A review by outcolder
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

5.0

At first, I was like, why was I so scared of this book? It’s funny as hell! A bit like that teevee show “Girls” but in “Mad Men” time... I was really laughing out loud a lot... but then she punches a rapist in the nose and gets away from him and that is the turning point. The back of my copy has this blurb that talks about a slow descent into depression, but it isn’t really is it? Even if Plath herself saw it as a slow descent, that isn’t really right, is it? This Marcus tries to rape her, and then she has a Major Depressive Episode... the next third or so of the book is a string of suicide attempts that actually — and I don’t mean to be cruel, I think it’s Plath’s intent — actually are also kind of funny... the way a depressed person can have thoughts like ‘I am so useless, I can’t even commit suicide properly... I think she means for us to read the suicide attempts and smirk and think “pathetic” ... then comes the treatment. Here she is in a horrible misogynistic world and then to make matters worse, the psychotherapy is also horrible: shock treatment, insulin, ugh... the certain knowledge that every woman in that private hospital is there because she won’t conform to the narrow, dark tunnel the men have prepared for them... there is Willard for example who asks her if there is something about him that makes women suicidal, and the answer is actually yes, but it’s not something special about Willard, it’s everything all the men are doing to keep everything so shitty for all the women. There is way way way more to this awesome book than I have babbled here, but that’s all I want to say for now.