From the Bookshelf of EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club…

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

Start date: December 1, 2022

Finish date: December 31, 2022

Discussion: CLASSICS READS

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CLASSICS READS

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What Members Thought

Jul 28, 2009 Athira (Reading on a Rainy Day) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, f-literary, format-print, fiction, source-own

It's been three days since I finished this book, but I've been pretty much hesitating to write this review. I wanted to gather my thoughts, which were in such disarray after reading this book. Besides, I was still imagining what life had been like for Esther Greenwood, and hence Sylvia Plath, wondering how after getting "cured", the author apparently relapsed and took her life.

This is the story of Esther Greenwood's breakdown, her deepest fears and how she attempted to recover from it. In Sylvia It's been three days since I finished this book, but I've been pretty much hesitating to write this review. I wanted to gather my thoughts, which were in such disarray after reading this book. Besides, I was still imagining what life had been like for Esther Greenwood, and hence Sylvia Plath, wondering how after getting "cured", the author apparently relapsed and took her life.

This is the story of Esther Greenwood's breakdown, her deepest fears and how she attempted to recover from it. In Sylvia Plath's words,

The pressures of the fashion magazine world which seems increasingly superficial and artificial, the return home to the dead summer world of a suburb of Boston. Here the cracks in her [the heroine, Esther Greenwood’s:] nature which had been held together as it were by the surrounding pressures of New York widen and gape alarmingly. More and more her warped view of the world around—her own vacuous domestic life, and that of her neighbors—seems the one right way of looking at things.

Right from page one, I was able to identify with Esther Greenwood. I did go through a lengthy phase, some time back, when I questioned every thing I did, when I wondered if I was on the right path or career and whether I wasn't just a robot going along a path charted long ago, without giving it much thought.

Esther begins to first acknowledge her doubts when her manager has a quick reprimanding one-to-one with her.

All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.

Her manager asks her:

"What do you have in mind after you graduate?"

What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.

"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.

Sylvia Plath slowly sets the stage for Esther's descent into "madness", in the first few chapters, where she gets increasingly suspicious about others' actions and increasingly disregards her work. During the one month at the job in New York, she tries to grapple with boyfriend issues, girlfriend issues and also with her image. She vacillates between affection for her acquaintances and scorn towards them. She slowly starts imagining more fanciful scenarios.

Once her internship is over, and she is back home, her schizophrenic actions become more obvious. The much-conveyed impression through her illness is that everyone is out to get her. As I was reading this, another book that came to mind is Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, whose protagonist, Dolores is similarly depressed and doubtful of other people's intents.

I know this book is described as Esther's "descent into madness". But although she did have schizophrenic thoughts, I did not find them so severe as to call it "madness", or "insanity". Maybe I am taking it a little too literally, but that's the surmise I got. Of course, to go from one extreme of being very focused on her course, to the other of being convinced that she won't write again is indeed a huge negative transition, but I didn't feel that what she went through warranted a tag of insanity.

Other than that jarring note, I found this book very impactful. It paralleled Sylvia Plath's life during the six-month crash, including her well-publicized disappearance, subsequent discovery, and consequent hospitalization for shock treatment. The shock treatment episodes made me particularly cringe. It felt almost inhuman reading about the existence of such practices. Sure, it was a long time ago, but nevertheless, attempting to shock a person into sanity felt almost barbaric to me.

Sylvia Plath eloquently captured the distraught felt by the victim, who looks at the world as if through a bell jar - thereby causing the warped view of his/her surroundings. What is particularly chilling are these lines, which almost seem like a self-prediction:

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

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It is always interesting to look at a world through the eyes of someone mentally challenged. What does such a person see? What does he/she think? The reader always believes the narrator. So when you read first-person beliefs about others out to harass you or others gossiping about you in a corner, it is definitely moving and harrowing. ...more

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