sad at times :(

It’s a beautifully written book, sprinkled with little moments of dark humour. Some parts were less intriguing or interesting than others. I probably preferred the second half over the first, where we really witness Esther at rock bottom.

Overall, I may not have absolutely adored it, but the memorable quotes and imagery will prevail. I’m glad it has introduced me to the talent that was Sylvia Plath. 4 stars.