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Classic Literature. Fiction. Literature. HTML: A realistic and emotional look at a woman who falls into the grips of insanity written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath "It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." �?? USA Today The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under�??maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's neuroses become completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic… (more)
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On re-reading The Bell Jar, I was almost immediately struck by just how great a book it is and remembered why I liked it so much the first time. The book feels contemporary despite its age, and it is filled with such beautiful prose and apt characterizations.
The Bell Jar has a strange way of making mental illness seem rational. The edition I read this time says it best when it states on the back cover: “Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies.” Indeed, many of Esther’s concerns are valid for a young girl in college. In the early part of the book, the question that plagues Esther most is what she will do with her life, which is hardly an uncommon concern for college students. But unlike other young adults, Ester is staggered into inertia and depression by the many alternate routes open to her for she knows by choosing one, she will have to forgo the others.
Her near rape on her final night in New York City seems to be the snapping point for Esther, and she returns home to contemplate suicide every day before finally attempting. In the sections where Esther spends her time making and unmaking decisions daily, even hourly, Plath loses me a little. Her prose is not nearly so succinct or beautiful here and some parts drag a little.
The book then picks up again when chronicling Esther’s experiences in a mental institution and the treatment (or lack of) she gets there. It was heartbreaking to read when she started receiving shock therapy three times a week (and a sad reminder that we still don't treat depression well, although at least now we're not shocking people over it). A cautiously optimistic ending concludes Esther’s tale, yet we all know how the real-life story ended for Plath.
For the audio reader, Maggie Gyllenhaal is a superb audio reader. She perfectly caught all of Esther’s emotions with both obvious and subtle gradations of tone. Her reading made the character of Esther really come alive for the listener. This audio edition also included a brief biography of Sylvia Plath that was very interesting and highlighted the influence of Plath’s own life on this particular book. Of particular significance was Plath’s explanation that writing The Bell Jar helped her address this part of her past and finally get the needed closure to move on with her life, but that she published in under a pseudonym because she didn’t consider it a serious work.
I highly recommend this book to just about everyone.
Esther is so authentic, so believable that it is hard not to think that much of this is autobiographical and I can't imagine how painful it must have been to write, although of course, it may well have been cathartic for Plath.
Plath possessed a keen eye, a taste for wickedness and a love for irony which mean the tale of slide into depression and back is not all this work has to offer. The saddest thing about it is that it contains or alludes to much of the bitterest aspects of life which anyone, if moved to dwell on them often and deeply, could find incapacitating.
Time to read something vaguely uplifting methinks
There are elements of The Catcher in the Rye in the main character’s disillusionment, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in her hospitalization, but the novel has such a darker meaning than either in part because it was largely drawn from Plath’s own life. It stands on its own and moves you regardless of that, particularly if you’ve wrestled with darkness, but it makes your skin tingle knowing she committed suicide a month after its publication by sticking her head into an oven while her two small children slept.
Quotes:
On feminism:
“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.”
“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equals time and let s equal the total distance.”
“It might be nice to be pure and then to marry a pure man, but what if he suddenly confessed he wasn’t pure after we were married, the way Buddy Willard had? 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.”
“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 colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
“This seemed like a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.”
On happiness, this feeling while skiing:
“Edging to the rim of the hilltop, I dug the spikes of my poles into the snow and pushed myself into a flight I knew I couldn’t stop by skill or any belated access of will.
I aimed straight down.
A keen wind that had been hiding itself struck me full in the mouth and raked the hair back horizontal on my head. I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist.
A small answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’
I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.
People and trees receded on either hand like the dark sides of a tunnel and I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly.”
On physics:
“Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn’t stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.”
On sadness:
“I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”
“I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.”
“I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground.”
On suicide:
“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.”
On therapy:
“I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying ‘Ah!’ in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn’t, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.
Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn’t sleep and why I couldn’t read and why I couldn’t eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”
Lastly, this haunting scene, atop a building, throwing her clothes off of it:
“A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it would come to rest.
I tugged at the bundle again.
The wind made an effort, but failed, and a batlike shadow sank toward the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”
This is, without a doubt, one of the best books I've ever read. Plath's ability to accurately articulate the feeling of falling into a deep depression is amazing. I actually felt as though she had tapped into my head and had poured my thoughts onto paper. I was also impressed by how
FAVORITE QUOTE(S): I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed. // To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
I first read this book when I was 19 and I loved it; it immediately became one of my favorite books, even though I went through a long bout of writers’ block that I attribute to my reading of it. I think that it’s a truly
The story in general is sad, but is punctuated by moments of a sort of morbid hilarity, as when Esther is visiting the convalescing Buddy Willard, a former object of desire and now of revulsion, with Buddy's father who "couldn't stand the sight of sickness, especially his son's, as he believed all sickness was sickness of the will" (paraphrase). Such episodes, little glimpses into absurd and ridiculous aspects of Esther's world, put the reader more in touch with her state of mind, as their lack of development and sustained attention, out of joint with what you would expect, results in an deep sense of alienation.
The effect of the book, throughout, is to transport the reader into Esther's bell jar, the reader however being deprived of the relief that is apparently granted to Esther via the shock treatments, the result being that you are left in a state of suspension as to whether she will retain her sense of the lifted burden, or whether it will return. Which leads to one of the central problems of the book, in my mind: whether the locus (and consequently, treatment) of mental illness and depression resides in the patient or the society.
I wanted to reach out and touch Esther Greenwood. I felt her pain, and needed to comfort her. I tried to share her emotional burden.(Pointless, as she is a character from the twisted but sensational mind of Sylvia Plath.)Her fears became mine. Her pain became mine. Her instability became mine.
Why aren't you having the time of your life in a job a million girls would kill for? Why are you still floating in the gray blob of time between adolescence and adulthood, with neither a set identity, or an outline of a future? What will you do with your seemingly uncontrollable mind, that wanders and dances and aimlessly roams and stays away from the exact place you want it to go, like a slacker from med school? What can i do to help you Esther Greenwood?
After my face returned to its normal color, my pulse slowed, my breathing was once again at its normal pace, i realized that i had just devoured a piece of literature, so unbearably melancholy, that i was feeling blue. (and i don't mean the color of my face, as i was once again breathing regularly) Anything that can make a person feel as i did reading The Bell Jar, should be praised, reread, absorbed, every drop of juice should be squeezed out of it, until it is as dry as the sahara. But when finished, it should still be as juicy, as breathtaking, as it was the first time the binding was cracked.
She writes handsomely, I don’t quite remember reading a book in which the words flowed so easily and beautifully. The scenes she paints are vivid and
I must confess I was kind of bored with the “most doctors are assholes” approach. Yea, yea, we all know that. Still maybe back then no one knew that. Maybe back then all doctors were utterly respected.
The same applies to the inherent feminism. She despises men (though she only meets assholes) and often thinks of a life without them. She even uses birth control methods, which must have been outrageous back then. But next she wonders about having a regular life with a husband and babies. So her feminism is always full of doubt. Then again, she is always full of doubt and I felt that was what locked her definitely inside the bell jar.
In the end it’s sad to know that Sylvia Plath couldn’t take it anymore and ended her own life by putting her head inside the oven and turning the gas on. Maybe today things would have been different, and she wouldn’t have been submitted to shock treatments and such. But I guess her story wouldn’t be as romantic and tragic as it is. Now I am curious to read her poetry works.
It opens in New York City
The Bell Jar was an emotional and immersive experience. Plath was a poet and certainly knew how to write expressively but nevertheless, this book is a glimpse into the dark side of the mind, and of course, knowing the details of Plath’s life made this book all the more realistic and poignant. I will long remember how the author lyrically exposed her raw feelings of vulnerability and failure.
Knowing Plath's personal history, I was surprised by the open-ended, potentially optimistic ending of The Bell Jar, a story of descent into and "recovery" from mental illness. I use quotes and say potentially because I'm uncertain whether we're
My copy has a foreword calling The Bell Jar a feminine version of The Catcher in the Rye, and I think that's a good analogy. Although Esther is a few years older than Holden and already in college, she displays the same immaturity and lack of direction. Instead of phonies, Esther labels her boyfriend a hypocrite because he has the temerity to have sex before she does and not volunteer the information until directly asked. In revenge or to equal the equation, she spends a great deal of time looking for the right opportunity to lose her virginity and ends up doing so in a manner more akin to today's hookup culture than the crew-cut stereotype of the fifties while drifting in and out of lucidity.
Although it isn't introduced until well into the novel, after we've had a glimpse of the coming events, the bell jar is an effective if somewhat perplexing device as a representation of Esther's mental illness. On the one hand, it isolates her from the world around her, letting in light and muted sound but limiting her interaction with that world. It also turns Esther into the subject of an experiment, as she herself must feel as she undergoes shock therapy and what seems like a haphazard treatment regimen. Since it is Esther, as our first-person narrator, who introduces us to this device and Esther who relates her awareness that the bell jar can descend again without warning, we are left to determine on our own the efficacy of Esther's cure.
I had been intending to read this book for a while and putting it off due to my expectations. While it isn't an upbeat book, it also wasn't as depressing a book as say Revolutionary Road and might be viewed differently had Plath herself chosen to live.
'The Bell Jar' is Sylvia Plath's only full-length prose work and was written in the early 1960's. It is an autobiographical novel that relates the descent into madness of Plath's alter-ego, Esther Greenwood. The novel was initially
The story covers a year in the life of Esther Greenwood. Initially she seems to have a rosy future in front of her, she is an 'A' student who is top in all her classes and she wins a competition for a month's all-expenses paid trip to New York to do some work for a prestigious fashion magazine. However, her time in the city heralds the start of her mental breakdown.
Back at home she drops out of college and lazes about the house, her mother worries that she is ill and takes her see to a psychiatrist. But when she is referred to a unit that specializes in shock therapy Esther's condition spirals even further downwards and she finally decides to that her only recourse is to commit suicide. Her attempt fails and she is sent to an asylum.
Esther slowly starts her road to recovery, but a friend at the hospital, Joan, isn't so lucky. Joan commits suicide but this acts as a catalyst for Esther to take control of her life albeit with the realisation that her illness could return and threaten it at any time.
The novel takes the reader inside the experience of a severe mental illness. When Esther considers suicide, she looks into the mirror and manages to see herself as a completely separate person, disconnected from the world and herself. Plath is very careful not to blame her illness on outside events.
However, Plath does attack the notion of the importance of chastity in women outside marriage, a health system that fails women and a society that expects women to simply settle down to marriage and children.
Esther is quiet, introverted and socially awkward but she is also a rebel. She is determined to free herself from societal expectations of what she should become, she disdains what she regards as the hypocrisy and double standards of a misogynistic society which sees a woman's virginity as the sole standard of her virtuous nature whilst at the same time encouraging and applauding sexual activity by men. She deliberately goes out looking for someone who will take her virginity to relieve herself of that burden. Esther is also disappointed by how the medical system like so many others is dominated by men who don't understand or recognise the pain felt by women. Her descent into madness is the direct result of callous and indifferent treatment that she receives from he initial psychiatrist, a man.
There is a powerful honesty to this novel and is a stunning portrayal of a particular period in Plath's life and the brave attempt to face her own demons. Thankfully some of the societal issues that this story attacks are not so prevalent today, even if they haven't gone completely, but all the same it still feels relevant and deserves to be on the 1001 list.
Thoughts: I thought this book did an excellent job of both portraying an intelligent woman's struggles in the 1950's and her mental breakdown and recovery. While I didn't really enjoy this per
This story follows Esther, an incredibly brilliant young woman who gets an opportunity to go to New York and write for a fashion magazine. She wants to be a poet or editor after she finishes college and this internship in New York is perfect. This story is supposed to parallel Plath's own life and struggles.
This is a tough read. Esther has so much going for her, but she is also smart enough to recognize the poor decisions and pandering that happen around her. She is both intrigued and disillusioned by the fast-paced New York scene. Watching the way she was treated by a lot of the men around her was painful. Then watching as a relatively small set back (not making it into a literary college class) set her into a depressive (and finally suicidal) spiral was tough. Plath portrays this all in a way that is realistic and easy to relate to. Esther seems fairly reasonable throughout her mental collapse and does her best to seek help and support. She is lucky enough to get supportive assistance and is determined enough to pull through onto the path of recovery.
I think what frustrated me most is that, although things have gotten better for both women in general and people suffering from mental illness, we still have a long way to go as a society. Esther has so many people tell her to "just hurry up and get better", like she has a choice. For a long time the support and assistance just isn't there for her. The character of Esther was lucky enough to get involved with a hospital and group that was cutting edge for the time and supported her recovery. A big part of her recovery is figuring out what makes Esther feel so out of control and sad.
The afterward goes into Plath's life and her struggles. Plath struggled and unfortunately, it doesn't seem like she got the same support that Esther did. So, while this was a book I think should be read, it wasn't really an uplifting or happy read.
My Summary (4/5): Overall, while this isn't something I will reread, it was masterfully written and I am glad that I read it. This touches on so many societal issues that are still problems today. In addition it makes this type of depressive spiral relatable and understandable for those who haven't gone through this sort of thing. This is beautifully written and does end on a hopeful note. Although in general it left me feeling pretty down when I thought about how much further we have to go as a society.
I found this book haunting. I was left with such a
I think the best thing about this book is its subtlety. At no point does Plath ever write "I was depressed" or anything so obvious. The subdued mood of the book is all created through observations and little details that gradually build up to absorb you in the writing.
I read this in two days. Its unputdownable to use the cliche and I definately would recommend it to anyone who has ever felt down for a prolonged period of time because you will find yourself identifying with at least one of the main character's feelings if not more.
Just don't read it before a party or a big night out...
For a book that should be sad, perhaps difficult to read/digest, the first portions flew by. I enjoyed the references to the 50’s (what is a pocketbook cover?), the beginnings of feminism, the ideals of the parents upon their children, marriage, perspective on sex and virginity. I found the writing to be honest, crisp, and direct, even though she jumped timelines as needed to address back stories. The later chapters were harder to process as the spiraling of this intelligent woman deepened – covering her shock treatments and institutionalization. I resonated with her writing style, ex: regarding the bad things in life: “But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”
I underlined numerous details about her disappointments, rather it is at herself, the people around her, the society then, the expectations upon the female sex, and wondered when/how do these add up to be too much. The book doesn’t attempt to explain. It’s just her facts, her view of her life, and the evaluation of herself. This book, when interpreted with a current mind set, may represent the struggle of women to fit in and define an equal say in this world (still a huge gap) . She hated the idea of serving men in any way (via her job), doesn’t want to become a floor mat and to be brainwashed because of marriage. I find she expressed a lot of strength in her convictions. After reading the book, I think she simply succumbed to her demons one day. Despite one’s life successes, rather in the home and/or career, the sadness dominates us. Then we cave in, especially when we think our death doesn’t mean anything to anyone.
Some Quotes:
On Success but feeling empty and not in her control:
“Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
Tired of the rat race at the age of 19:
“After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.”
On Physics – this made me smile as physics was the first science class I had to really study to understand:
“Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn’t stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr. Manzi’s special red chalk.”
The view on women, as expressed by Mrs. Willard:
“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security. What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”
And Esther’s response:
“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 colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
More on Feminism:
“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as bad as let t equals time and let s equal the total distance.”
Marriage and Feminism:
“This seemed like a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.”
“And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before 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.”
“I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. 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.”
In indication of much worse ahead, throwing her clothing away on her last night in New York:
“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”
On Suicide, and the depth of it:
“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.”
On Death: Do all women whose fathers died early have deep laden issues?
“Then I remembered that I had never cried for my father’s death.
My mother hadn’t cried either. She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn’t have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen.
I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”
The Bell Jar – To be suffocating in it, selected references:
“I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
“But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”
When she comes home her mother immediately lets her know that she has not been accepted to a prestigious writing course that she'd had her heart set on. Esther decided to spend her summer writing a novel but gets discouraged by the belief that she hasn't had enough life experience to write well. This coupled with the memories of what she feels was a betrayal by her unofficial fiance Buddy helps to send Esther into a downward spiral of depression and insomnia.
Her mother convinces her to see a psychiatrist whom Esther immediately dislikes and who preforms electro-shock therapy incorrectly on her. Eventually, Esther is sent to a private facility where she meets a new doctor and receives treatment for her depression.
While the book has a reputation for being very popular with the angry feminist set but I didn't see it like that. I saw it as just a disturbing voyage through the mind of a woman who is losing hers. Yes, Esther struggles with what is appropriate for her as a woman in that time period. However, I just saw someone who is unsure what her place in the world, who she is and what she is supposed to do. I think that is a feeling that is easily relatable to so many people, both men and women. I do totally see why this book is so popular with the young adult women though since I had many of the same thoughts when I younger.
Though I've never personally dealt with serious mental illness, I have suffered through bouts of postpartum depression after the birth of each of my children. I felt like I'd lost control over my own impulses, thoughts and feelings and it was the scariest thing I've ever dealt with. This book brought back some of those feelings for me and I didn't like that at all. I can't say I enjoyed the book as it wasn't exactly a fun read but I am glad that I read it and would recommend it to anyone.
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Plath herself committed suicide in 1963.