Reviews with content warning for Infidelity - The Bell Jar

Es una historia difícil de leer. Tuve que parar en varias ocasiones. Me resulta inimaginable el dolor de Sylvia Plath. Creo que el primer párrafo del texto transmite exactamente lo que será el resto del libro

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

curatoriallyyours's review against another edition

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challenging dark hopeful reflective medium-paced

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

3.75

Content Warnings

mirireads's review against another edition

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dark reflective 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

4.5

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