Sylvia Plath

I was supposed to be having the time of my life. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into serious depression as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take her aspirations seriously. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is partially based on Plath's own life and descent into mental illness, and has become a modern classic.

The Bell Jar

Bell Jar

Olja Lijeskić

I turned the words over suspiciously, like round, sea-polished pebbles that might suddenly put out a claw and change into something else.

Srijita Sarkar 

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

kayla 

“to the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published under a pseudonym in 1963.
--front flap

Ecnamreh

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoon to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

It’s not that we hadn’t enough to eat at home, it’s just that my grand mother always cooked economy joints and economy meat-loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, ‘ I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound,’ which always made me feel I was somehow eating Pennie’s instead of Sunday roast.

I’m not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.

I think I still expected to see Doreen’s body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ´I'll go take a hot bath.'

I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water's up to your neck. […]

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.

[…] I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water. […]

The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft, white, hotel bath towels I felt pure and sweet as a new baby.

I thought of crawling in between the bed sheets and trying to sleep, but that appealed to me about as much as stuffing a dirty, scrawled-over letter into a fresh, clean envelope. I decided to take a hot bath.

I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

I let myself into my room. It was full of smoke. At first I thought the smoke had materialized out of thin air as a sort of judgment

The tropical, stale heat the sidewalks had been sucking up all day hit me in the face like a last insult. I didn't know where in the world I was.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.

I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time

and I liked feeling naked on the hot summer night.

Buddy Willard went to Yale, but now I thought of it, what was wrong with him was that he was stupid. Oh, he’d managed to get good marks all right, […] but he didn't have one speck of intuition.

I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

biddy

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

rachel

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

fareez

‘We'll take up where we left off, Esther,' she had said, with her sweet, martyr's smile. ‘We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.’

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

‘I don't see what women see in other women,' I’d told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. ‘What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?’

Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, ‘Tenderness.’ 

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.

Please be warned that there are descriptions of self harm and suicide in this book.

Throughout reading The Bell Jar, I felt an unmistakable emptiness. It’s in the tone, in protagonist Esther Greenwood’s focus on rationality over feeling, in her detachment from self. There’s a detachment that Sylvia Plath paints between Esther and her experiences, between Esther and emotion. Though rational in judgment and narration, the draining darkness of depression is felt as it pulls everyone within its reach down below. 

This is a book that reflects Sylvia Plath’s own life, provides an accurate portrayal of the debilitating nature and dismissive treatment of depression and mental illness, and calls to attention the limiting societal expectations of women. And it does all of this so beautifully and with a bit of levity from Plath’s sarcasm and wit. It’s vulnerable and honest and hopeful. It fights to reclaim womanhood and the self. It’s fairly poetic.

This is a book I’ve been putting off for so long, and I’m so glad it’s found its way back to me now at this point in time. As I’ve mentioned before, life is pretty difficult right now. I feel my own perceptions clouded and distorted by the bell jar, my mind and my heart and my lungs trapped and stifled within its heavy glass. But despite the distortion, I know others are just outside, enclosed in their own bell jars, experiencing what may very well be the same thing. And I know I’ve lifted the glass over my head before, so I can do it again.

joana ashley

Please be warned that there are descriptions of self harm and suicide in this book.

Throughout reading The Bell Jar, I felt an unmistakable emptiness. It’s in the tone, in protagonist Esther Greenwood’s focus on rationality over feeling, in her detachment from self. There’s a detachment that Sylvia Plath paints between Esther and her experiences, between Esther and emotion. Though rational in judgment and narration, the draining darkness of depression is felt as it pulls everyone within its reach down below. 

This is a book that reflects Sylvia Plath’s own life, provides an accurate portrayal of the debilitating nature and dismissive treatment of depression and mental illness, and calls to attention the limiting societal expectations of women. And it does all of this so beautifully and with a bit of levity from Plath’s sarcasm and wit. It’s vulnerable and honest and hopeful. It fights to reclaim womanhood and the self. It’s fairly poetic.

This is a book I’ve been putting off for so long, and I’m so glad it’s found its way back to me now at this point in time. As I’ve mentioned before, life is pretty difficult right now. I feel my own perceptions clouded and distorted by the bell jar, my mind and my heart and my lungs trapped and stifled within its heavy glass. But despite the distortion, I know others are just outside, enclosed in their own bell jars, experiencing what may very well be the same thing. And I know I’ve lifted the glass over my head before, so I can do it again.

Campana de Cristal / the Bell Jar

Written from a white perspective and although the story is interesting, it is not as groundbreaking as it was hyped up to be.

Gladys Marcos

I really, really, liked the prose in this one. Sometimes the stream-of-consciousness style of narration pops up, and the descriptions never fail to paint a picture of what Esther sees and feels.

I think I read it at a good time in my life (just fresh out of university, not knowing what exactly I want to do)... 

Throckmorton

I really, really, liked the prose in this one. Sometimes the stream-of-consciousness style of narration pops up, and the descriptions never fail to paint a picture of what Esther sees and feels.

I think I read it at a good time in my life (just fresh out of university, not knowing what exactly I want to do)... 

emmy 

** spoiler alert **
           This is an absolute masterpiece that left an indelible mark on me. From start to finish, I was utterly captivated by the raw honesty and poetic beauty of her writing. Every word seemed to resonate with me on a deeply level, as if she had reached into my soul and put my thoughts and feelings into words. I couldn't help but give it a perfect five-star rating because I genuinely loved everything about it. 
One aspect of the novel that particularly resonated with me was the fig tree metaphor. Plath’s portrayal of Esther Greenwood's struggle to find her place in the world and break free from societal expectations really spoke to me, as I too have grappled with feelings of disillusionment and uncertainty about the future. I feel it perfectly captures the overwhelming pressure to make the "right" choice and the fear of making the wrong one

Rocío de la Hera

Si estás en tus 20's lo tenés que leer.

julia

willow belle

shit got a little too relatable after chapter 10 😁

Ghofran Mustafa 

Someone once said,
The thing about depression, A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end.

We all, at some point, experience this phase: "I'm lost and I have no clue what to do with my life".
While reading this book,I thought that Esther was feeling the same way.
She didn't know what she wanted, feeling scared that she'd just sit there and watch her life pass by, and I believe that's the main reason that made her depressed.

Being lost in every kind of way, trying to find meaning for life in everything she does. And I can relate to all of this. 

As with so many other girls like her, Esther was a lonely person who
needed support and love.I also
was thinking about Sylvia the entire time I was reading this.

When she talked about the fig tree and how each fig represented a distinct life decision for her, that's when I felt the most moved.
It's a pretty dark and miserable book to read overall.
Although not everyone will like it, I definitely did.

Anna 

Kiran Aftab

ok this is how i know i’d hate a little life

Sadly, the novel had a few racist remarks which irked me but I had to take in mind its historical context. All that's well to say, I do not tolerate such things, and it still made me uncomfortable reading such parts. For the rest of the book, however, I feel it might sound too much but this novel has really changed me. It is one of those novels that you are able to gain full insight on a certain matter like depression, and how it was like for some people from the past. I could find myself relating to some of Esther's thoughts sometimes, and maybe reading into her thoughts these past few weeks has also made me feel like I've become one with her. We share something so similar yet experience it so differently, and so makes me wonder, what could've happened to me if I had been in Esther's place? 

Louisa

Terrifying to admit but Sylvia feels the way I do and expresses it the way I wish I could.

Andrea Morales

good book but i hope i NEVER read it again :)

its like year of rest and relaxation if year of rest and relaxation made sense

Noha Zainal

Read it twice and i still can't comprehend the beauty of Sylvia's writing

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 insanity 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.
--back cover

First Senten

armoni mayes

i was in a horrendous reading slump which is why it almost took me a whole month to finish this. that being said it was an incredibly funny read and also..a bit dark of course

Joub

I finished the last 70% in one sitting waiting for my next class and it felt like a fever dream

The Bell Jar

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