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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 undermaybe 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.
I don't think that I would ever call this an "enjoyable" read... but it is still worth reading.
Sylvia Plath's story of depression in a time where women are not taken seriously and mental illness is demonized feels raw, personal, and wildly uncomfortable. Plath's knack for conveying negative emotions really adds to the uneasiness that this novel exudes. ( )
I had avoided this novel for 30 years or so. Always thinking "I can't read that depressing S%^&! I am glad I finally decided to read Sylvia. I think it's a very well-written book. ( )
An interesting journey through one woman's fumble and, ultimately, fall from sanity to insanity. Her narrative was, at times, a little strange to follow ~ it all flowed well into her losing her mind. I don't know that this was a profound book (one worthy of Reading before I die..) but I didn't mind reading it. ( )
The prose was good, but... the protagonist was so unlikeable and her struggles didn't feel like struggles. IDK, it just didn't click with me. The emding was unsatisfactory, too. ( )
Esther Greenwood's account of her year in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. It makes for a novel such as Dorothy Parker might have written if she had not belonged to a generation infected with the relentless frivolity of the college- humor magazine. The brittle humor of that early generation is reincarnated in "The Bell Jar," but raised to a more serious level because it is recognized as a resource of hysteria.
You might think that classics like The Bell Jar are immediately recognized the moment they reach a publisher's office. But publishing history is rife with stories about classic novels that barely squeaked into print, from Nightwood to A Confederacy of Dunces, and The Bell Jar is one of them. -Introduction, Frances McCullough
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I don'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 paper - goggle-eyes 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. -Chapter 1
Quotations
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. (p. 69)
The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.
"We'll take it up where we left off, Esther," she had said, with her sweet, martyr's smile. "We'll act as if all of this were a bad dream" A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything. I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull. Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape. (p. 181)
I took a deep breath, and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
I began to think that 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. (p. 70)
I wanted to tell her that if only something was 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. (p. 140)
I smelt a mingling of Pablum and sour milk and salt-codstinky diapers and felt sorrowful and tender. How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn't I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway? If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad. (p. 170)
I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.
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 in 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.
I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
Last words
The eyes and the faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.
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 undermaybe 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.
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Legacy Library: Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
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Wikipedia in English
Sylvia Plath's story of depression in a time where women are not taken seriously and mental illness is demonized feels raw, personal, and wildly uncomfortable. Plath's knack for conveying negative emotions really adds to the uneasiness that this novel exudes. (