Review of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

*The Bell Jar* by Sylvia Plath (1963). Published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

If you’re new here and stumbled upon this blog through the magical powers of the Internet: welcome! My name is Ashley, and I worked as a film critic, am an author myself, and I just generally love reading, writing, and watching all forms of art.

I started this blog as a form of a digital diary to keep track of what I’m reading, as I was finding I was reading so much I was beginning to forget the basics of what I was consuming.

Anyways, one of the formative books I’ve read in the past few years was Red Comet, which is a massive biography about Sylvia Plath. I read it at a low point in my own writing career, when I was depressed and doubting whether I should continue, and then I realized how important it is for me to keep going.

I’ve always loved Plath’s work, and never got the hate for it. Red Comet helped me piece together how much of it is sexist when we interpret her legacy.

Dismissing her and calling Plath a Tumblr literary girl is so reductive of what she did and overcame, especially when we interpret her legacy through the man who controlled her last book’s production (Hughes) and through the lens of male literary icons.

Anyways, I read The Bell Jar recently and wanted to review it. 1950s American fashion magazines is a period of history I’m weirdly obsessed with, so this came at the right time for me, and I do quite like Plath. I found a copy at my local library, cracked it open, and finished the book quite quickly.

I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, so let’s get into the review, shall we? I know the semantics of how we got here can be a bit too much if you’re not here for that.

A depressed young woman, in new environments, slowly reaches the point of a mental breakdown.

Before we get into the meat of this review, something I think we should be mindful about when consuming and reading this narrative specifically is how personal it is. It’s a thinly veiled version of what went down in Sylvia Plath’s life, as she herself was selected to work in New York at a fashion magazine (through a program others like Jackie Kennedy did) and had multiple breakdowns.

This novel is set in 1953, and our protagonist Esther is 19. She goes to a university in the suburbs of Boston and has just been awarded a prestigious summer internship at Ladies’ Day, a New York City based magazine. Despite this being such an incredible opportunity for her career, Esther find of feels numb to everything going on around her.

Despite her fellow interns and workers seeming so excited for being in the world of fashion and consumed by all of the lights in New York City, Esther simply isn’t happy. She finds herself admiring a more simple and old fashioned girl named Betsy, and meets with her benefactor that funds the scholarship that allows Esther to attend her college.

As this goes on, there are other major events, as this is a novel that’s told through a series of flashbacks. This is a reflection of what went down, and what Esther witnesses isn’t exactly all sunshines and rainbows at the end of the day. There are some serious traumatic events she witnessed, and the summer has to come to an end eventually.

She does return back home to Massachusetts and finds everything she expected to be the way it is, which of course does not happen. As things start to unravel for her, she starts mentally succumbing to the impacts of not succeeding the way she expected to, leading to devastating consequences.

A large chunk of the book is exploring how she ended up getting electric therapy, as well as how she tries to grapple with the impacts of her declining mental health. This is where the concept of the bell jar really comes in, as it feels like Esther is suffocating from the weight of her own expectations and mental health throughout the course of the novel.

Plath, who was also a very conventional woman from the 1950s, is also casting a look into the gender roles of the period she was living within. Through reading her biographies you can see how she was a very traditional wife, but this might have actually also contributed to her worsening depression and led to her eventual suicide.

Overall Thoughts

Whether it’s trendy or not, I think this is such an important book. It shouldn’t be minuscule in the sense where it is solely an accessory for someone trying to seem intellectual; actually go and read the book if you’re going to take the aesthetic that far. I’ve met some people who’ve done this.

Regardless, I love Plath if it wasn’t obvious. I think this novel is another show of her brilliance, and we were truly robbed of her talent too soon. It was a shame she felt a need to end it all, right when her career was starting to blossom and take off. We lost so much when she died.

Go read this if you haven’t already and are interested. It might be worth your time if you’re into the themes and storylines it brings up throughout its plot.

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