She fears the end of her career as a writer should she get married, and she wants a more interesting life than just raising children. “… I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.” One of the central ideas in the novel is Esther’s aversion to getting married and thus throwing away her life and aspirations outside of motherhood. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”Īnd that leads me too… Feminism in The Bell Jar

“ The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. Luckily, I live in a time and a place in which this is no longer a rigid social requirement for women. I also related to her desire to escape the stifling life of wife- and motherhood she sees stretching out in front of her, as becoming a housewife would not make me happy. I was pulled into the book immediately, and I found so many of Esther’s thoughts uncomfortably relatable, especially the well-known “fig passage”, where she describes the choice paralysis she faces with regard to her future, and the feeling of life slipping away as she struggles to choose. It is even stronger when you realize that Plath wrote this novel to be semi-autobiographical. You are submerged almost completely into Esther’s psyche and her hopelessness becomes your own. Reading this book feels like stepping into a sea of suffocating grayness. “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.” 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.“ My Thoughts: 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. “ 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.

Genre: classics, feminism, psychology/mental healthįirst line: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” The Premise:

The bell jar sylvia plath book