Bell Jar

Rating:
Summary: Dated
Review: While "The Bell Jar" is well-written its portrayal of psychiatric care is rather out-dated. Stays in hospitals are often reduced to a few weeks or even days by insurance companies. Electroshock therapy is not as commonly used as a "cure."

Other than that, I thought this was a good book, though a bit tedious at times.

Rating:
Summary: A True Classic
Review: The Bell Jar is a truely captivating story. My english teacher was telling my class about the book and how her college roomate's grandmother was mentioned in the book(her character was Philomenia Guinea) so I decided to read it. I read the book in two sittings. You would think that it is depressing and morbid, but I really had a great appriciation of how Sylvia Plath described the character and the situation. Esther Greenwood is witty and independent as well as different and smarter than everyone else in the story. I recommend this book to anybody(especially women), the Bell Jar is a true classic.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've ever read
Review: I hate reading, and usually have to be forced to read for school, but when I sat down with the Bell Jar, I read the first 150 pages in three days! The way that the author presents her stories and situations, not only do you get a detailed understanding of what she is going through, but you start to wonder what is ACTUALLY wrong with her. You come to a point when you don't consider her crazy, but you look at her as misunderstood! I love this book, and I wish that it had never ended! I know that everyone will love it, boys, girls, young, and old! This book should be read by all, although not through school, at some time or another! WOW!!

Rating:
Summary: The Bell Jar
Review: The Bell Jar would have to be one of the most wonderful books I have read yet. I find myself feeling the same way "esther" did in the book seeing that I am also a 19 year old college student who writes poetry and stories trying to find ways to show the world my work. It shows the darkness behind the sugar coating that society has painted for youth today. We are told that we have it easy and that we should be more thankful and in The Bell Jar it shows that life isn't as easy for youth as we are told it is. It shows that success is not always a great thing to have. It can bring you down faster than it brought you up. This is a great book and I recommend it to anyone. It's partially autobiographical and I recommend also reading "Letters Home" by Plath's mother. It has letters that Sylvia wrote to her mother throughout her life and it gives much more depth to The Bell Jar.

Rating:
Summary: A work of art--both thematically and symbolically
Review: Plath's pseudo-autobiographical account, THE BELL JAR, is a striking novel rich in symbolism and marked with thematic relevance. Plath's main character, Esther Greenwood, a talented writer living in NYC and working for a fashion magazine, finds life as a female to be a terrific struggle of choosing between and conforming to the cookie-cutter "good girl" or "bad girl" roles of society. Consequently, Esther continuously references her inability to pick from the world's "fig tree" of female roles; she does not want to conform to ONE single role because she is diverse in both her thoughts and abilities. Plagued by her "abnormal" (as seen by society) desires for female equality, Plath loses her sense of identity and ends up in a mental institute attempting to overcome oppression from the conformity that she cannot defeat.

Will Esther conquer or succumb to the pressures of life's "bell jar"? Only by reading this symbolic novel of self-discovery can one uncover Esther's true fate. Down-to-earth with real-life characters who suffer real-life problems, this novel proves to be a great read for anyone who is looking for lessons on how to prevent and/or overcome personal trials in life. Learning from the examples/mistakes of Esther, the reader grasps insight into life lessons throughout the novel. Skillfully incorporating various symbols and themes into the text, Plath engenders a literary masterpiece as well as work of art.

Indeed, I am convinced that if a reader is willing to open up both his heart and his mind to the sensitive issues of this novel, he will not be let down.

Rating:
Summary: The Bell Jar
Review: The Bell Jar, by Slvia Plath, is a somewhat autobiography of the author's life. To begin the book we meet Esther, an aspiring author who gets a chance to go to New York to work on a magazine. While in New York, Esther realizes the phoniness of the people around her and that she has serious problems dealing with society as a whole. Esther in a downward spiral of dispair and confusion, takes a whole bottle of sleeping pills. Having survived from her overdose Esther is admitted to a mental institution where she is forced to discover her true self, and remove the bell jar that is suffocating her. Sylvia, the author, does an amazing job portraying Esther's raw emotions and inner desires. This is a wonderful book for anyone who liked The Catcher in the Rye, and Girl Interuppted. The Bell Jar has the same pesimistic attitude toward society. Slylvia is a great author with many classics under her belt and this is yet another to add to the list.

Rating:
Summary: A must read...
Review: The book tells the story of a young English major who finds herself breaking down mentally and being treated by electric shock in a special institute. This novel is said to be based on the life of the author, Sylvia Plath.

Is Esther a younger version of Sylvia, or just a wannabe girl with ambitions to become a poet / author / journalist? Or maybe this is just the way Sylvia sees herself, denying all her literary accomplishments? I find that to be one of the most interesting questions raised in the book.

I sensed that Esther's main problem was not knowing how to handle the world around her once she got out of the "perfect" environment of being a star pupil in school and college, and living in a world where she might not be the "star" but the average person or even fail evry once in a while... She starts to feel confused while staying in NYC. Even though she got that stay as a prize in a competition, and the prize could be seen as a high point for her, once she gets there she finds herself in social and personal situations she just can't handle properly. Some are minor, such as drinking the water meant for cleaning her fingers in dinner - and some more serious, like getting involved with Doreen's newfound friends, and finding out too late that she'd rather spend time with the "nicer" girls, boring as they might be compared to the former.

When she finally gets back home, she experiences the first "academic" failure she has in a while - not being accepted to a writing course she was absolutely sure she'd get into. She hadn't made other plans, and is so shocked by the failure she just spends her time doing nothing in her mom's house, and that eventually drives her to think the thoughts and ask the questions that eventually break her down.

Her treatment at the institute sounds like a "standard" and obvious, but I found the descriptions of the other patients rather amusing in a cynical and black humor sort of way...

Esther has a very distorted view of men. The sofisticated men of New York all turn out to be creeps and empty headed people, the guy wshe chooses to lose her virginity with is a calculated women chaser, and even Buddy, who seems to be the perfect guy at first - handsome and smart medical student - turns out to be the sort of person who looks down on Esther, her ambitions and thoughts, and her mental situation.

Rating:
Summary: Distressingly realistic
Review: I find this book almost the biography of Sylvia Plath. The protagonist,Esther Greenwood have numerous similarities to Plath. Reading this heart-breaking novel was a totally unforgettable experience. The book began with narration of Esther,19 and trying to write something in the summer in New York,1950. Esther like Plath was going through a difficult phase with life. She expereinced failures and distress and with unstable mind plus a little this and that lead to mental illness which eventually lead to suicide. Plath depicted the whole situation and events so vividly. Only one been through those thoughts and suffering could relate.

Plath wrote it with so much empathy and conscientious. She was crying out for help to her mental unstableness and woe she was going through. Through Esther, she voiced out her feeling, sorrow,emotions and those things going through her mind at that time. Only Plath will know the truth...

Since this novel was published a month before her death at 30.Wonder how come no one approach to help her.If at that time she had more love,care and support,maybe there's hope, or maybe not....

Rating:
Summary: A cry for help!
Review: I find this book almost the biography of Sylvia Plath. The protagonist,Esther Greenwood have numerous similarities to Plath. Reading this heart-breaking novel was a totally unforgettable experience.

The book began with narration of Esther,19 and trying to write something in the summer in New York,1950. Esther like Plath was going through a difficult phase with life. She expereinced failures and distress and with unstable mind plus a little this and that lead to mental illness which eventually lead to suicide. Plath depicted the whole situation and events so vividly. Only one been through those thoughts and suffering could relate.

Plath wrote it with so much empathy and conscientious. She was crying out for help to her mental unstableness and woe she was going through.

Since this novel was published a month before her death at 30.Wonder how come no one approach to help her.If at that time she had care and support plus better treatment,maybe there's hope, or maybe not....

Rating:
Summary: Plath's other great book (next to the poems)
Review: "The Bell Jar" is many things. When you read it in your teens, like I did many years ago, it's a survival manual on how to get through the idiocy and incomprehension of other people. When you're a bit older, it's a harrowing and scoriating tale of mental breakdown, given extra edge by the public history of its author. When you're a bit older still (I am now about the age that Plath was when she wrote it), it suddenly reveals itself as not just an artful novel but a frighteningly funny one as well.

Even Plath's best poetry has been criticised for occasional glibness, and I have to agree. The sardonic drawl of parts of "Lady Lazarus", for example, doesn't move me like I think it's supposed to - Plath not quite on form can sound like a more extreme, free-verse Dorothy Parker - and the jackboot rhythm of "Daddy" goes on a few stanzas too long, like one of John Lennon's more doggedly sincere creations. Plath's most brilliant poetry has a pure surrealism, a mythological quality, light years from this obviousness.

However, in "The Bell Jar", her liking (and talent) for cracking black jokes is in perfect sync with her panic and her fear of emptiness. This novel takes bitchiness to epic extremes - it's hyper-bitchy, it's suicidally bitchy. The flat, pale tone is always rendering things with the painful vividness you get from the early stages of a migraine. I laugh out loud at Buddy Willard's pathetic attempts at seduction ("Esther, have you ever seen a man?"), and I also hate him for not being more stylish, for being such a smug, humourless prig. The fat medical student who smirks "At least your mother loves you" is a tiny, unforgettable, unforgivable cameo.

Esther on boys is whipcrack lethal, and this is both funny and part of her tragedy. I'll never forget the "bitter, hawk-nosed Southerner from Yale" who comes on all weatherbeaten and streetwise and then writes her a letter saying "he thought he might be really able to love me, I was so intelligent and cynical and yet had such a kind face, surprisingly like his older sister's" - Esther's reaction is "so I knew it was no use" and she breaks off relations with him.

The reason this book isn't your average memoir of a depressed girlhood is that Plath wasn't just the wannabe journalist that Esther (and dozens of imitators) have been, she was an exceptional poet. The underlying sensibility is obsessive, mythological, not novelistic. Plath/Esther has an incredible sensitivity to brute Things, but she doesn't relish them or get curious about them the way a Nabokov would - she experiences them as weapons directed against her. New York at night is not a fun place full of happy people, but a lonely hell of "tropical, stale heat". The UN Secretariat building is not a place where people work but a "weird, green, Martian honeycomb". The feverish style of the first half of the book is stunned into calmness in the second half, when Esther is institutionalised and has had ECT; but it does its work in putting us right inside the spiked, angry cell of Esther's mind.

"The Bell Jar" is a one-off. Plath's other fiction is trivial next to it. It gets better on rereading. I'll probably always turn to it sooner than the poems; for all her demons, Esther is good company, and her story is told with great truth and great artfulness.