The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

Mass Market Paperback, 216 pages

English language

Published Aug. 7, 1981 by Bantam Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-553-23960-7
OCLC Number:: 444868443

(72 reviews)

A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath's own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness.

~from the back cover

109 editions

M.Duritz reviewed Campana de Cristal / the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Sí pero no pero sí

4 stars

A ver: entiendo porqué es un clásico y no puedo decir que no haya disfrutado de la lectura. Pero me la ha enturbiado el hecho de que la protagonista me ha parecido insufrible. Por otra parte, sé que está muymuyMUY basado en la vida de la propia Silvia Plath y creo que parte de la insufribilidad del personaje de Esther se debe a lo realista que es el discurso interno, y eso me parece una virtud. De hecho, las escenas me parecen tan originales que me lo creo si me dicen que todo pasó exactamente así. Otro pero: la nula transición entre escenas me ha sacado de la historia muchísimo. Sin embargo la continuidad del mensaje, desde spoiler la electocución de los Rosenberg hasta la terapia de electroshocks fin del spoiler, y la claridad de las causas->consecuencias de su derrumbe es perfecta. Y así podría seguir y seguir. En …

isa reviewed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Faber paper covered editions)

"Darkly Funny" is apt

4 stars

Content warning Mentions of depression and racism

Esther is an interesting but (in my eyes) unsympathetic character. She has a certain manipulative streak that unsettles me. But she makes up for it by being quite humorous at times, intentional or not. Sometimes I can't quite tell if she is self aware enough of herself.

Plath, however, is completely self aware. She inserts humour in unexpected places. She makes acute observations about the characters. She is a little cynical. It's evident that Plath is in a precocious place in her psyche. And she turns it into a beautiful work of art.

It would be remiss to praise Plath but not address her racism in this book. She continuously uses "Chinaman/woman" as descriptor and an insult. She writes a grotesque caricature of a Black man in one scene. It did not wholely take me out of the reading though, since it seems very in line with Esther's character, but it is something that should be taken note of since Esther is practically an avatar for Plath's own psyche.

As for how I felt about this book... I enjoyed it. There were a lot of moments where I inwardly cringed at Esther's behaviour. But I still found her character completely compelling. It was dark, yes. An accurate portrayal of depression, yes. And an interesting look into how mental health and women are treated in the 1950s. I feel like the end kind of went over my head and will need to read this again at one point.

Stephanie Jane reviewed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Faber paper covered editions)

Surprisingly matter of fact when describing horror

4 stars

I am lucky to have read The Bell Jar by choice, borrowing a copy from a friend who also loved the book, rather than having to read it for school and I think these different approaches significantly influence how people feel about Plath's semi-autobiographical novel. At the very beginning I was reminded of Rona Jaffe's The Best Of Everything which was written around the same time and also examines the lives of young women in New York. However it is Plath's rejection of society's restricted expectations for women which, for me, made The Bell Jar an interesting novel and The Best Of Everything seem somewhat vacuous.

I was surprised at Plath's matter-of-fact language, especially when describing some of the horrors of what passed for mental health care in 1950s America. I think it is this removal from herself which was the strongest symptom of her breakdown, but it made it difficult for me to get under the skin of her writing. I am used to more overt emotion. I found myself wondering how much of The Bell Jar was actually fiction and how much truth. Being always aware that Plath did commit suicide shortly after the book was first published coloured my reading of it, especially in scenes where Esther feels herself blocked from following her dreams due to her gender and where the opposite applies and she meets role model career women - writers, doctors, psychiatrists - but does not recognise the potential of their example, locked away as she is in her metaphorical bell jar.

Artem reviewed Sırça Fanus by Sylvia Plath (Can Yayınları 197)

Yazarın Kendi Hayatından Bir Parça

3 stars

Sylvia'nın kendi hayatını anlattığı bu roman, benim için ırkçı ve homofobik cümlelerle dolup taşmasa hayatımın merkezinde yer alabilirdi. Keza hala benim için önemli bir yere sahiptir bu kitap. "Sırça fanusun içinde ölü bir bebek gibi tıkanıp kalmış biri için, dünyanın kendisi kötü bir düştür."

Wolfie reviewed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Review of 'The Bell Jar' on 'Storygraph'

No rating

After finishing reading I found out that it is a semi autobiographical story and that makes it difficult to rate because it is so introspective and personal

BOOitsnathalie reviewed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Review of 'Bell Jar' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

My favorite book of all time. Bleakly funny, beautifully penned, a wonderful and horrible companion through so many years.

Erin reviewed Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

Review of 'Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

There was a lot I really enjoyed about this book. I think if I hadn’t known multiple people with depression, I’d be more annoyed by this book. I used to be far more impatient with depression, like most uninformed people are. I think Esther could easily be frustrating to read and unlikeable without some context.

One of the main problems with this book is some racism. I didn’t expect it, though I should have. It’s random, not constant, but it’s there. She’ll use other races or ethnicities as ways to describe ugliness or sickliness, unfortunately.

Esther has an interesting journey. It’s a slow descent, brought on I think by some quarter life crisis thoughts. She notes that she expected to not get into this writing course, which her future goals depended on. You get the sense that she told herself she was going to get in, was planning for it, but perhaps deep down felt it was unlikely and didn’t want to face that. But as her time in NYC passes, she has to start thinking about it.

I related to her feelings about doing well in school. I was a straight A student in undergrad. Once I got to grad school I had a realization that straight As don’t matter. No one’s going to care. My effort dropped. But in my case it was more a relief, less pressure on myself as I moved toward the finish line. In Esther’s case, it leads to her questioning whether anything matters. She’s sort of awakening to the emptiness of her goals, or the difficulty in achieving them, and it takes her on a downward spiral.

I was glad to read her come back out of it. She’s not suddenly a wonderful person

Cheri reviewed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Review of 'The Bell Jar' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

Loved it. Plan to read it again at some point.

Matto reviewed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Faber paper covered editions)

Review of 'The Bell Jar' on 'GoodReads'

4 stars

Sylvia Plath was a very promising writer. It is a pity she died too young.

Hilo reviewed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Review of 'The Bell Jar' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Sehr schmerzvoll, sehr nachvollziehbar.

Phiznlil reviewed Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

Review of 'Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I'm glad that I finally got around to reading this... It is beautiful, interesting and sad, but most of all full of beautiful descrive language!

Michael @ Knowledge Lost reviewed Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Review of 'Bell Jar' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Esther Greenwood is a young woman from Boston who gains an internship at a prominent women’s magazine in New York City. We follow her personal life and her decline into depression, attempting suicide to being committed into an asylum. We see the bad treatment as well as the good, all the way up to her attempt to re-enter the world.

This is the seminal semi-autobiographical novel of Sylvia Plath and I’m so glad that I’ve finally read The Bell Jar. I want to say she is the female version of Charles Bukowski (even though I’ve only read Factotum); there are differences but I feel like the voice and style feel very similar. Originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas to protect identities of characters she took liberties with, but more the fact it parallels Plath’s own experiences.

A bell jar is an inverted glass jar that is normally air tight used to display objects for observation, normally for scientific curiosity. For Esther the bell jar is a symbol of madness, when gripped with depression she feels like she is stuck in a jar with no real perspective to the outside world. It prevents her from making any real connections with people and sometimes she feels like she is on display (especially when she was hospitalised and received all those visitors).

What was interesting for me is that to me it never really felt like Esther Greenwood suffered from depression to begin with. I’m not saying she wasn’t really suffering but for me I think the idea was forced on her by everyone else, just because her thoughts were a little macabre and she was a little different. Almost like she was forced into her descent, because she was a little different to the norm.

Esther has an obsession with death; we get that from the very start with her fascination of newspaper headlines about executions, suicide and death. There is also the blood motif throughout the book; blood normally represents life but the constant bleeding would point towards death. When she starts to think about killing herself she talks about it at great lengths and even practices slashing her own wrists.

I think this is a novel about the regression into madness, the life experiences that normally have a positive on a person’s live, but for Esther these were partly responsible of her descent. Romance, success in education, finding work and Marriage proposals tend to upset or disorient her and in the end instead of finding reasons to live she finds how different she is to others and this cements her choice to die.

Then the book looks into the world of treating mental illness, the good and the bad. This is where the book moves into the territory similar to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in particular a look at 1950 psychiatric treatments. In this part there seems to be three treatment types used within the book; talking, injections of insulin and then the dreaded electroshock therapy. The treatment is meant to clear the mind entirely and after her first electroshock treatment Esther was unable to think about knives. The treatment was doing more damage than good, especially to her intellect.

I went into this book thinking there might have been some psychological elements but that this was mainly a novel about feminism. It is to some extent but what I got was so much more; I was really impressed with this novel and really enjoyed the journey it took me. I feel like kicking myself for not reading this sooner. A novel about a protagonist slipping into depression is normally right up my alley but I’m a little perplexed about the ending. Overall this is a masterpiece and well worth reading.

This review originally appeared on my blog; www.knowledgelost.org/random/regular-segments/book-of-the-month/book-of-the-month-the-bell-jar/