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

bösewicht

Campana de Cristal / the Bell Jar

micaela

Cuando se marchó, me pregunté por qué de pronto me costaba tanto cumplir con mis obligaciones. Eso me hizo sentir triste y cansada. Entonces pensé por qué me costaba tanto no cumplir con mis obligaciones, como hacía Doreen, y me sentí aún más triste y más cansada. 

hessensitive

“That’s tough, Joan,” I said, picking up my book. “Because I don’t like you. You make me puke, if you want to know.” And I walked out of the room, leaving Joan lying, lumpy as an old horse, across my bed. 

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep. 

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

The wanted to do everything once and for all and he through with it. 

It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my night- gown 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 teacher once herself. 

Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a red- blooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebody who wasn't pure either. Then when he started to make my life miserable I could make his miserable as well. 

I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldn't seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. He'd go to a whore if he had to and keep the woman he loved free of all that dirty stuff. 

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. 

After that - in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-colour lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and black- bottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day- I had never really been happy again. 

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open and shut her in again.

Then I wiped each finger carefully with my linen napkin which was still quite clean. Then I folded the linen napkin and laid it between my lips and brought my lips down on it precisely. When I put the napkin back on the table a fuzzy pink lip-shape bloomed right in the middle of it like a tiny heart.

Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. 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. 

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. 

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat. 

Botany was fine, because I loved cutting up leaves and and putting them under the microscope and drawing diagrams of bread mould and the odd, heart-shaped leaf in the sex cycle of the fern, it seemed so real to me. The day I went into physics class it was death. 

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.

Mdy<3

sylvia plath is one of the authors that encapsulates writing the feeling of emptiness. in addition to that, the lead character, Esther, remind me so much of sylvia on her unabridged journal. 

this book is such a good read that it healed my slump. 

sylvia plath is one of the authors that encapsulates writing the feeling of emptiness. in addition to that, the lead character, Esther, remind me so much of sylvia on her unabridged journal. 

this book is such a good read that it healed my slump. 

i enjoyed this book at first, especially considering i dont usually choose literary fiction (?) but then it rlly lost me. having to google a summary of the book after finishing it ,, not my fav experience. i hate ambiguous endings so even more minus points & i wish i knew the trigger warnings going into it yikes 

An enjoyable read. I appreciate the pov & enjoyed the themes of marriage, women vs men & crippling mental health through Sylvia’s lens. 

im so sick to my stomach bcs been reading this for tooooo long and finished it this nighg where i thought im not at my function (like... at all!) 

Alma

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.

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

fareez

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

Vince Hilahan

isabelle

Beautifullly written but Esther was a piece of shit

The Bell Jar

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