The jar bell pdf

Joan might be taken as the representation of the homosexuality and Esther symbolically buries that part of herself, She has become a little more acceptable, a little more well. Despite her education and creativity, she at times wishes to conform to the societal roles and expectations. Nolan that she feels restricted by the thought that she will have to sacrifice her career if she were to marry and have children.

Esther had urges to break through her bond by killing her in her sleep. But according to Esther the repressive environment of her house and her mother has led her to take all the wrong turns in her life. The fault of the mother was the practicality, which was almost robotic. The routine shall not be disturbed. The money has to be earned and saved and not spent on doctors. Life had to go on. On to a point where Esther could not take it anymore and burst out crying on the grave of the father, but providing no relief, no sense of meaning.

The lack of understanding from her mother led Esther to attempt suicide. And the barring is done by Dr Nolan, to whom Esther looks upto. Finally, Esther has a role model. The hypocrisy of Buddy disgusted her but still she competed with him. She felt relieved after losing her virginity to a man she did not have to keep contact with for the rest of her life. Obviously, the representation of femininity ought to be blamed for Esther could see herself in those advertisements doing what was correct for a woman to do as described by society but the complexities in the mind of a s woman was never really portrayed in any form which left the real women with their problems feeling alone and repressed.

For women in s America, it was a totalitarian state where nothing but only what is prescribed by the society was accepted. Which also led to the fragmented self and fractured identities. Esther literally converts herself to Elly Higginbottom, who is everything Esther is not. Anyone who digresses from the social norm was instituitionalized. In conclusion, Esther Greenwood is a complex character and is a product of her times. The conservatism of the Cold War years had hit the women the most.

After the war, Women were expected to return to the house, to the private. This is a disturbingly frightening journey through the mind of a young girl suffering from depression in the 's. How far we have come in the last few decades in recognizing depression as a mental illness and treating it with much less radical techniques than electric shock.

Ester Greenwood is 19 and her future is just starting to unfold. Yet, day by day, she is questioning herself: her capabilities, her confidence, who she is, and what does it mean.

Her thoughts turn dark and helplessness en This is a disturbingly frightening journey through the mind of a young girl suffering from depression in the 's. Her thoughts turn dark and helplessness envelopes her in a tight, downward spiral. Plath captures the emotional characterization of depression and the utter helplessness that accompanies it.

I truly felt like I was living this horror with her. View all 44 comments. Dec 08, Jaidee rated it liked it Shelves: three-ana-half-stars-books. I told my GR friend Ann that I meant to read this since age All the girls I had crushes on at the time were reading this book with their pencil skirts and Smiths Tshirts.

I read some Plath poetry that I enjoyed but never got to this novel. I spent a good deal of time reflecting on Esther She is a fascinating study in female narcissism that mistakes herself for being misunderstood, special and superior to 3. She is a fascinating study in female narcissism that mistakes herself for being misunderstood, special and superior to men, lesbians and those of other social classes and ethnicities.

She is raised by a working class widowed mother whom Esther feels a great deal of disdain and hostility towards. Esther, however, continually struggles for her independence, dealing with her suppressed libido and I suspect significant lesbian tendencies of her own. None of this is unusual in late adolescent females who consider themselves both world weary and special.

Unfortunately Esther suffers also from unprocessed grief, school disappointments and a traumatic event that bring out her biological vulnerability,in her case, either very severe depressive psychosis or more likely a schizoaffective disorder that render her non-functional, at times delusional and severely suicidal. This book is her journey from confused spoiled brat to a young woman with a horrendous mental illness and her journey back to the living world. The book is very adept at describing the moral and the social roles of white middle class Northeastern men and women as well as the hypocrisies of that time period.

At times the book is hilariously funny despite being about a young woman's immense psychic suffering. This book did not reach four star status however. I found much of it fragmented, unfinished and the prose unlike her poetry rather pedestrian more than inspired. I also found that although I found the character most fascinating I was not able to empathize or understand to the degree that I had hoped for. View all 33 comments. Jul 23, Sophia Judice rated it really liked it Shelves: flawed-women-that-i-love.

Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it! The chance of severe disappointment? The possibility of debilitating resonance? Either one would weigh much too heavily on my sensibilities and result in time lo Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. Either one would weigh much too heavily on my sensibilities and result in time lost to regaining equilibrium. Not that I grate against having to go through such measures to regain normal functioning in society, mind you.

The fact that I have found such measures is a matter that I treasure greatly. This review, for example. What I found in this book was not what I had been expecting. My opinion changed as I went on, as it often does, and I have come to see this straightforward dropping of facts and opinions as a boon, a mark of brilliance almost when it comes to presenting content such as this.

All for having mentioned to her university granted and 'confidential' therapist that she had considered killing herself. As she discussed the events leading up to it, I saw the similarities between her thoughts and mine, and thought about how easily I could have found myself in the same horrible situation. In choosing that, I have been much more fortunate than Esther Greenwood, as I have had the time and the space to come to conclusions about my own particular brand of troubles as a female bred for academic success, and how to best deal with them.

How life is full of countless little dissatisfactions, and how the mind is so wonderful at subconsciously accumulating each and every one, and how splintered it can become when it is led to believe that happiness is found one way, and then another, as it is betrayed again, and again, and again.

The hard part is figuring out exactly what you want and need. The frontier of the unknown is whether you will be given the means to achieve it. I promised myself a long time ago that when it came to choosing whether to go back to the path that was guaranteed to end in me jumping off a bridge, or to live, I would choose the latter. Every single time. And while the events described in this book happened long ago, the attitude towards mental illness today is still one of distrustful hysterics, and I'll be damned if I put my faith in the impositions of the public before I've exhausted every possibility within my own voluntary grasp.

You know what? But so long as I can see a future that compels me on, a future that adheres much more to my own sense of worth than what society and its denizens would like me to believe, I can keep going. And I am grateful to this book for giving me the chance to express it. View all 31 comments. Oct 07, Lizzy rated it really liked it Shelves: read-years-ago , classics-literay-fiction , stars It wasn't the silence of silence.

It was my own silence. It opens with "the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs," as if it were an omen of what is to come. Conspicuous and beautiful, it tells a story of despair as a young woman falls to the pitfalls of depression. However, helplessness and doubts drifts all over as a constant companion while she tries to hold to shreds of her life. And, fragments of realization that we are not alone in our despair. Sylvia Plath with her superb, alluring and somber writing, holds the reader spellbound and has the power of drawing us into her tale.

She made me her accomplice in her hilaraty, in her secrets and in her honesty. Thus, the reader empathizes and is grateful to share with her her pain without appearing miserable or demanding any form of solace. This uncovering, if nothing else, should make us grateful. Sep 06, Madeline rated it it was amazing Shelves: the-list , all-time-favorites. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway.

It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world. I have never read something so utterly compelling and literally could not put it down.

It was quite terrifying how often I read something the narrator thought or felt and found myself thinking, "I know exactly what you mean. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Holden Caulfield was a whiny bitch with nothing real to complain about. She makes Holden look like a snot-nosed preschooler throwing a tantrum because someone took his crayons. View all 10 comments. I'm really struggling with writing a review for this one, given the unique nature of the book and the sad reality that surrounds it.

Every book is a testament of its author in one way or another, but with this semi-fictional autobiography it's difficult not to equate the book with its tragic author, making the reviewing of it an exercise in the kind of delicacy I'm not very well versed in. A delicacy that, frankly, I don't really enjoy employing. So what is one to do when he didn't really like " I'm really struggling with writing a review for this one, given the unique nature of the book and the sad reality that surrounds it.

So what is one to do when he didn't really like " The Bell Jar "? Tread very carefully through the thorny bushes, knowing many in the Goodreads populace have a special place in their heart for this sensitive book. I decided on a respectful three-star rating even though my less delicate self would probably give it only two.

It gets three because of its importance, because of its needing to be heard, but my heart of hearts doesn't care all that much about importance. It cares about being lifted up while this story mainly seemed to try and drag it down.

I called this book an "autobiography", but with the important difference that autobiographies put the emphasis on a life fully lived, while in this book life seems pretty empty and the story was mostly about reasons for and ways of ending it. This book reads very much like a cry for help, and cries for help don't generally make for pleasant reading.

The fact I felt useless as I heard that cry, the dread that comes with seeing a person consumed by fires I can't put out and other such merry sentiments make it hard for me to say I enjoyed this book. Everybody who reads this classic also knows about the tragic fate of the author, making the cry for help all the more chilling and making it akin to the reading of an elaborate suicide note.

In short: I'd be surprised if this makes it on any "best beach reads" lists. I realise that even if this isn't a pleasant read that doesn't mean that it's not a good read, or a meaningful one, so let me elaborate on my mediocre rating for a book so highly praised by many others. I normally don't go for books dealing with depression, telling of a darkness with which I'm unfamiliar and quite uncomfortable, but reading is also about getting outside of your comfort zone.

Also, I've got a severe gender inequality problem going on in my reading list and this book, hailed as an important womanly novel, caught my attention through promises of profundity and humor. The profound is there, in the intentions of the author to tell this deeply personal story, but I found most of the observations made in the book surprisingly superficial.

The humor, while there in the earlier parts, felt like vinegar to a thirsty mouth. A perfectly enjoyable riff on the tipping system in New York in one of the earlier chapters gets a bitter taste by the end of the book, becoming a denouncement of one of the many things that are wrong with this world.

Despite the lack of living up to what was promised, not all was bad with this book. Plath had the gift of prose, with elegant metaphors and the creation of immersive settings, evoking indelible images like of Esther sitting in the breezeway trying to write a book or a pair of boots pointing to the ocean.

She's got a poetic stroke that mixes very well with her cynical side, resulting in a reading experience that was artistically and aesthetically pleasing. It's sad that this first novel is also her last, because the markings of true talents, with a lot of potential to be further developed, were clearly visible. I'm sad for Sylvia Plath and for everyone who shared and shares her plight.

I have a great yet tender respect for her, writing this book, which must have cost her a tremendous effort given all the dark clouds in her heavy mind, trapped under a bell jar. But it was not for nothing, because as she was heaving up the bell jar with every word she wrote, trudging along with it in order to be heard, she created something that would make her message heard, then, now and far into the future.

Go on, Sylvia Plath, and rest in peace. Your bell will keep resounding, maybe not on sunlit beaches, but definitely in your readers' hearts. Mar 06, ALet rated it it was amazing Shelves: read-in , favorites. It was interesting to deep dive into women's mind and world. I do not know a lot about Sylvia Plath, but now I really want to read her other works and maybe a life story. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done. Sometimes the traffic report would push me one way or another. After being trapped for three hours waiting for a jumper on Golden Gate to decide if he was really going to do it or finally climb back down, I became paranoid as to whether there would be a jumper every time I climbed into my Jeep to head home. I can remember people standing in groups, cupping their hands around their mouths, yelling for the man to jump.

It was the indecision that was so inconvenient. I have to admit, even though it made my stomach sour, that I too wanted a resolution to this interruption in my life. I wanted to be home with my family, a good book, and a glass of wine. We are all capable of such selfish thoughts.

I felt the same way at moments in this book. I thought to myself, Just please get it over with. So Esther Greenwood has earned a scholarship to college. She has a roommate, Doreen, whom she admires immensely. She seems so self-possessed and free from the burdens of expectations. There is that aura around Doreen that makes men want to break through that cool exterior to the tiger they can sense lurks beneath. The problem is, there is no escape from herself. There is a voice that is slowly turning all the rest of the natives in her head against her.

What have I done? Of course, the poignancy of reading The Bell Jar is the fact that Sylvia Plath does attempt to kill herself in in a similar way as Esther does in the book. I kept thinking about Anthony Bourdain, Virginia Woolf, and in particular David Foster Wallace; all had many people who admired them and loved them.

We think one of the worst things on this planet is to be unloved and how being in that terrifying position would be a reason to be suicidal, but these chemical imbalances that people suffer from tilt the scales of their lives in the wrong direction. I want to unroll the list of things Bourdian has loved and read them to him one by one to convince him that he has much to live for.

I want to catch Woolf at the river, pull the rocks from her dress pockets and fling them into the water to sink without her.

Is that what they wanted? A miraculous intervention? Did they want the universe to insist that they live? This book is considered by many to be a masterpiece. The book is certainly unsettling, especially when the reader knows he is basically reading a page suicide note. Wallace, I believe, wrote two pages. Woolf wrote a simple page, but a beautiful one.

I can see how people who are struggling, especially those who are struggling silently, with their mental health would seek this book out. It does seem to help once people know they are not alone or even discover that their problems are not unusual. For those who see the very best in life, it is sometimes difficult to understand why someone would want to kill themselves. When I feel a bit blue, there is always a book to pull from a shelf to take me somewhere else long enough to let the stormy weather in my mind subside.

I feel very fortunate that I have discovered such an outlet for my happiness. The victim is not the only victim; suicides leave a lake of tears and recriminations in their wake. If you are suffering and are contemplating suicide, please do continue to search for a reason to live. There is something out there for you. View all 14 comments.

Extremely beautiful and powerfully poignant. The Bell Jar is the autobiographical story of a young girl with Esther's future but shouldn't we say, Sylvia?

The young winner of a literary talent competition discovers New York, its parties, demands, and futility. But at the same time, Esther becomes aware of her cruel maladjustment. Of twists and turns, her personality cracks and let us glimpse the drama that occurs on her return home.

Carried away by a furious melancholy, her personality crumble Extremely beautiful and powerfully poignant. Carried away by a furious melancholy, her personality crumbles. Unable to get up, she has caught in the frightening whirlwind of the psychiatric world.

A tour de force that this novel and one feels well behind Sylvia Plath's poetic soul renders with great accuracy the runaway of her thoughts, their confusions, and the loss of her momentum. It's very well writing, but above all, very accurate, and it is impressive to see how the language itself conveys Esther's mood and her progression into madness.

There are no big flights, no wrong notes; it's both testimony and almost a farewell letter. View all 8 comments. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. These chilling lines from 'Daddy' played inside my head time and again like the grim echoes of a death knell as I witnessed Esther's struggle to ward off the darkness threatening to converge on her.

And despite my best efforts to desist from searching for the vestiges of Sylvia in Esther, I failed. I could not help noting how effor At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I could not help noting how effortlessly Plath must have slipped into the mind of an ingenue like Esther, a thinly veiled version of her younger self, while letting her true disenchantment with life and its unkept promises manifest itself in the iconic poems of Ariel.

That she could work up the intellectual rigour to create a body of work unanimously regarded as her very best during a period of tremendous upheaval in the domestic sphere is a testament to her artistic spirit.

The personal lives of very few writers have been subjected to a scrutiny as unsparing as Plath's life invited after her suicide and yet her creations have managed to wrest the spotlight from more sensational subjects like a bad marriage and her lifelong battle with a fatal depression. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.

I had expected a kind of solipsistic navel-gazing to occupy the thematic core of this semi-autobiographical novel but instead what I found was a masterful portrayal of a shared reality of many women of the 50s.

For instance, this is evident in Plath's depiction of an attempted rape scene which she describes as drolly as conceivable, with nary a mention of a word suggestive of sexual assault. Such must have been the way of life before second wave feminism wedged its way forcefully into the 20th century zeitgeist.

Thus, the bell jar does not merely symbolize death or even the decay of intellectual faculties of an artist which Esther Greenwood equates with death. It also represents the metaphorical prison that Esther and undoubtedly many of her compeers may have wanted to escape - the dilemma between attempting to preserve selfhood at the cost of defying societal conventions and submitting to the patriarchal injunction against female autonomy.

I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not. Even though Esther lacks Plath's cold fury and resentment as reflected in many of the 'Ariel' poems, she betrays a subliminal fear of her own sexuality and the world she has only just begun unravelling like a mystery.

In the last stretch when she contemplates likely methods of ending her life without much ado she does so with an unnerving ease, emotionless as a wax sculpture. Death is like the ultimate remedy to the problem at hand - her inability to cope with her own life any longer.

Death also saves her from the tyranny of indecision. The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep. Sadly the parallels between both narratives end at Kaysen's adoption of a distinctly TBJ-esque mode of narration. While Kaysen eventually managed to silence the voices inside her head and went on to pursue a fulfilling writing career, Plath couldn't stand life long enough to leave behind a more voluminous, more enriched oeuvre.

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to circulating air. View all 39 comments. Nov 28, Manny rated it really liked it Shelves: too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts. Warning: this review contains major spoilers for the movie Melancholia The paradox at the heart of The Bell Jar is that Esther, the narrator, comes across as an engaging and indeed admirable person.

She's smart, funny, perceptive and seems to have everything going for her. But she feels less and less connected with life, and in the end just wants to kill herself.

Evidently, there must be something wrong with her. It ends when she emerges from a mental hospital after a breakdown. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in , she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.

The novel is partially based on Plath's own life and descent into mental illness, and has become a modern classic. The Bell Jar has been celebrated for its darkly funny and razor sharp portrait of s society and has sold millions of copies worldwide. Just as to her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry Plath brought a decidedly feminist perspective, so too did she etch in her novel The Bell Jar a disturbing vision of life for young women in America at midcentury.

The Bell Jar - based on Plath's own experiences as a student at Smith College, an intern at Mademoiselle, and a young woman battling for her own sanity amid societal mores of the times - was initially published in England under a pseudonym, its American publication stifled for years by the writer's family. When, however, the novel was finally released to U.

Whereas past critical attention has centered on The Bell Jar as autobiography, Wagner-Martin transcends that approach, looking as well at the novel in its larger context of the social and historical forces shaping women's lives in America during the fifties and sixties.