As a student of English Literature, you get book recommendations practically every day. Of course, there is no time to read all of them and sometimes the books will not be worth your time. I can only say that I am now very thankful to my lecturer in first year who told me to read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
To be honest, The Bell Jar is not a particularly joyful read. Instead, it is a painfully honest account of a young woman, Esther Greenwood, spending a summer in New York City while doing an internship at a women’s magazine. While Esther is “supposed to be having the time of [her] life”, the “stream of consciousness”-like narrative illustrates all throughout the novel her feeling of suffocation as if living in a stifling bell jar, ending in a mental breakdown after her application for a prestigious writing class is rejected. Until then, Esther’s academic and literary career had only existed of perfect grades, prizes and scholarships. Her whole identity, which she based on her achievements in writing, is now shattered. Esther no longer knows who she wants to be, and the suggestions of others, ranging from learning shorthand to marrying and becoming a devoted house-wife for the rest of her life, do (understandably) not appeal to her at all. The novel movingly portrays the struggles in her professional and private life, while thematising the question of womanhood and the double standards of the strictly patriarchal American society of the 1950’s as well as social alienation and, most importantly, the struggle with mental health.
The Bell Jar is Plath’s only novel. The novel, which was only posthumously published under her own name, is very much inspired by and based on Plath’s own life. Often termed “a modern classic”, The Bell Jar however offers more than your average work of (semi-)fiction: no matter how enthusiastic (or not) you might be about literature, you will become absorbed in this novel that offers you a poignant, but unsettling story that is still relatable to young readers today. It is a sad and cruel truth that the essential struggles of Esther (and Sylvia) are still part of the lives of many young women today, which makes the novel even more relevant. Though an account of a past life, it tells the truth of unfortunately more universal experiences.
Illustration by Lucy Wellington (@lucywelli)