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The Bell Jar: A Novel (Modern Classics) Kindle Edition
A realistic and emotional look at a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by 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 neurosis becomes 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.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateAugust 11, 2015
- File size1581 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B0105VDUQ4
- Publisher : Harper; 1st edition (August 11, 2015)
- Publication date : August 11, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 1581 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 291 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : B09NRHHM1F
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,685 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and The Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Plath is credited with being a pioneer of the 20th-century style of writing called confessional poetry. Her poem "Daddy" is one of the best-known examples of this genre.
In 1963, Plath's semi-autobiographic novel The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas"; it was reissued in 1966 under her own name. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.
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She’s honest with her world and self and doesn’t hold back or pull punches. If you’ve ever had a stint or time of despair in your life, this book describes it so well you’ll begin to feel the bell jar all over again. I found this book reads more like a modern narrative poem than a novel. Her musings on baths, the bell jar, rebirth, and uncertainty is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I felt I was her….am her. It’s not a book you simply shake off. It sticks to you for a while. For those that have had similar trials in their life it will not only stick to you but it will make you feel as if for one moment in time lived a person who understood you. Simply it’s a masterpiece.
One flaw, I think, is Plath’s over-reliance on metaphor. Plath often attempts to come up with a powerful metaphor to describe the state of mind of her protagonist. Her metaphors are sometimes powerful and beautiful but I think she uses them too much. I think there are generally more powerful ways to convey a character’s state of mind. For example, in The Catcher in the Rye - a novel I may be referencing a lot since there are a lot of similarities between the two novels and because I think Salinger’s novel is ultimately more successful - there is a scene where Holden is quite depressed and he is riding in a Taxi cab. He reaches back into his hair and feels that some of the dampness in his air has turned to ice. This physical description is actually a more powerful way to convey Holden’s depression than a metaphor (rather than saying “I felt a loneliness as deep as the ocean”, etc.). Tone of voice can also convey a great deal. If the novel is narrated in an hysterical tone of voice, or one of the characters takes on an hysterical tone of voice, it often draws the reader right into the state of mind of the character rather than using a metaphor to describe it from the outside.
I will say that sometimes Plath's metaphors are right on the money. In one scene Esther is waiting in a waiting room to see Buddy Willard, who is a boy that she has been dating, and it is clear he is much more enthused about the relationship than she is. While she is waiting she sees a fountain and “The fountain spurted a few inches into the air from a rough length of pipe, threw up its hands, collapsed and drowned its ragged ribble in a stone basin of yellowing water.” I like this metaphor for two reasons. First, she is describing an actual physical object in the environment so its use as a metaphor here is disguised. Second, even though it is an actual object in the room it perfectly describes her feelings for Buddy Willard, it is an objective correlate in T.S. Eliot’s terms. She is trying to be excited about seeing Buddy but all she can muster is a spurt that winds up just dribbling down and drowning in its own depths. Plath is also sometimes able to convey mood powerfully without relying on metaphors: in her descriptions of her hot baths, for instance, I think we get a better feeling for her depression than in her metaphors.
Another flaw is: I do not think that the character of Esther Greenwood is as well developed as Holden Caulfield. What was Esther like before her episode of depression? Throughout the novel she can sometimes be quite cruel. Is that a result of the distorting effects of the bell jar or was that always a part of her personality? We learn that she is ambitious, and a good student, and we pick up bits and pieces here and there, but the character is vague, and her voice as a narrator is too literary to reveal much about her character. Holden does not narrate in the voice of a writer but Esther does. It feels like it is written in third-person, by Sylvia Plath, even though it is written in first-person, and is supposed to be the first-person narration of Esther Greenwood the character. When Esther says, at the very beginning of the book, “By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream” (1) it does not feel like a character speaking to us, it feels like a writing exercise. It is a well written sentence but it is not in the voice of the character. It is generic literary language, as is the line “Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep” (50). Compare this to a writer like Celine whose narrators speak in colloquial language mos of the time but can also utter a passage of the most beautiful poetry without it seeming like a literary device; it feels like it comes from the character and is something they would actually say.
The book is quite powerful in places. There is a scene where she is out with a man and he attempts to rape her. It was a frightening scene that I thought did a great job of conveying her helplessness and fear. I have often pondered the difference between seeing violence in a movie or reading about violence in a piece of literature and seeing violence in real life. A lot of the writers I like have a fairly violent aesthetic. Cormac McCarthy, for example. Violence in the works of Cormac McCarthy conveys some kind of aesthetic emotion that is difficult to describe but it is very different from the feeling one has when one sees violence in real life. I have been in a few situations in my life where violence suddenly erupted without warning and the adrenaline starts flowing immediately. It is not an aesthetic or contemplative emotion at all. I thought the scene where the man attempts to rape Esther succeeded in conveying the kind of emotion one feels when violence is actually witnessed. It made the reader feel, to some degree, what it would feel like to actually be in a situation, rather than contemplating it from an aesthetic distance.
I thought Plath’s use of foreshadowing was also a mixed bag. Foreshadowing is a great way to draw the reader in and keep their attention and their interest. I will say, I never had trouble remaining interested in Plath’s novel, but there were some foreshadows that failed to pay off. Very early in the book Esther makes reference to a corpose that Buddy makes her see. I was sort of expecting a pay off, and while Esther does eventually narrate the scene, it does not have a huge impact. On the other hand, there is some brilliant foreshadowing in the opening when Esther is contemplating the execution of the Rosenbergs when Esther can’t help wondering what it would be like to be burned alive “along all your nerves”, which foreshadows her own electroshock therapy.
All in all, I thought Plath’s novel was quite satisfying and powerful despite its flaws. I would liken it to blues music. I am not a music historian, and I actually know very little about the history of the blues, but the analogy to me is this: the blues musicians did not possess all the musical training or sophistication of the great composers. They were not composing music that was as complex or refined as Mozart or Beethoven. But, they managed to express themselves very powerfully with the means at their disposal. In some ways, more powerfully than the more refined composers. They were expressing real suffering, without filter, and people respond to it on a gut level. I think Plath’s novel is like blues music in that way. While there are some flaws in her technique no one can doubt that she is expressing something real and that connects with people. Which is why I think this novel is still so popular in spite of naysayers like Harold Bloom. Critics often attempt to tell artists how they should go about expressing themselves, as if they were trying to channel the waters of a flood, but water has a tendency to follow its own will and explode wherever it wants, and I think we should be grateful for that.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Mexico on December 31, 2023
update : readed like 100 pages and this book is quite racist. maybe this book deserved that
Reviewed in Belgium on March 25, 2024
update : readed like 100 pages and this book is quite racist. maybe this book deserved that