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The Bell Jar (P.S.) (平装)
by Sylvia Plath
| Category:
Fiction, Autobiography |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A sad, honest, and best-told tale of a woman's descent into madness. An American literary masterpiece! |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 17 items |
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Robert Scholes (The New York Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
A fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems - the kind of book Salinger's Fanny might have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those ten years in Hell. |
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Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
Novel by Sylvia Plath, first published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and later published under her real name. Plath committed suicide one month after the publication of The Bell Jar, her only novel. This thinly veiled autobiography details the life of Esther Greenwood, a college woman who struggles through a mental breakdown in the 1950s. Plath examines coming of age in a hypocritical world in this painfully intros- pective novel, which is noted for its symbolic use of bottles and jars and black and white colors and its symbols of imprisonment and death. |
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Time (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
By turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent and artless. Its most notable quality is an astonishing immediacy, like a series of snapshots taken at high noon. |
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Christian Science Monitor (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
The narrator simply describes herself as feeling very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel. The in-between moment is just what Miss Plath's poetry does catch brilliantly - the moment poised on the edge of chaos. |
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Book World (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor's office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures. |
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Holly Smith (The 500 Great Books by Women) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel is a somber, circling journey through a severe depression. Nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood, on a one-month internship with a fashion magazine in New York City in the early 1950s, wonders what life is all about and feels increasingly confused by her thoughts. When she returns to her mother's home, Esther's feelings of despair become apparent. The reader is awake with Esther when she hasn't slept for seven days, fourteen days, twenty-one days, and feels her suffering when she refuses to wash her clothes or hair because "it seem[s] so silly." At her mother's insistence, Esther sees a doctor who asks her what she thinks is wrong. Contemplating her response, she realizes the question "made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong." She is given shock treatment - "a great jolt [that] drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant" - which causes her to wonder what she had done to deserve this. Later, she spends extended time in private sanitariums. Her awareness throughout her ordeal that many of the accepted realities of life are not her realities makes her struggle even more heart-wrenching. Her pain is real and tangible and it is with sadness the reader learns that Sylvia Plath committed suicide only one month after The Bell Jar's publication. |
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Kimberly Jimenez (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
The hot steam rising off the streets of New York City and the buzz of the Rosenberg case emitting from the radios and televisions laid the foundations for the fragile construct of what became known as Ester Greenwood's Bell Jar. It serves as a euphemism for the period in Ester's life that captures within its confines her gradual breakdown. Ester Greenwood was an aspiring, appraised writer who was sent to New York for a month long internship at an esteemed women's magazine, an opportunity which ensured her job security in the future, fine clothing, food, and accommodations, and the opportunity to work with a renowned editor by the name of Jay Cee. In a situation devised to launch Ester's burgeoning career and future, Ester breaks down to the point she can no longer read, write, or function. What brought about such a decline in what appeared to be such a firm, confident woman?
Sylvia Plath eloquently paints the decline of Ester Greenwood in the novel because it is a self-portrait of her life and her past. The revolutionary work depicts a witty, insightful caricature of Sylvia Plath and her deep, dark struggle with accepting the role of a mother and wife, fulfilling society's expectations. Ester's rebellion against the confines of the female spirit entraps her in The Bell Jar, a world that restrains her from attaining her intellectual and career goals. This invisible barrier leads Ester to thoughts of suicide and self-deprecation. Her relations with her family, friends, and lovers are caught in the web of her confusion, and as the web become more complex, Ester's thoughts become darker and she plummets further into oblivion.
Plath so expressively elaborates the decline of Ester and constructs the perfect conditions for her downfall. From the setting of the hot, steamy, bustling New York City streets to the calmly eerie street her mother lives on, Ester's surroundings depict her own feelings and state of mind. She begins in a state of confusion but relative bliss in her plush New York City hotel, to isolation and dreary thoughts of various deaths she could incur while staring out the window alone in her mother's quiet house. Ester's talk about alcoholic beverages additionally gives insight into her state of mind, when she goes from craving soothing, cooling drinks that appeal to her like vodka, to craving a wet and depressing drink that "tasted more and more like dead water".
The honesty with which Plath portrays Ester, stripping her down to flesh and bone, exposing every daring, suicidal, morbid thought that dashed through her mind, to her random revelations, allows for anyone to find some channel to connect with Ester. The confidence of the reader is won over by her modesty and frank nature, making them vulnerable to her spell. Under the pseudonym of Ester in The Bell Jar, Plath paints the inspiring and intriguing story of a renaissance woman. In every sense of the word she is a woman; she resisted male domination and spun a raw, uncensored and unsweetened depiction of the effects of society on a young, defenseless woman. |
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Alan Chase (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
The fact that I read and review so many books is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, people often assume I am more knowledgeable about literature of all kinds than I really am. So, I am often greeted with, "You surely must have read `Bel Ami' by Guy De Mauppasant!" Then, I have to mumble words of apology for my Neanderthal lack of sophistication and admit to not even having heard of the book! On the other hand, I get to add "Bel Ami" to my list of books to read!
It was just such an interchange about books-worth-reading that led to my decision to pick up a copy of Sylvia Plath's, The Bell Jar, from a used book table in Greenwich Village. I was vaguely aware of Plath and her tragic life, but did not know many details of her story and her one novel. She lived part of her life just around the corner from the location of my office in the town of Wellesley, so I felt a geographic connection to the author and to her overtly autobiographical novel about a young woman's descent into madness and despair.
I felt another connection, as well. She recounts in vivid detail her experience, as a young woman, of undergoing electroshock and insulin shock treatments - the treatments of choice in the 50's for those experiencing a "nervous breakdown." As a child, one of my favorite people in the world was a great aunt who had endured the same kind of mental roller coaster ride that Plath narrates so hauntingly. "Dedda," as she was know within the extended family, lived a life in many ways in parallel with that of Plath and her fictional alter ego, Esther Greenwood. As a young woman, she suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide, was hospitalized, and underwent a series of debilitating shock treatments.
Reading Plath's plangent account of Esther's journey through hell allowed me to feel that I was in some manner walking in Dedda's shoes. She has been gone for almost twenty years, but I think of her fondly every day. And I think of her fondly because of a significant difference between the path that she walked and the one that Plath ultimately chose to follow. Rather than succumbing to a despair that would lead to a successful suicide attempt, Dedda turned her experience with brokenness into a driving passion to reach out with compassion and love to other broken souls. The second half of her life was a frenetic sprint to touch as many lives as possible - often sacrificing sleep and a normal schedule in order to find enough time to visit the sick, bereaved, distraught, unhinged and institutionalized. She became my role model for networking. But, I digress. More about Dedda and her remarkable life another time…
One of the themes that jumped out at me from the pages of Plath's novel was the all-encompassing sense of strangulation that Plath felt as a young women growing up in an era and a culture that delimited the roles that a woman was expected and allowed to assume. She despaired of becoming someone's wife and mother - only to place within the suffocating isolation of a bell jar her brain and her career aspirations.
"I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband. It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.
This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself." (Pages 68-69)
Stylistically, Plath chose to write the first paragraph above as a single, run-on sentence - emblematic of her feeling that she envisioned that such an existence would be nothing less than a life sentence of cruel and unusual punishment.
I am not sure, as a white male, I will ever be able fully to appreciate the frustration of what it must be like to have one's choices in life narrowly delimited by one's gender or skin color, but Plath's claustrophobic Bell Jar takes me a few more steps down that path towards understanding. For that reason alone, this is a book worth reading, reflecting upon and sharing with others. |
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Surya (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
I expected this novel to be incredibly depressing and so had put off reading it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find how much humor it actually has. Futhermore, the writing style is crisp and concise, making it a very easy read. An interesting thing about this novel is it's incredible subtlety.
While often being quite descriptive regarding events and people, the protagonist actually shares very little information about her personal thoughts and her rationalizations for her actions. Normally I would see that as a flaw but the events she narrates seem to actually speak for themselves so that we can almost guess how she must have been feeling or why she was so upset as a woman in a restrictive society who encountered several difficult relationships with men. We can see that these relationships upset her and that the social norms she imbibed growing up kept her from feeling free to express herself, leading to mental instability. This allows the reader to become more involved than is generally possible by encouraging them to fill in the blanks and analyze what is happening in order to draw conclusions about her feelings for themselves.
While often interpreted as being feminist, anyone can read into the novel their own interpretations of her psychological demise based on their own experiences. For example, her type A personality and the pressure she puts on herself as an over achiever is another probable trigger for mental breakdown. Though slightly ambiguous as to the source of her depression, the symptoms of alienation and withdrawal are clearly mapped out. Even if you are unable to relate to what appears to be a self-centered, passive, depressive the symptoms are accurate and the detached tone is an appropriate reflection of someone who is depressed since it makes sharing your feelings with the people around you so difficult. Even the choppy narration can be seen to reflect the mental instability.
The lack of a fast paced plot or some kind of racy trigger for her depression highlights the fact that anyone can become depressed seemingly without warning, and that the ordinary day to day trials of life can be just as wearing on the soul as an dramatic encounter. The overall feeling of the book is one of alienation and withdrawal from the world, yet with delightful touches of humor, written in a simple and straightforward, yet poetic manner. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-08 00:00>
Sylvia Plath was one of those mysterious figures in twentieth century literature whose work I had never read...until now. This is one of those rare novels that is arresting from the first page to the last, not least because of its obvious autobiographical nature, in its thinly veiled descriptions of characters drawn from Plath's life during a six month period in her early twenties, primarily in the character of Esther herself. Plath indicated after the novel was written that this work was autobiographical, with only the addition of a little fiction to give it a little more color. We witness the descent into herself of a compelling literary character, one in whom the seeds of melancholy reside deeply. The society girl who does not quite fit in, not feeling fully connected with her friends, her boyfriend, or herself. One who has a mother who is remote, a father who died while she was a young girl; a younger brother who is absent. She disconnects further, and we see the marks of a deep depression descend on her, as she starts to withdraw from life into her solitude, and a wretched one at that. Depression and sleeplessness and hopelessness overtake her and she goes through the motions of therapy, treatment, being committed to an asylum, electro- shock treatment, a pervasive obsession with death and suicide, and ultimately, several attempts to end her life. This would be great fiction if indeed the sadness of its direct parallels to Plath's life were not present. Some of her descriptions are deeply disturbing, in a way that I have only otherwise encountered in someone like Augusten Burroughs (a present day writer of a similarly harrowing memoir, Running With Scissors). In any event, this novel is further truth that some of history's finest writers and artists are also among those most tortured and unhappy.
Not a happy read at all, rather one that left me with an overwhelming sadness, but filled with appreciation for its beauty and strength. Despite her early departure from this earth (Plath ended her life shortly after the publication of The Bell Jar), this work, along with her collections of poetry, remains and keeps her alive to those who read her words. |
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