TITLE: The Bell JarAUTHOR: Sylvia Plath
STARTED: October 23, 2008
FINISHED: October 29, 2008
PAGES: 296
GENRE: Fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I don't know what I was doing in New York.
SUMMARY: [From barnesandnoble.com] The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother and the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her 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 rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature.
THOUGHTS: I can't say that I enjoyed reading this book. On the other hand, I also can't say that I didn't like reading this book. The Bell Jar is a tough read. The text itself is easy enough to follow (far easier than I thought it would be), but the emotions and physical reactions I had while reading this basically ensures that this will be a one-time only read for me. There were too many times I cringed, felt uncomfortable, or sick to my stomach over the course of this book. It reminded me of scenes in a movie where I felt like I had to turn away or risk being sick.
For being a book about a woman's decent into madness, I found that text logical, steady, and remarkably easy to follow. That leads me to believe that Plath wants the reader to be in the shoes of Esther. She is insane simply because she believes her decisions to be healthy and logical. I was surprised by how even keeled Esther seemed - in some ways, I grew to admire her because she knew what she wanted and was rarely distracted from her path. Esther may have been insane, but her willpower was strong.
Honestly, I don't know what scares me more: the fact that this book made me shiver in disgust or the fact that it made me feel a sense of empathy with Esther.
Luckily for me, I did not read this alone. My book club is tackling the text tonight - I think we'll be having one hell of a discussion.
RATING: 7/10 [Very Good]
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