Reviews with content warning for Misogyny - The Bell Jar

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I was in the airport waiting for my plane to visit my family, absolutely raging inside. Not because I didn't want to see my family but because I was bored and eyeing people eager and happy to travel made me think about my future. More specifically where I could be living after I graduated university. Maybe I'll be in Brazil trying new food, on a train in east Europe, visiting my friend in japan or maybe grad school in Singapore,or maybe I won't go anywhere. Instead of feeling whimsical or excited about all the possibilities, I was growing more and more frustrated because I knew. No matter where I was I was never going to be happy. I thought I was the only depressed person in that airport surrounded by happy strangers.
I was forever trapped in this body. In this mind that hated being. A new location, a new hobby, new group of friends has never and will never make me feel any different. Because I was forever trapped under this glass bell jar. And I believed this to be true. 2 years later I would suffer a major mental breakdown where my depression took hold of my life. While therapy, antidepressants and a strong support system saved me, but I think reading and listening to similar stories help usunderstand and take hold of our own experiences and stories.

While I didn't relate to Esther on every aspect I was surprised to read my own experiences and feelings written so delicately on paper. Reading the bell jar, not only was i reading about Esther, I was reading about myself. flashes of parallel memories like the one I had in the airport. I felt less alone knowing I wasn't alone in feeling like this. I understand why this book is liked. Even if mental illness isn't part of your life, you can feel plath's despair and grief seep out of the pages. Or the pressure plath feels from having to pick a career path fearing that what she picks will not be the 'correct path, the disappointment you feel from knowing you didn't get into a program you applied to, the panic from graduating college and entering the real world, being pressured by your superior at work about your performance, meeting your parents expectation of how you should behave, the double standards society puts on women and men. I think there are aspects anyone can relate to.

But... I do have criticisms, the racism. Do I need to say more? Yes I do. The racism deeply embedded in this novel is just ugh. Ugh. It's the decisions plath made to use non white ethnicities to describe unappealin scenes. She describes herself as a yellow Chinese man to describe herself looking unattractive or how the only black character in the book is described in such mocking way etc. Maybe it is a tad unfair to compare today's standards to a book written in the 60s. But when we talk about the bell jar so many of us (I definitely have) talked about how plath's view on mental illness and feminism was ahead of her time and these discussions are still discussed today. If we can compare those to today's standards we can point out the racism. Its not the most outrageous outward example of racism in classics but it is sprinkled everywhere in the book. Maybe it is not very noticeable to some but for people who lived their whole lives being outcasted for the color of our skin it is super noticeable.

Content Warnings

bregger99's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

areebanomani's review against another edition

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dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

4.0

Content Warnings

emohell's review against another edition

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dark 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

3.0

read this for class and enjoyed it a lot more than i thought i would!

Content Warnings

courtneyfalling's review against another edition

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dark sad medium-paced

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

3.0

I had to read and annotate this the summer before I went into high school, and I hated it then. Like, for years and years I considered it the worst book I've ever read. Mostly, it terrified the shit out of me. I already had pretty significant depression by then and so everything in Esther's internal thought processes seemed... normal. I was following along. She was just sensitive. And then suddenly I was reading the first scene where she self-harms/possibly attempts suicide in a very graphic way

slitting her wrists at her childhood home

and I had to immediately put the book down and try to distract myself because I was so filled with fear, disgust, and shame that I hadn't realized this was where the book was going and that I'd just had such a viscerally triggering scene thrown at me. In retrospect, this absolutely should not have been an assigned reading option for a thirteen-year-old. Reading this book at all requires significant emotional prep and awareness of content warnings that I was not given, and even if they had been superficially mentioned to me, I didn't have the power to opt out of reading or the resources for any necessary aftercare whatsoever.

I finally decided to revisit this book almost eight years later because I wanted to see how my opinion might've changed after so much internal reflection and mental health advocacy. And I have... mixed feelings. It is genuinely one of the best depictions of a suicidal episode I've ever seen, in terms of how it explains social pressures and cultural influences on mental health and how it connects patriarchy and (surface-level) feminism to mental health. I'm a few months out from college graduation now, and its descriptions of how career uncertainty and dread contribute to depressive episodes are spot-on in the earlier chapters. It talks about medicine in a complicated and real way, including the biases of medical professionals and the harms of medical trauma.

But holy hell does it still have problems. I think the biggest glaring one is Sylvia Plath's racism, which she offloads onto Esther. (This is a good article for the basics of racism in The Bell Jar but there's a whole set of stuff out there at this point: https://www.wweek.com/arts/books/2017/10/04/its-time-we-had-a-talk-about-the-bell-jar-the-white-feminist-racist-literary-icon/.) The scene that occurs while Esther is in an inpatient facility is atrocious as are all the other racist comments and asides throughout the book. For this reason alone I don't plan to ever try to pick up Plath's writing again.

There's also a bunch of issues I had that, for simplicity's sake, I'll call "pacing."

I was confused by Esther suddenly waking up in the hospital, and it takes a while for Joan to present the relevant newspaper stories and context for us to understand what happened. Buddy Willard's plot line felt stretched thin by the end, Joan's importance to the story ramped up suddenly in the second half and the actual weight of her death was downplayed, Esther's quest to lose her virginity and her resulting blood loss left me with a lot more questions than answers, and we spent a lot of time learning information and details about characters in the first half who would entirely disappear by the time Esther went home, just to name some primary ones.

The biographical notes at the end also begin to address some of the controversy this novel created in the world directly around Sylvia Plath, including how it wrecked her mental health in the process (in no small part because of the difficulties of trying to balance her career, her children, her marriage, and her own health) and how it destabilized her relationships with her family and others who she created fictionalized representations of in this novel. I feel like this is a terrifying, solid case study of autofiction ethics and what it really means to represent your closed loved ones in literature, especially such emotionally raw and representative literature. It also makes the novel's racism even more reflective on Sylvia Plath as a person and writer across all her works: there is no separating Sylvia Plath and Esther Greenwood, not really.

Anyway. Read this at your own warning. It's hard stuff.

Content Warnings