Even though I didn't understand it completely I couldn't help but love it. ( )

Sylvia Plath's semi autobiographical novel is a very disturbing read indeed. It starts out pleasantly enough. The main character is a beautiful intelligent woman spending a month in New York City, all expenses paid, as a reward for her academic achievment's. She's interning as with an editor and gets to go to parties on a nightly basis. Seems like a wonderful future is in store for. But then we start to notice some cracks in the armor. She suffers from depression and we sadly watch her spiral further and further down the proverbial, slippery slope before attempting suicide. She's admitted into an asylum whereupon the novel turns really dark, at times horrific. Reading about the torture of electro shock therapy, virgins hemorrhaging to the point of near death upon their first sexual encounter, and young women hanging themselves by the rafters, I felt I was reading something out of a Stephen King novel. And what made this novel even more troubling was that while The Bell Jar is a novel, she was in fact, pretty much telling her own life story. ( )

I remember reading this in high school and being blown away by it. I'd be interested to pick it up and read it now as an adult. ( )

Very depressing, and it seems that she was ahead of her time, what with not wanting to have kids and not wanting to marry the "wrong" man. Shame it had to end the way it did. ( )

The postscript biographical information makes clear how much _The Bell Jar_ tracks with Plath's own life. Setting that aside, and the foreshadowing of her suicide in London in 1963, I get the comparison to _The Catcher in the Rye_. Esther's time in New York feels tonally similar to Holden Caulfield's attempt to navigate his independence while still struggling with grief. Esther is holding in her own depression; what makes the Bell Jar so powerful is how unaware the reader is that her life is teetering on a precipice - Esther is only allowed to express herself in the limited way striving women are allowed to show vulnerability.

Her love life takes center stage in the early chapters - it is only later do we see how hollow and destructive these relationships can be. A woman's identity is totally subsumed by her marriage prospects.

And that is the main difference between Esther and Holden - ECT was (and probably still is) applied to female depressives more than male. Holden needs help and never gets it. Esther is institutionalized soon after her first suicide attempt. It is a question of freedom, but also of how expectations define these characters. Holden is not expected to be functional in the same way as Esther.

The ending is more tragic because of its ambiguity. There is the realization that Esther will never fully escape from under the thumb of her depression, and that she lives in a new reality. It is the reality of poetry and death. ( )