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luci_liest 's review for:
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
dark
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
When I stumbled upon this book in the library, the name Sylvia Plath immediately rang a bell as a classic feminist author, but I didn't really know anything about her or the story. CN: suicide.
Esther Greenwood is a young girl with a promising future, spending a month in New York on a scholarship where she and other girls like her get to make some firsthand experiences of working at a successful women's magazine. So far the whole setting kind of reminded me of "Friends like these", only taking place in the 60s. But then Esther gets depressed. It starts in New York that she doesn't feel like herself anymore or questions who she really is. But when she gets home and discovers that she didn't make it into the writing course she applied for, she plunges headfirst into a deep depression in which she can only think about ending her life. What follows is a detailed account of what depression can feel like.
I'm not sure how to rate the book. I did like it on some level - like Esther not wanting to get married and tie herself to a man, an almost revolutionary act at the time, but there's also a good amount of internalised misogyny. On some level it's timeless. But on another it didn't age well - there's a lot of casual racism that put me off.
Sylvia Plath based Esther on herself, it is an autofictional account of her own time in New York and her stay in a mental institution ten years before. Sadly, she died by suicide a month after publication. She was 30 years old. Next to a lot of poems I didn't read (as I'm not into poems), this is her only novel. It's hard to say whether her work would have progressed more into feminism, but I can see how it inspired feminists at the time, although it doesn't seem particularly feminist to me (especially not through my modern intersectional feminism goggles) and apparently this wasn't her agenda anyway.
I'm gonna say 7/10.
Esther Greenwood is a young girl with a promising future, spending a month in New York on a scholarship where she and other girls like her get to make some firsthand experiences of working at a successful women's magazine. So far the whole setting kind of reminded me of "Friends like these", only taking place in the 60s. But then Esther gets depressed. It starts in New York that she doesn't feel like herself anymore or questions who she really is. But when she gets home and discovers that she didn't make it into the writing course she applied for, she plunges headfirst into a deep depression in which she can only think about ending her life. What follows is a detailed account of what depression can feel like.
I'm not sure how to rate the book. I did like it on some level - like Esther not wanting to get married and tie herself to a man, an almost revolutionary act at the time, but there's also a good amount of internalised misogyny. On some level it's timeless. But on another it didn't age well - there's a lot of casual racism that put me off.
Sylvia Plath based Esther on herself, it is an autofictional account of her own time in New York and her stay in a mental institution ten years before. Sadly, she died by suicide a month after publication. She was 30 years old. Next to a lot of poems I didn't read (as I'm not into poems), this is her only novel. It's hard to say whether her work would have progressed more into feminism, but I can see how it inspired feminists at the time, although it doesn't seem particularly feminist to me (especially not through my modern intersectional feminism goggles) and apparently this wasn't her agenda anyway.
I'm gonna say 7/10.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Blood, Medical trauma, Suicide attempt
Moderate: Suicide
Minor: Racism, Xenophobia