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The Bell Jar (P.S.)

by Sylvia Plath

ISBN13: 9780060837020
ISBN10: 0060837020
Condition: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under — maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Synopsis:

This extraordinary work--echoing Plath's own experiences as a rising writer/editor in the early 1950s--chronicles the nervous breakdown of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful, but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time.

About the Author

To this day, Sylvia Plath's writings continue to inspire and provoke. Her only published novel, The Bell Jar, remains a classic of American literature, and The Colossus(1960), Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water(1971), Winter Trees(1971), and The Collected Poems(1981) have placed her among this century's essential American poets.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, the first child of Aurelia and Otto Plath. When Sylvia was eight years old, her father died--an event that would haunt her remaining years--and the family moved to the college town of Wellesley. By high school, Plath's talents were firmly established; in fact, her first published poem had appeared when she was eight. In 1950, she entered Smith College, where she excelled academically and continued to write; and in 1951 she won Mademoiselle magazine's fiction contest. Her experiences during the summer of 1953--as a guest editor at Mademoiselle in New York City and in deepening depression back home--provided the basis for The Bell Jar. Near that summer's end, Plath nearly succeeded in killing herself. After therapy and electroshock, however, she resumed her academic and literary endeavors. Plath graduated from Smith in 1955 and, as a Fulbright Scholar, entered Newnham College, in Cambridge, England, where she met the British poet, Ted Hughes. They were married a year later. After a two-year tenure on the Smith College faculty and a brief stint in Boston, Plath and Hughes returned to England, where their two children were born.

Plath had been successful in placing poems in several prestigious magazines, but suffered repeated rejection in her attempts to place a first book. The Colossus appeared in England, however, in the fall of 1960, and the publisher, William Heinemann, also bought her first novel. By June 1962, she had begun the poems that eventually appeared in Ariel. Later that year, separated from Hughes, Plath immersed herself in caring for her children, completing The Bell Jar, and writing poems at a breathtaking pace.

A few days before Christmas 1962, she moved with the children to a London flat. By the time The Bell Jarwas published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in early 1963, she was in desperate circumstances. Her marriage was over, she and her children were ill, and the winter was the coldest in a century. Early on the morning of February 11, Plath turned on the cooking gas and killed herself.

Plath was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for her Collected Poems.

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: ashley.kershaw, March 30, 2012 (view all comments by ashley.kershaw)
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, is a novel that holds heavy elements like depression, suicide, and sex, therefore it is not a novel meant for those who are discomforted easily. The story involves Esther, a girl trapped in a world of unreality and uncertainty which leads her to attempt suicide. Sylvia Plath traces experiences from her own life in this text. The Bell Jar is a chilling, yet brilliant story that brings light to the world of depression.

As previously stated, Sylvia Plath includes autobiographical elements in this book. She, like the protagonist in the story, was born and raised near Boston. Plath’s father died when she was 8 years old; similar to how Esther loses her father at the age of 9 in The Bell Jar. When Plath began to write this novel, she based much of it on her own life. Plath eventually married famous poet Ted Hughes. As their relationship turned to turmoil and their marriage ended, she fell into a depression just as her novel The Bell Jar was being published in England. Just weeks after the publication, Plath committed suicide. After being recognized as an accomplished poet, this text, along with her death, brought Plath to light as a cherished novelist.

The Bell Jar follows the narration of Esther Greenwood. She begins the story in New York, studying with a fashion magazine just towards the end of her college years. In this setting, Esther introduces readers to Buddy Willard. Esther dates Buddy throughout the majority of her story, but she informs readers right away that “[She] did look down on Buddy Willard” (52) because he “was a hypocrite” (52). After spending time in New York, where she clearly doesn’t fit in, Esther returns home to Boston to stay with her mother.

Esther’s glimmer of hope for the summer is shattered when she returns home to learn the news that she had not been accepted to a writing class that she has been dreaming about. She soon plunges into an intense depression at this point. Esther can’t get herself to read, write, or sleep for months on end. She begins to see a psychiatrist, but she grows wary of him when he prescribes her with a horrific shock treatment.

Esther then begins to seriously contemplate methods of suicide. She considers hanging and drowning herself. She even thinks, “One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you counted changing the razor from hand to hand. Then I would step into the tub and lie down” (147). She finally decides to take the whole bottle of sleeping pills her psychiatrist has prescribed to her. Her mother finds her in the basement unconscious and she is then sent to a city hospital.

Esther gains fame throughout Boston from her suicide attempt. After a short period of time, her scholarship benefactor Philomena Guinea decides to send her to a luxurious facility for mental rehabilitation. Here, Esther begins a process of rebirth and regrowth. She coincidentally meets a past acquaintance named Joan at this institution. Esther doesn’t like Joan very much primarily because Joan irritates her, but secondarily because she has a suspicious relationship with Buddy Willard.

Near the end of the novel, Esther decides to throw away her virginity and she sleeps with a stranger she has only known for one day. She ends up getting seriously hurt from the sexual activity and calls Joan for help. Joan, who witnesses and nurses Esther until she reaches the hospital, grows weak from the traumatizing event and decides to kill herself. Esther is deeply wounded by Joan’s death because she realizes that even though she found Joan annoying, she was her only real friend. Esther finishes out her time in the hospital and decides to go back to school. She feels revived and in touch with reality now that she has been rehabilitated, but she fears that the bell jar will close over her again someday.

The Bell Jar isn’t a plot-heavy text, but it is definitely a book worth reading. The author does a superb job of displaying the thought processes and torments one suffers through depression. She presents a chilling tone throughout the entire story by having Esther narrate her suicide in such a nonchalant manner. At one point, Esther claims, “That morning I had tried to kill myself. I had taken the silk cord of my mother’s yellow bathrobe as soon as she left for work, and, in the amber shade of the bedroom, fashioned it into a knot that slipped up and down on itself. It took me a long time to do this, because I was poor at knots and had no idea how to make a proper one” (158). Esther is so logistic about her suicide attempts; she narrates them in such a way that hits the readers hard about her seriousness. The book not only approaches suicide, but it also approaches sex in a very grave manner. Plath holds no reigns on addressing Esther’s painful loss of virginity. Plath uses diction choices like “But as Irvin drove me through the barren, snow-banked streets I felt the warm seepage let itself through the dam of the towel and my skirt and onto the car seat” (230). Relating the towels to snow makes the blood seem all the more violent and powerful. Sylvia Plath creates a vivid illustration of controversial matters in her story The Bell Jar.

The Bell Jar is an effective portrayal of the trenches of depression. Sylvia Plath uses her language and narrative style to relate this story to her own life, making it all the more powerful. The Bell Jar is an incredibly well-written piece of art.

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: erazz16, March 29, 2012 (view all comments by erazz16)
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, takes the reader through Esther Greenwood’s life from June 1953 to January 1954 as she battles through the downward spiral of her life that is depression. By telling the novel through Esther’s eyes, the reader truly gets a sense of what depression is like. Esther lives in New York where glamour and appearance is everything, but no one sees how imperfect her life truly is. As the novel starts, Esther is a young woman, attending college on scholarship, and living in the lap of luxury. Slowly, however, she falls into depression through the continuous hardships she must face. The novel dives into the inescapable reality of depression and the problems of self-image caused by society, ultimately asking if recovery is actually possible.
In order to create the reality of depression for the reader, Plath describes Ether’s world with extreme vividness and compares her life to ideas the reader can understand, describing them in elegant but simple terms. Esther almost justifies her suicidal thoughts through these descriptions. Esther can see “the years of [her] life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. [She] counted one, two, three… nineteen telephone poles, and then wires dangled into space, and try as [she] would, [she] couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth” (123). Esther sees no future past nineteen years old. She is so young, but in her mind, her life is already over. She even decides how she would end it saying, “When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies” (147). Death becomes such an easy concept for Esther, and she makes it sound almost beautiful.
Not only do images create her reasoning for suicide, but they also help the reader comprehend the confusing, intangible thoughts of a victim of depression. “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo” (3). The reader can better understand how the world just seems to hang around Esther; how life can move around her while she is at a standstill. Esther is trapped inside a bell jar where “the world itself is the bad dream” (237). One problem is that she cannot choose a path for her life. She says;

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t wake up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet ” (77)

She is so indecisive that she’s dying trying to choose between all the amazing possibilities for her life. However, the longer she waits, more opportunities pass her by.
But what caused her to feel so dull inside? “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it” (77). Part of her depression is caused by the self-image she creates due to society. She feels inadequate, so she does not see value in living. As she watches her friends, she judges her own life. Her friend, Doreen, starts a relationship, and Esther thinks “there is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other” (16). Esther’s own loneliness is compounded by the excitement of the relationships around her. She feels demoralized because of the gap that exists in that part of her life. Esther refers to herself with forceful, harsh words like “inadequate” and “demoralizing” because the society around her forces her to view her own life as worthless.
Through the vividness and forcefulness of Esther’s thoughts in The Bell Jar, the reader is immersed inside her head, creating an experience that is almost real; a story so genuine and tangible that the reader feels like they are suffering the depression with her, battling it with her. The reader’s eyes can truly be opened to the cold, dark existence of those suffering from depression. It draws the reader so close to Esther that they share a piece of her life. The reader NEEDS to know what happens next to Ester because they NEED to know she is okay, making it impossible to put the book down. In the end, Sylvia Plath leaves the reader to judge whether or not recovery is truly possible, or, will Esther forever remain an empty shell, living through the motions of the rest of her life, trapped in the bell jar.

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: MayaReinholdz, March 29, 2012 (view all comments by MayaReinholdz)
The novel, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath is a fictional autobiography that in many ways mirrors the life of Plath. The main character of the book, Ester Greenwood undergoes similar struggles and feelings that Plath experienced during her lifetime. The setting of the novel is also key in understanding the similarities between Plath and Ester’s character. In the novel, Ester grows up in Boston, as does Plath, both attended prestigious women’s colleges and both want to purse a career in poetry and writing. Both Ester and Plath experience a gradual decent into depression and multiple attempts of suicide due to the experience of failure, oppression of women, and the pressures of society.
The novel is set in the mid 1950’s, a time when women did not have an equal place in society to men. The book begins in New York, where Ester is living for the summer, working on a scholarship as an intern for a fashion magazine. She is living every girl’s dream, yet she isn’t showing it. She doesn’t take in the experience as the other interns do, and instead of helping her grow, it sets her back into her first stages and signs of depression. After New York, Ester moves back home and encounters her first major setback, the denial into a summer writing program. After this, Esters life tailspins downward, and she falls deeper into depression and mental instability. Ester’s physiatrist refers her to a mental institution where she is given shock treatments, traumatizing her and only making her condition worse. After multiple suicide attempts Ester is admitted into the city’s mental hospital. After failing to recover there, she is admitted into a private mental hospital where she is eventually able to slowly make progress towards recovery.
Sylvia Plath uses literary elements such as diction, symbolism and foreshadowing to convey the novels theme. Plath’s writing helps to convey the tone of the novel through her casual, yet intricate style. In the beginning of the book, Ester describes her feelings as “the way a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo” (3). This interesting diction depicts exactly how Ester feels about her life. She feels as though the world is passing her by, while she is helplessly being tossed along by life’s twist and turns, never grasping ahold of what she really wants for herself. The book’s symbolism comes alive as she falls further into depression and a state of mental instability. Plath uses a bell jar to symbolize Sylvia’s feeling and belief that she is trapped by her mind “under the same glass bell jar” (185). The bell jar is Sylvia’s madness and mental illness trapping her “in the bell jar, blank and stopped as dead as a baby, the world itself is a bad dream” (237), and keeping her from living a normal life. Ester feels trapped by her own emotions, causing her to feel suffocated, leading to her depression and almost successful suicide attempts. Plath also uses foreshadowing to convey the novels major themes and tone. In the beginning of the novel Plath mentions multiple times Ester’s fascination with the Rosenberg’s case and how she “couldn’t get them out of [her] mind” (1). Her curiosity and slight obsession over the details of the Rosenberg case represent her own decent into depression and attempts of suicide. By Plath adding in allusions to the Rosenberg’s death, she is immediately alluding to Ester’s own later attempts to kill herself, and giving the reader insight into what is later to come in the novel. Plath uses all three literary elements of diction, symbolism, and foreshadowing to convey the novel’s tone, depict a larger meaning, and, most importantly, to convey the story’s overall theme.
The major theme that Plath emphasizes in this book is the realization of society’s expectations compared to Ester’s feelings toward her place in society. The novel is set in the 1950’s, a period in which women did not fully have the same place in society as men did. Society is trying to fit Ester into a particular mold of a married woman, whose job is to raise a family and care for the children and a husband. Ester doesn’t want the typical things a woman in the 1950’s is expected to have. Instead, Ester wants a career in writing and editorial, she wants to be independent and free from marriage. This causes her to see only her imperfections compared to “normal society and women”, and causes her to be singled out as different compared to the rest of the women. This theme is meant to recognize the oppression of women during this time. Plath uses Ester as a way to convey her ideas about the role of women in society. As Ester is one-by-one turning away marriage, college, and the “typical” role a woman should play, she is pushing against society even more, creating friction as her oppositions stand. The pressure society put on women to fill a certain role causes Ester to think “[she] had been inadequate all along, [she] simply hadn’t thought about it” (77). The pressure that is placed on Ester to fit into the typical woman role in society causes her to fall into depression, giving her the feeling that she does not fit into the molds of society, nor does she want to. Ester wants to follow her own path, but because of social restrictions and the oppression of women, she instead falls down a road of suicidal depression.
I would definitely recommend this book to all readers. The underlying themes and messages that Plath is conveying are understandable by both male and females from all ages. Sylvia Plath successfully captures the essence of the time period while highlighting the struggles that society was facing. Through diction, symbolism, and foreshadowing Play shows how the oppression of women in the 1950’s society forced some women into despair and depression because to the conforms of society. In this novel, Plath gets the reader to think more deeply of the influence of society’s expectations and the dramatic and deathly impact they can have on people such as Ester and herself.

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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780060837020
Author:: Plath, Sylvia
Publisher:: Harper Perennial
Illustrator:: PLATH, SYLVIA
Foreword by:: McCullough, Frances
Foreword:: McCullough, Frances
Author:: PLATH, SYLVIA
Author:: by Sylvia Plath
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Classics
Subject:: Depression, mental
Subject:: Women college students
Subject:: Psychological fiction
Subject:: Suicidal behavior
Subject:: Literature-A to Z
Edition Description:: Trade PB
Series:: P.S.
Publication Date:: 20050831
Binding:: TRADE PAPER
Grade Level:: General/trade
Language:: English
Illustrations:: Y
Pages:: 288
Dimensions:: 8.02x5.30x.70 in. .48 lbs.

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