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.

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 feel the way about The Bell Jar that other readers feel about Catcher in the Rye. Rather than J.D. Salinger's anti-hero Holden Caulfield labeling everything in sight as "phony", my preference is Sylvia Plath's thinly veiled account of her summer in New York, interning as a guest editor at Mademoiselle and her descent into depression and the mental health system that fall, with Plath's vivacious wit plunging me into the almost sheer terror of looming adulthood.

Published in England in January 1963 under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas," The Bell Jar was the first novel by the poet and also her last. Plath, whose marriage to poet Ted Hughes had dissolved, was living in a bare London flat with two children and no telephone in one of the coldest British winters on record. Anxiety over her future and overwork had contributed to Plath's suicide attempt in 1953. Ten years later, in February 1963, a kitchen oven finished the job; Plath was dead at thirty.

Hughes had assured Plath's mother Aurelia that The Bell Jar would remain unpublished in America during Mrs. Plath's lifetime to spare her the pain of her daughter's brutally honest critiques, but the demand for Plath's work had spiked with the rise of women's liberation. When Random House planned to exploit a provision in the copyright laws of the time and publish the novel, Hughes agreed to release The Bell Jar in America through his publisher Harper & Row in 1971. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for six months.

Aurelia Plath related her version of events with a book of her daughter's correspondence, Letters Home, in 1975.

Plath's anti-heroine Esther Greenwood is nudged out onto a big river in a basket and I felt like I was holding on with her, ready to tip over and drown at any turn. Esther attempts to navigate her way into adulthood and Plath conveys how dangerous it was to be a young woman in the 1950s. Regardless of our differences, I found myself able to relate to Esther's perils. This is a world where one missed assignment, one social faux pas or one dangerous encounter with the opposite sex could spin a life of promise into tragedy. The pressures are enormous and the consequences real, without any embellishment or drama on the author's part.



Sylvia Plath interviewing Elizabeth Bowen in New York. June 1953.

From a great opening paragraph --

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 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.

-- to an expertly timed final page, Plath's wit and sensuality knocked me over throughout the book.

When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete.

Esther's fear and looming anxiety over the future waiting for her is palpable.

For the first time in my life, sitting there in the soundproof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along. I simply hadn't thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

Certain folks in the book club or discussion group might consider The Bell Jar a sad or depressing read. Not me. Plath's writing has an vitality and clarity that propelled me through in under a day, but more importantly, reminded me of what it is to feel alive. So many of the people Esther comes into contact with seem to be dying in front of her in one way or another. Esther dreams of escape from that sort of life, She doesn't want to be the spot an arrow shoots off from. She wants to be the arrow.



Lisa Simpson was spotted reading Plath in The Simpsons, Season 20: Episode 11, "How the Test Was Won".



Rory Gilmore entered her Plath phase early, in Gilmore Girls, Season 1: Episode 12, "Double Date".



Gwyneth Paltrow played Plath in a 2001 feature film. Maggie Gyllenhaal seemed to be playing a pulp version of Plath in Secretary, released the following year.



Alvy Singer threw Plath a backhanded compliment in Annie Hall (1977). Considering what happens in his relationships, Alvy's understanding of women bears scrutiny.

"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

Да ви се е случвало да хванете настинка, въпреки че сте си слагали шапката и сте си носили вълнените чорапи? Да сте били убедени, че сте направили всичко както трябва в дадена ситуация и все пак съдбата да ви е погодила гадничък номер? Предполагам, че да. Тогава съвсем спокойно депресията би могла да ви дебне зад ъгъла, нищо, че животът ви си изглежда привидно нормален към момента. Спокойно, няма да можете да направите нищо (или както казва баща ми: „Корабът потъва по график“) – просто това е пътят, който трябва да извървите.

„Стъкленият похлупак“ е като разходка из обраслата с трънак градина на нечий ум. Мъчителна е и те изподрасква целия. Естър Грийнуд не е от протагонистите, с които читателите се отъждествяват. Хората обикновено прилепват към своите малки частици ежедневие и ги наричат „щастие“. Когато се наситят на това щастие, то се превръща в бреме и монотонност. Тогава започват да си търсят друго щастие. Естър по някакъв почти свръхестествен начин изглежда прескача тези фази и достига до момента, в който се пита „А от тук нататък какво?“. За нея метафората със смокиновото дърво е едновременно възможно бъдеще и сюрреалистично преживяно минало. Тя иска да опита от всичко, но и има усещането, че всичко може би ще има един и същ вкус, ще донесе все същите обикновени човешки емоции – без значение дали е на пътешествие из Европа, в някое кафене в Париж или някъде из Банкок. Защото „everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end“. Защо да правиш каквото и да е, след като накрая просто ще си отидеш?

Въпреки болезнената тематика на романа, Силвия Плат описва апатията на Естър, като използва подбран с вкус язвителен тон, изискано чувство за хумор и доста автоирония (аз през цялото време не спрях да си мисля, че всяко усещане на Естър е всъщност нещо, изпитано от Силвия, макар романът да е само отчасти автобиографичен). 50-те години на миналия век в САЩ са време на „врява и безумство“, белязано от Студената война, икономически растеж, сексуални табута, строго разграничение на ролите на мъжа и жената, стремеж към образа на перфектната домакиня, ерата на Елвис Пресли, Мерилин Монро и pin-up гърлите. Време на оформяне на калъпи. Някъде прочетох, че на Естър ѝ липсвала емоционалност и всички описания в романа били доста клинични. Аз смятам, че това е вследствие на изпепелена прекомерна емоционалност. Нещо като burnout на чувствата – изпитваш толкова много чувства и за толкова много неща, че накрая се изчерпваш и оставаш неспособен да продължиш да изпитваш.

В крайна сметка има нещо неестествено. Още през Просвещението фокусът се премества върху отделния индивид и всеки следващ период се старае да подготвя по-осъвременена версия на изначалния манифест на хуманизма. Въпреки тези опити обаче, преди едва 50-60 години в най-напредналата страна на света няма кой да чуе вика за душевна помощ на една млада жена. Да, тогава, разбира се, ги е имало лоботомията и електрошока, но те са сериозна стъпка назад в традицията на човеколюбието. „Стъкленият похлупак“ е търсене на смисъла на живота. Отказ от конформизма и обезверяване пред перспективата за наложени модели. Човек, който е имал смелостта да си зададе въпроса „Защо трябва да правя като всички останали?“, заслужава уважение. Заслужава и отговори. Най-вече заслужава да ги открие по своя начин.

"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.

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.

I remember reading this short story in Asimov’s magazine about a very young girl who suffers from autism. She moves at her own pace, dragging herself at the heels of the rushing time and existing in that void where her consciousness treads a gravelly path only to arrive at the destination to find that everyone else had already moved on. So that when she answers her mother to a question that was asked of her three weeks ago, her mother doesn’t really understand her because she had already moved on from that question. For the life of me, I can’t seem to be able to remember the name of the story. But it probably was the best darnest short story I will ever read. And it seemed to wave, lazy like a flag in a winter night with the trifle of winds, in the nook in the behind of my head that was spared by the brutal voice of Esther Greenwood, throughout my reading of The Bell Jar. I failed to grasp at the significance of this remembrance until I came across this line that helped put everything in blinding focus:

n  I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloon

For The Bell Jar is an account of Sylvia Plath’s own experiences, Esther a fait accompli , a flesh that she constructed of her own imagination , to allow a look into her own life through a ‘a curtain of clear water’. Or a bell jar.

It is an anxious and unsettling novel. On one hand there is a young girl who a younger me, stripped of the vagaries of time and experiences, nodded along with vigorously and vehemently and found a winning kinship with. A world away from my own childhood, yet the voice of Esther spoke of the dawn of youth with such clarity and a bluntness that can only be expected off the mouth of a child. And then the descent of the bell jar, the glassy apparition that separated her from the world into her own, looming like a black cloud, slowly and sleathily crept in. She feels separate from the rest of the world, so disassociated that it feels to her as though even the air that she breathes is separate and ‘sour’. The unflinching prospect of death as the final destination causes her to question the merit of the frivolities of everyday life, the depression finally pushes her to try and take her own life.

My reading of this book was a sad one. Knowing that it was not just a story, knowing that the haunting witticisms was a result of a Schizophrenia (although she was never officially diagnosed) and in full possession of the knowledge of the finality that ripped this brilliant voice at the young age of thirty. Yet, knowing full well, how the story really ends, shouldn’t drive one to perceive this as a book about depression. Although it deals with the part of Plath’s life that romanced with death with her many attempts at suicide, it is also the voice of a girl who refused to conform. The Bell Jar is also a text on social critique. Set in the 50’s with it’s strict societal constraints , Plath shreds the accepted notions of what it was she was supposed to be, and attempts to replace them with what she wanted to be. No wonder that it became one of the centrepieces of feminism.

But, in the end what really gripped me was her brutal honesty and the genius that she potrayed in evoking reality through her prose. For when she wrote:

n  The Silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.n

I realised how stifling it must have felt to have realised such glaring truths in her own alienated world, separate in her understanding and alone in her trials.

Update(14/11/2015) : The short story I mention is Movement by Nancy Fulda.I read it last year while sitting on a bench in a bus station waiting to come back home after a particularly intense and gruelling internship. The bus was late by hours due to floods and it was cold and rainy and just one of those particularly miserable winter nights that make you miss your bed and your mom's special 'cold day' dish.I remember reading this story from an old, badly dog eared copy of the Asimov magazine and the moment of inner silence that follows the completion that tells you that this is a book that is going to remain with you. I distinctly remember the details in the story, and the shadow of silence that descended as I made my way through this. But, soon after the bus arrived and I forgot the copy of the magazine. I left it behind on the bench and ever since, try as I might, I couldn't bring the name of this story to my mind. It was lost like the magazine. Until I mention it here, and two wonderful people tell me the issue, the title, the author... Ah! I love Goodreads! Thank you to Kim and Joe for helping clear the mist!

This was a book that was recommended to me by a friend (after challenging him to give it a try) so obviously I really wanted to like it as much as he did.
Unfortunately, I didn’t. It was a good book, really well written, but there were too many things about it that bothered me.

Her idea of feminism, rubbed me up the wrong way. I’m aware this was written in 1953, but still, it almost felt to me as if she hated men, despite the fact she worked with accomplished women in NY, female psychiatrists in the private institution, and was being sponsored by a successful female novelist. She also had fond feelings for her father, whom she lost at a very young age.

“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.”

“And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married 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.”

“Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn't know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been,...”

Although there’s a nugget of truth in these statements, certainly in those days, they’re obviously as stereotypical as the often heard platitudes among men, that (married) women are bossy and a man loses his freedom and voice once married.
I regret that this book is considered by many as classic feminist literature, while to me, this intense pessimistic view only demonstrates her low self-esteem, her anxiety about the future, and her distrust of men ascribable to personal experiences.

I also felt uncomfortable by the racist utterance in the book :

”Usually it was a shrunken old white man that brought our food, but today it was a Negro. The Negro was with a woman in blue stiletto heels, and she was telling him what to do. The Negro kept grinning and chuckling in a silly way.”

“Soon after they had locked the door, I could see the Negro's face, a molassescolored moon, risen at the window grating, but I pretended not to notice.”

Her sudden descent into insanity/depression was confusing to me. I understand she struggled with feelings of anxiety and low self-esteem, and with a sense of alienation, but in only a very short period of time, this ambitious woman undergoes a marked change. I think I would have liked the book more if she had explored that transition more deeply.

Her prose is of an exceptional beauty,
“A thick white china cup was lowered under my nose. In the wan light that might have been evening and might have been dawn I contemplated the clean amber liquid. Pads of butter floated on the surface and a faint chickeny aroma fumed up to my nostrils. My eyes moved tentatively to the skirt behind the cup. "Betsy," I said. "Betsy nothing, it's me." I raised my eyes then, and saw Doreen's head silhouetted against the paling window, her blonde hair lit at the tips from behind like a halo of gold. Her face was in shadow, so I couldn't make out her expression, but I felt a sort of expert tenderness flowing from the ends of her fingers.”

but to me, the many poetic descriptions distracted from the story and felt incompatible with the deeply disturbed mental state of mind she was trying to convey. Even when she talks about suicide, she seems to have poetic rather than morbid thoughts.

”I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me. A second wave collapsed over my feet, lipped with white froth, and the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal ache. My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.”

“Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.”

I haven’t read any of her poems, but I can imagine she is more a poet than she is a novelist.

All in all, it was a good book, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how it feels like to suffer a breakdown ; how it used to be treated ; how
people react to it and how isolated someone with a breakdown can feel. It’s a bleak journey into one woman’s shattered mind but one that doesn’t offer much hope.

“How did I know that someday --at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere --the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?”

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.

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.

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