The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Bell Jar
Book Review: EXCELLENT PORTRAYEL OF DEPRESSION THAT SHOULDNT BE FORGOTTEN...ESPECIALLY FOR FEMALES
Summary: 5 Stars
There have been plenty of novels that since The Bell Jar have described in painstaking detail the morbid coldness of a psych ward experience, and people who've been through it may more closely relate with these recent
works, as certainly the psychiatric field has changed since 1953. However, Plath's experience is both personal yet easily relatable. We feel in her body when she's receiving the electric shock treatments; we feel in her head as she tries to make sense of why death is so appealing; we feel in her heart as she tries to understand what love is, and why she hasn't even come close to it. Plath clouds Esther's thoughts with plenty of vivid imagery and similes, and by the book's completion, we wish it wasn't over.
FULL REVIEW:
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Book Review: Enlightening and Devastating
Summary: 5 Stars
Esther, a young woman living in the 1950s, should be on top of the world. She is recognized as brilliant by her peers and by the committees who keep awarding her scholarships and academic prizes. She has won the opportunity to spend the summer in New York city, living a glamorous life as a magazine junior editor.
All of the opportunities of the world are open to Esther.... and this fact absolutely paralyzes her. She is terrified of making the wrong decision, of losing out on something by choosing something else. She begins to feel that doing anything at all is futile and nothing in her life matters anyway.
When Esther is passed over for an elite summer writing course, her world begins to crumble. She feels as though her life is slipping from her control, and she spends a great deal of time thinking about the various ways she could commit suicide. It seems that drastic measures are required to calm Esther's troubled mind, and she finds them in an asylum for women.
I found the workings of Esther's mind to be fascinating. In so many respects she seems like any young woman trying to find her place in the world and decide which path she will take and, by definition, which paths will be left behind. The mental anguish she faces at participating in day-to-day life, though, is clear and beautifully written. Esther is smart and amusing and terribly troubled, and it was devastating to read about her decline and her difficulties with simply living her life.
Book Review: Esther Greenwood and Holden Caulfield Would Have Made a Monstorous -- but Hilarious -- Couple [K]
Summary: 5 Stars
Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel begins the first half with an uncannily similar introspective caustic awareness of Holden Caulfield - The Catcher in the Rye - and ends with a tranquil and disturbingly pathetic prisoner of mental illness who resembles Susanna Kaysen - Girl, Interrupted.
The beginning accounts for a young talented writer who wins an award in college to work for a fortnight in New York and hob nob with literary greats while witnessing the operations of a media magazine mogul. Life was free and very good to the protagonist - Esther Greenwood.
Then Esther shrinks and defies comradery and eerily succumbs to a mental illness that most cannot relate to - as most are lucky enough to be immune to such disease. And, to Plath's credit, Esther does not deliver an account pleading for your sympathy. Instead, Plath describes in the first person what she perceives - awkward to the sane reader, but amazingly enlightening.
Malcolm Lowery won great praise for his dipsomaniac's perspective in Under the Volcano - where words plastered on the beginning pages read as though the typist either could not formulate a sentence, or was as impaired as the protagonist. By reading pages of the blundering but decipherable prose, Lowery made the reader feel the torment of the drunkard's demise. In this book, where the prose is not nearly as difficult as that by Lowery (in fact the writing is exceptionally good), the reader is taken to experience what Plath calls the Bell Jar. This book teaches without being didactic.
Before reading this novel, I fondly looked upon bell jars - the glass covers used to protect flowers. They tickled pleasant and fond memories of nature and its beauty. But, to Plath, a bell jar is something much more than a cover to adorn. Even if she received the greatest gift from anyone, she writes that she could not appreciate it as ". . . I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air." And this haunting life discouraged her and made her want to avoid becoming a fusty old mare. She continually would worry because ". . . I wasn't sure . . . [that] somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar , with its stifling distortions. . . wouldn't descend again. . ." And, in real life they did.
Not hidden amid this novel are feminist tones - not undertones. Great details about not marrying, not having children, and fighting men who almost rape good girls like Esther to do the "act" exist in this book. And, in the end after having virgin-ending sex, she experiences what the doctor says "only one in a million" experience - severe unending hemorrhaging. Men are not good for much - even in that respect.
Having lived in the novel's backdrop, and being an avid lover of J.D. Salinger's deprecating words in young man's jargon about the privileged of New York, I felt shrouded in nostalgia when reading this novel. This book brought me to places and literature I admire. This book took me back in time in a comfortable way - irrespective of the topic which I rarely include in conversation or thought. Plath is, in my biased opinion, as important a voice of the early sixties as those who preceded her by only a matter of few years - the Beat Generation.
This novel deserves its praise, and it is certainly our misfortune that the author died at a young age with only one published novel.
Book Review: Exploring the hazy barrier between sane and insane
Summary: 4 Stars
Reading The Bell Jar, I have uncomfortable moments where I see whispers of Esther's insanity in myself. Plath has created a character (or maybe recorded herself in a way) that is eminently believable, and begins the book with a personality that doesn't hint at what is to come later. Her apathy and distraction grow so gradually, normality and madness blend into each other so finely, that it is disconcertingly jarring to realize how hazy and meaningless the word "normal" really is. For some reason we seem to expect that we would know insanity instantly were we to see it, or experience it, ourselves. But of course the difference between a "normal" person and a person suffering from a mental disorder is a construct of our society, not an immutable distinction. This book is beautifully written, with many scenes that linger in my memory. It ends ambiguously, but the sad story of its author gives the entire work a somber feel.Book Review: Fails to define the protagonist's problem.
Summary: 3 Stars
I read this book because I wanted to see what the big deal was. Apparently the author took her own life a month after the book first appeared in 1963 under her pseudonym "Victoria Lucas." Critics say the character Esther Greenwood is an extension of the author. Perhaps it also refers to the book of Esther. I don't know. Nevetheless, it is a typical 1960's book. The protagonist is well compared with Holden Caulfield of "The Catcher in the Rye" (another overrated book). Holden and Esther both are in New York City, the former in the 40's, the latter in the 50's. Like Holden, Esther gradually loses her marbles. In fact, the first part of the book differs radically from the second half of the book. The first part is the narrator during sanity, the latter part is the narrator during insanity, so to speak. Although Esther loses it more than Holden, Holden narrates his story from the nut house. She is the classic mixed up person of Hedda Gabler of Ibsen lore. Esther too, like Hedda Gabler, attempts suicide. What is tragic is not the descent into mental anarchy of Esther, but the fact her problems in the novel were essentially problems because she was too immature to deal with them. This is evident by Esther's inability to make choices. All choices have unforeseen consequences. No one is omnniscient. The solution to her problems was she needed to simply "grow up." It's like falling into suicidal despair because your favorite soap opera was canceled. Some critics have suggested that Esther's problems have to do with repression. In part, I agree. But the definition of that repression has been skewed. The objectification of women is not liberation unless you bought into the twisted logic of the political left. Unless women are liberated to clean house, cook meals, send the kids off to school, clean laundry and go to the grocery store, this repression will only continue. Similarly, white men need to be liberated from the defamation perpetrated against them by the so-called House of David laying at the white man's feet the alleged repression of women and minorities. It is noteworthy that the number of suicides amongst women increased dramatically when women were shamed away from their natural vocation as wife and mother. Unless women are allowed to be women and not pinups for greedy men like Hugh Hefner, Al Goldstein and other members of the synagogue, to be objectified and marketed like slabs of meat, they will remain in bondage to unnatural repression.