Reviews with content warning for Body shaming - The Bell Jar

This book is often seen as a classic feminist work with literary merit, but I found the book to be severely lacking in all the above and hardly worth the two stars I have given it.

The possibly feminist tropes are so small and sparse, the word loses all meaning. The story is about a woman who does not want to get married, yet connects her self worth to her experiences with men throughout the entire book culminating in an act of freeing herself for which she still believes she needs a man.

Plot lines are introduced and cut short before the protagonist has any time to express any sort of emotion or absence thereof.

Apart from the scene where Esther is scared of receiving a certain type of therapy, the only scene in my opinion in which we actually see the protagonist, I found the book poorly written.

We don't really get to know Esther. We get to know what happens in her life, but not really how she experiences it. This is partly due to the factual and cold writing style. Lacking any literary or poetic prose.

The blatant racism in the book, which is not once condemned, giving the reader the message that it is okay and perhaps in line with the opinion of the author, took away any little enjoyment that the book might be able to offer after taking the above points into account.

In its time this book might have added a new perspective, one not often explored. But perhaps it's time to look at books we revere as classics and ask ourselves if they still hold any class or if we are mistaking the word for simply old and poorly aged.

It just made me very sad to see how much praise this book still receives and how all the readers that praise this book seem to ignore how racist it truly is.

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const_elle_ations's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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___'s review against another edition

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.25

First world white girl problems. Not a single likable character in the book.

I knew nothing of this book going into it. As someone who has been both depressed and suicidal most of their life, as well as someone who knows everything's relative, I still found this book to be completely trash and almost insulting (bigotry aside).

...

Upon further reflection, this is one of the worst books I've ever read.

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mirandyli's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

This book is the whitest "I'm not like the other girls" story I've ever read. A country girl comes to the big city on a scholarship and realizes she doesn't fit in. She has always succeeded academically and begins to spiral once she is no longer succeeding.

I thought I would relate more to a book about depression, but I should have expected a super white story. There's casual racist phrases spattered throughout the book (“I looked as yellow as a Chinaman"). The author laments how difficult her life is as a (white) woman compared to a man. She says she doesn't see people as Black or white, but as those who fucked and those who didn't... what?! And don't even get me started on the racist comments about the Black hospital attendant.

Other wtf parts: the narrator falling out of love with Buddy because he became fat after getting tuberculosis (yikes). Or becoming depressed because she volunteered to pass out flowers at a hospital and threw out the dead flowers (one of the weirder moments of the book).

The book, which is about depression, depressed me by how mediocre and white it was.

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