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.

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.

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currently-reading updates

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

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.

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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.

”I tried to smile, but my skin had gone stiff, like parchment.

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.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.”

This reminds me of this guy that used to go around the country talking about that moment in time when he hung in the air after jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. He knew instantly that he’d made a terrible mistake and at that moment desperately wanted to live. When I worked in San Francisco and lived in Richmond, I would sometimes take the Golden Gate Bridge to work and the Bay Bridge on the way back home, to mix things up, or vice versa. Sometimes the traffic report would push me one way or another. After being trapped for three hours waiting for a jumper on Golden Gate to decide if he was really going to do it or finally climb back down, I became paranoid as to whether there would be a jumper every time I climbed into my Jeep to head home.

I can remember people standing in groups, cupping their hands around their mouths, yelling for the man to jump. It was the indecision that was so inconvenient. I have to admit, even though it made my stomach sour, that I too wanted a resolution to this interruption in my life. I wanted to be home with my family, a good book, and a glass of wine. We are all capable of such selfish thoughts.

I felt the same way at moments in this book. I thought to myself,...Just please get it over with. I can’t take this anymore. How could I possibly think that the loss of a few hours of my life was worth all the rest of someone else’s life? Of course, I don’t believe that when it is put in those stark of terms, but the wait for something to happen was/is nauseating as well.

So Esther Greenwood has earned a scholarship to college. She is certainly smart and has come up with a snappy subject for her dissertation, if only she could get around to actually reading Finnegan’s Wake. She has a roommate, Doreen, whom she admires immensely. She seems so self-possessed and free from the burdens of expectations. ”Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”Esther is pretty enough, not the prettiest of girls, but pretty enough to attract the attention of boys, but of course, men prefer Doreen.
There is that aura around Doreen that makes men want to break through that cool exterior to the tiger they can sense lurks beneath.

There are hundreds of girls who would be jealous of Esther’s opportunities, but Esther will gladly trade her life for almost any life. The problem is, there is no escape from herself. There is a voice that is slowly turning all the rest of the natives in her head against her. ”If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat--on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok--I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

If only Esther can jump from a bridge and fall far enough, before hitting a safety net, to discover that suicide is not what she wants.

What have I done?

Of course, the poignancy of reading The Bell Jar is the fact that Sylvia Plath does attempt to kill herself in 1953 in a similar way as Esther does in the book. This may be a novel, but the autobiographical elements of the book make it as real as reading a memoir or Plath’s diary. The tragedy is, of course, that Sylvia, ten years later, does successfully end her own life, so I guess we know the ending of Esther’s life as well. "Blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion."--Sylvia Plath

I kept wishing that Esther/Sylvia would work as diligently at finding a reason to live as she did scheming for a way to kill herself. I kept thinking about Anthony Bourdain, Virginia Woolf, and in particular David Foster Wallace; all had many people who admired them and loved them. We think one of the worst things on this planet is to be unloved and how being in that terrifying position would be a reason to be suicidal, but these chemical imbalances that people suffer from tilt the scales of their lives in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter how much they are loved. I want to unroll the list of things Bourdian has loved and read them to him one by one to convince him that he has much to live for. I want to catch Woolf at the river, pull the rocks from her dress pockets and fling them into the water to sink without her. I want to cut the rope that is dangling from the rafters of Wallace’s house and watch him inhale that first precious gasp of air. I want to walk into Plath’s house in 1963 and turn off the gas and carry her out into the sunlight.

Is that what they wanted? A miraculous intervention? Did they want the universe to insist that they live?

This book is considered by many to be a masterpiece. The book is certainly unsettling, especially when the reader knows he is basically reading a 234 page suicide note. Wallace, I believe, wrote two pages. Woolf wrote a simple page, but a beautiful one. It is unclear whether Bourdain wrote a suicide note, but given his penchant for prose, I find it hard to believe that he didn’t. I can see how people who are struggling, especially those who are struggling silently, with their mental health would seek this book out. It does seem to help once people know they are not alone or even discover that their problems are not unusual. Does this book help or hinder someone’s own recovery? I don’t know the answer to that.

I do think those people who have someone in their life who is grappling with mental health issues would possibly gain some insight into their loved one’s battle with their own mind by reading this book. For those who see the very best in life, it is sometimes difficult to understand why someone would want to kill themselves. When I feel a bit blue, there is always a book to pull from a shelf to take me somewhere else long enough to let the stormy weather in my mind subside. I feel very fortunate that I have discovered such an outlet for my happiness.

The victim is not the only victim; suicides leave a lake of tears and recriminations in their wake.

If you are suffering and are contemplating suicide, please do continue to search for a reason to live. There is something out there for you. Don’t be dangling in the air before you realize that you really do want to live.

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why did she kick that black man and then call him a negro????? bc Sylvia used the word negro so many times i was like damn did i accidentally pick up a stephen king novel?? anyways liked the topics of the madonna complex even though that term wasn’t coined then. i just found this book boring ngl

I feel like I owe Sylvia Plath an apology. This is a book I actively avoided for years because so many people (namely female classmates who wanted to be perceived as painfully different or terminally misunderstood or on the verge of absolutely losing their teenage shit) lauded the virtues of this book and how it, like, so totally spoke to them in places they didn't even know they had ears. My own overly judgmental high-school self could not accept even the remote possibility of actual merit lurking between the covers of something that such bland, faux-distraught ninnies clung to like a life raft.

I should probably also apologize for referring to every pair of oven mitts I've ever owned as a pair of Sylvias but I think the lady scribe in question was too mired in real problems to care all that much about my sick amusement's crass reduction.

"The Bell Jar," packed as it was with bleak truths, difficult topics and wryly dark humor, was not at all what I was expecting. Old biases die hard: I couldn't help but brace myself for a trivial tribute to mental imbalances, White Girl Problems and petty complaints disguised as life-ruining moments. What I got was an utter lack of histrionics and a sincere, to-the-point road map of one talented young lady's fight against her inner demons. Sylvia's alter ego Esther Greenwood (let's all take a second to appreciate the sly cleverness of trading "Sylvia" for the fictional surname "Greenwood") is so straightforward in addressing her despair that I couldn't help but extend more sympathy than I thought I could muster to her understated suffering. If nothing else, this book taught me that my own bouts of the blues are simply me being human and could be so much more debilitating: For that clarity of self-awareness alone, I am grateful.

Reading this as I neared the "Infinite Jest" finish line offered necessary perspective that helped me get a better idea of what it must have been like inside such a messy head. The relative ease with which IJ's depressed cast could self-medicate in secret or seek refuge where at least someone was trying to understand the extent of such gaping psychological wounds offered a jarring contrast to the way Sylvia/Esther seemed truly isolated from those who couldn't see how awful it was to live inside herself. While she encountered precious little understanding in both her personal life (Mrs. Greenwood's inability to see her daughter's problem as her daughter's problem instead of wondering what she did wrong just rubbed my modern sensibilities the wrong way) and from the medical professionals who were tasked with helping her rise above the sinking despair she couldn't escape, I finished this fictionalized semi-autobiography 50 years after its publication with a keener understanding of what Sylvia Plath endured than I'm comfortable with.

5★
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story."

If you are inclined to bouts of depression, find another book. If you've lived with or are fond of someone followed by the Black Dog, this describes the intensity of the feelings (and the treatment) well.

Countless critics and reviewers have written about this sad 'memoir' (written as fiction and first published under a pseudonym) about depression, but it is also full of funny anecdotes and perfect insight into American East Coast college girls in the 1950s.

Knowing that it’s autobiographical makes it more painful than usual to watch someone curl up in despair, feeling as if she’s been captured under a bell jar, suffocating. Being exceptionally smart, talented, popular and loved is no preventive against depression.

She is driven to write, and when she isn’t driven, she fears she’ll never get that feeling again. Therapy, asylums, shock treatment, you name it, it's done to her.

I’ve not read Plath’s poems, for which she is much lauded, but I liked the one that was included. I can’t help wondering if she’d lived a generation or two later if she’d have found anything that would have helped her better.

Interestingly, to me, are the mentions of feeling some comfort being in a tiny crawl space or wedged between her mattress and the padded headboard.

n  “It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.”n

This is reminiscent of Temple Grandin’s hug machine and the similar weights and aids that are used with people on the autism spectrum who may not tolerate real hugs but who crave the relief that pressure can give. There’s now a lot of information about these, but there wasn’t back then. Rooms with no windows feel safe to her, too.

Her alter-ego is Esther, and this scene is when she had a month’s internship at the popular Ladies Day magazine. She’s gone there, thinking she’s always wanted to go to graduate school or study in Europe, become a professor and write. But when her boss calls her in and asks her point blank what she wants to do, Esther is astonished to hear herself reply:

n  “'I don’t really know,' and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that’s been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.”n

This sort of thing that we might do ourselves and wonder idly about, has really thrown her. The fact that she gave father as an example is interesting, in that, her father died when she was very young, and she mentions later that she was never really happy after that. So for her to even contemplate as an example the idea of his being a sham tells us how startling she found her impulsive answer: n  “I don’t really know.”n

But there are so many funny anecdotes, that it’s not all heavy-going. She drank all the water (including the blossoms) in the first fingerbowl she ever saw (at a wealthy benefactor’s, who kindly didn’t remark on it), and found out only later when a college debutante told her. She dates, teases, goes to parties, joins in plenty of college-aged antics.

Her sarcasm and cynicism come through in comments such as this, when she and her med-student boyfriend are outside a delivery room, hearing a woman in labour making a lot of noise. He tells her that the woman is on a drug that will make her forget all about the pain because she’s in a kind of twilight sleep. (Yeah, right.)

Esther thinks:
n  “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, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”n

She wants to grow up, become an adult, lose her virginity, become one of them but remain outside of them, whoever they are. The popular crowd. She actually did a pretty good job of straddling the divide, I think, but that may have been part of her undoing.

“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 [her initials], the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, [many more dreams]. . . 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.”

There’s an enormous amount of information available about Plath and her work, as there is about Temple Grandin and hers, although they are very different women. Still, I sense some connection there.

I enjoyed the writing and have only a bit of criticism about the loose ends that I think she was unable to tie up and that we may think we have figured out, but I'm not entirely sure.

I'm sorry she didn't find, as the women in labour were supposed to find, an escape from feeling that an  "secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”n

My edition had a lengthy editor’s note at the end with some sketches and a biographical note by Lois Ames.

Fascinating.

P.S. See comment #25 for my response to another reader who hated the book because they were triggered by the racism and language, especially the use of the "n -word" (not the usual "n-word", but "Negro"), which IS what we were taught was the appropriate language in the 1950s.

Written in April 1963, this is the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King Jr. addressing his fellow clergymen about his work. In it he uses the word 'Negro' 64 times and the word 'black' only 5 times and when talking about 'black nationalists'.
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles...

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.

The Bell Jar started off in such a promising way. Up to the halfway point I was convinced I'd rate the book 5 stars, despite its blatant (and unchallenged) use of racist slurs (especially Anti-Asian and Anti-Black slurs and depictions can be found in this book, so beware of that!). I just loved how Plath captured the feeling of feeling lost (as a woman in the big city, as a graduate entering the working field, as a human looking into the world's future). The book was refreshing in its honesty.

But for some reason, the second half of the story, once Esther was hospitalised in the mental health institution, fell flat for me. It felt like the plot wasn't moving forward and no new aspects were added to the story. Ultimately, I had to bump my rating down to 3 stars due to its narrative structure and its harmful language. (TWs also for fatphobia, rape, ableism and homophobia)

n  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.n

This is the first paragraph of The Bell Jar, and it serves not just as a perfect opening, it also captures the spirit of the entire novel. This first paragraph already sizzles with life. You get the feeling that our narrator has a lot to say, that she's quite clever, snarky even. She's good at observing things. She likes to put herself in the centre. She feels young, curious about life. Plath's writing is effortless. It feels quite modern, even though the mention of the Rosenbergs clearly puts the novel in the early 50s.

Many modern readers (especially young white women) seem to be able to relate to Esther. And I understand why. I truly do. In the first few chapters, Plath does an amazing job at making her heroine approachable. Yes, she's problematic and highly judgemental of other people ... but she's also cynical and sarcastic, she doesn't know what to do with her future and feels overwhelmed, yet she's also perfect at assessing her situation in a realistic and funny way.

n  I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.n

And aren't these sentiments something most of us can relate to? The pressure you feel after graduation, the pressure to "make it", get a good job, start a family, or whatever it is. Esther feels it too. And she feels it in a way that rings true to Plath's readers. Esther muses: "Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself."

Living through our third pandemic year, of having so many things in our lives be uprooted, of looking into a future that looks so fucking bleak and doomed, many of us will feel like we aren't the ones sitting behind the steering wheels of our own lives. It is external forces that govern us. Plath speaks to a truth that most of us had to quietly admit to ourselves. That ours is a generation that probably won't reach the mountain top, we are quite literally headed into the other direction.

It's something all of us have to face, even though it's hard. We keep procrastinating our lives away, we keep suppressing the knowledge of what the looming climate crisis will eventually do to our lives and the lives of our children. Doing anything meaningful with one's life can feel really fucking meaningless in times like these.

n  'What do you have in mind after you graduate?' 'I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.n

Esther feelings of feeling lost and lonely and overwhelmed are signs of her depression. She doesn't know what to do with herself and her life. And she so desperately wants to feel something. As someone who struggles with depression as well I saw myself in a lot of Esther's thoughts. It was a bleak and unsettling feeling, but also reassuring, knowing that one isn't alone with these thoughts. That's another reason why I think The Bell Jar still speaks to young audiences today. It's relatable and honest in a way that few books are.

The Bell Jar also speaks to a specific female truth. Yes, Plath centres whiteness, and therefore some of her feminist endeavors aren't universally applicable, but I still think that many women know the experiences that Esther and her girlfriends live through to be true. Sexual assault, rape and the belittling of women are continuously portrayed throughout the narrative. Whether it's Esther's friend's fear of her own lover – "'Stick around, will you? I wouldn't have a chance if he tried anything funny. Did you see that muscle?' Doreen giggled." – that is masked by laughter and "lightheartedness", the constant gaslighting she receives from doctors, or her meetings with men who treat women like "a playing card in a pack of identical cards [that] happened to be dealt to him."

Esther's advocacy against marriage is also something that will resonate with many modern girls and women. Among the most iconic quotes in this book are the ones in which Esther muses about marriage:n  

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

nI mean, how great is that? Or her thinking to herself "The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.", after her mother suggests attending a typing course.

Esther, despite her flaws and problems, is an easy character to root for. I would assume it's easier for people who are more likely to look past her overt racism, but even as a Black woman, I empathised with how hard her life is, not only as a woman in the 50s (her fighting off a rape at a party is among the most harrowing scenes in this book) but also as a woman with mental health issues. Plath does a great job at showing how the medical system failed her.

n  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, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.n

Esther is belittled by doctors and her parents, especially her mother, when it comes to her depression and illness. They keep suggesting that she can basically will herself to be healthy again. All her mother wants is for her to be a "good girl" again. When hospitalised, her mother tells her that she should be "grateful" because she had "used up almost all her money". Esther thinks to herself: "I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

And that feeling, of feeling trapped, of sitting under a bell jar, is something that has and will resonate with women across centuries and locations. It's one of the strongest images in the entire book. Esther feels like "the air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir." It's the feeling of being unable to move, unable to steer your own life down the path you want.

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

After her release from the mental health ward, Esther asks herself: "What was there about us, in Belsize, so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort." She realises that the bell jar is not just linked to her mental illness and depression, it's also linked to her being a woman and having certain areas of society barred from her. And she knew that even if now "The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.", she wasn’t sure "that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" There’s no escaping the bell jar, only in death.

And even though I had my problems with Esther as a character and Plath as a person, it made me sad that at the end of the book, Esther "took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.", whereas Plath would take her own life weeks after the novel's publication. She was, she was, she was.

Favorite quote: "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."

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've never shied away from depressing material, but there's a difference between the tone serving the story, and a relentlessly depressing work that goes entirely nowhere. I know it can be viewed as a glimpse into Plath's mind, but I would rather do a lot of things, some quite painful, than read this again. It hurt to get through it, and I think it's self-indulgent and serves no real artistic purpose. Which is truly a shame, as I love a lot of Plath's poetry.