Sylvia Plath was an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection, The Collected Poems. She committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30.
The Bell Jar is billed as a novel, a work of fiction, although the book reads as an autobiography and, upon reading facts of Sylvia’s life, it is obvious many of the elements came directly from her own experiences.
In 1970, her mother penned a letter to the publisher pleading her case as to why the book should not be published, explaining the stresses Sylvia was under at the time of its writing and Sylvia’s own desire that the book not be published in the United States. She stated that Sylvia had described the book as “events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color-it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown”.
The book has been compared to Catcher in the Rye and I have to agree. It is similar, though from a woman’s perspective. Esther Greenwood is a bright, straight A, college student who begins to feel more and more isolated, finding fault with everyone, and eventually declines to the point of suicidal thoughts occupying her daily life. She finally acts on this impulse and lands herself in a mental institution with all that entails, including shock treatments, which were commonplace at the time.
I had hoped the book would give me more insight into the actual state of mind one is in that makes the life so dark that one succeeds in committing suicide. Perhaps that was her actual state of mind, and that was what perplexed me. The feelings expressed, however lonely, didn’t convey the darkness that I was expecting.
What did strike me, however, was her lack of loving. She didn’t express a love or even a strong affection towards anyone and she did not express that she felt love or great fondness coming to her from another.
I found The Bell Jar to be a quick, easy read, perfect for the weekend.
