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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
84 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The original and best on depression?,
By
This review is from: The Bell Jar (Paperback)
Sylvia Plath is probably one of the most recognisable female authors and poets of modern times, she will be largely remembered for her haunting poetry of depression and mostly autobiographical novel (the first and last) the Bell Jar in which her real life persona is replaced by Esther Greenwood, a young woman who is on the verge of breaking into the writing world. In the first section of the book Esther is an intern in New York working for a prestigious fashion magazine. It is clear from the outset that she has worries as she cannot find any immediate beauty in the cosmopolitan world of NY, she merely carries on day to day but it is clear the enjoyment and excitement is gone. As the book progresses we see her return home where she essentially suffers a nervous breakdown in which she is unable to move from her room and concludes that the everyday tasks of life are too unbearable. She then goes on the journey into a deep depression in which she clearly considers the best method for suicide, has regular visits to a psychiatrist and spends time in a mental rehabilitation unit. The one thing that this book highlights is the terrible way in which mentally ill people were treated in the 50’s and early 60’s, the method of electric shock therapy to eradicate her depressed feelings leaves her scared of any other ‘help’ she may receive, and we see how petrified she becomes when next given this ‘treatment’ albeit once more under more friendlier circumstances. The story is a powerful evocation of Plaths own mental health issues and by writing this book she successfully suggested to a quietened nation of other mental health sufferers that it was ‘ok’ to feel this way and that it happened to the best and most promising bright young things. The way in which the Bell Jar is still seen as a core piece of literature on depression shows the values it holds even today, when rivalled against other authors memoirs such as Elizabeth Wurtzel’s ‘Prozac Nation’ and later on ‘More, now, again’ she remains the original and possibly the best writer on the issue of depression and mental health.
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truly Excellent,
By Beauty on the Fire (Essex, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Bell Jar (Paperback)
As a real book worm, I knew that this book was semi-autobiographical before I read it, and I had thought that Plath would struggle to remove herself enough from her situation in order to be able to write about it in a subjective way. I am pleased to say however, that I was mistaken! Plath describes excellently the plunging depths of depressive illness, even conveying to me - someone who has never suffered from depression - the true despair and suffocation that can be experienced.
The bell-jar itself is a description of how it feels to fall into a period of depression- entering into a suffocating, surreal and distorted world where only you live- unable to communicate with anybody. One piece of symbolism I really enjoyed in the book was the notion of the fig tree, and how your life can be represented by a fig tree...so many branches representing the many paths you could take in life. The choice of; which branch will lead you to a delicious fig?...but the ever conscious notion that if you take too long to decide your path, the figs will all be rotten by the time you pick one. I really enjoyed this book. Excellent read.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Bell Jar is a must read for its poetic content,
This review is from: The Bell Jar (Paperback)
This novel is the retrospective viewpoint of Esther Greenwood's (a thinly disguised Plath) mental breakdown. The narrative voice is lucid, yet disembodied. As Esther says in the opening paragraphs "I knew something was wrong with me that summer"...."I was supposed to be having the time of my life". It is as if the characher is saying 'this is what happened to me but it feels as if it happened to someone else' - a totally dislocating and disembodying experience.The novel has a poignant poetic quality and I know we shouldn't read it with the author's biography in mind, but somehow I can't separate out her poetry from her life and from the novel. The imagery of Esther discarding her useless clothes, (which she describes as "hanging limp as fish in my closet"), to the wind, across a New York skyline, is one example of what I perceive as as a disembodied experience. This is made explicit by Esther's observation that it was like scattering "a loved one's ashes". It is almost like an out-of -body experience, as if she had already died, or some part of her that she could not come to terms with had died. The same kind of disembodied experience is framed in Esther's swimming out to sea, where she imagines her shoes will be found on the beach,pointing like a soul compass towards her destiny. This is a staging of events: All the best poets have a melancholic frame of mind and their work is, thus, infused. Plath's work epitomises this dark, descending, cloud of depression and frames it for us in the stale air of The Bell Jar. Wonderful stuff!
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