The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

This haunting American classic has been on my bookshelf for quite awhile. Why not make a Bahamian vacation the perfect time to involve myself in a psychotic breakdown? bad timing? I think so. Regardless, I now have this book under my belt and can carry on conversations at dinner parties with others whom have also read the book...or are slightly psychotic themselves!


In this darkly humorous novel that’s more autobiography than fiction, Plath portrays the slow mental breakdown of Esther Greenwood, a talented and successful writer on scholarship at a prestigious women’s college.

At the time the book opens, Esther is at a glamorous summer internship in NYC fashion magazine. Here, in this world of endless possibilities,  she begins her unwinding into the dark world of her own 'bell jar', the mental illness that descends upon her -- suffocating and distorting her own world.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.
The book is beautifully honest with a whole range of issues that are still relevant today amongst the 'female angst': identity, sex, gender roles and the pressure to achieve. This book, therefore, is poignantly relative to so many today. It is painfully honest and yet such a clever subterfuge that the reader is drawn down the path toward madness but without even realizing it. Her mental illness happens in such small increments, it almost felt rational. By the end of the book, Greenwood is in a mental institution receiving shock therapy with attempts of reintegration into functional life. Did she make it?

Although Plath committed suicide shortly after her novel was published, the book has endured the decades because of the perfect subtle fall into mental illness. For someone like myself, who is not that well experienced with mental illness, it gives a fascinating portrayal of a writer's psyche and her inherent creative genius. Aren't most brilliant people somehow slightly mad?

Overall -- It's a classic and should be read. I can't say that it was 100% enjoyable, but still -- I'm glad I now understand the analogy of the fig tree w/ dropping figs. The painting makes so much more sense now.

How did I know that someday–at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere–the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?