The Bell Jar Author: Sylvia Plath | Language: English | ISBN:
0899668151 | Format: PDF
The Bell Jar Description
The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful -- but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother, and with the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies.
Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature.
"Esther Greenwood's account of her years in The Bell Jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing ... [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures; it is literature." -New York Times
This special 25th-anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Frances McCullough,who was the Harper & Row editor for the original edition, about the untold story of The Bell Jar's first American publication.
- Hardcover
- Publisher: Buccaneer Books (November 1, 1995)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0899668151
- ISBN-13: 978-0899668154
- Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Frequently, when I read about The Bell Jar, reviewers caomment on the parallels between Esther, and the author. Then they proceed to describe the book's harrowing descent into madness.
I almost hate to burst the bubble, but after reading the book, I find it to be widely misinterpreted. The book is not about Esther's problems, but the problems of the world about her.
When Plath wrote the book, she did so under a pseudonym. Not only, (as many suggest,) to avoid the ire of her friends, whose loosely drawn chariactures pepper this book, but also because of it's biting censure of her male oriented society. I have NO DOUBT in my mind that when Plath wrote the Bell Jar, she had no intentions of killing herself. I think the work should be viewed in that light, and when one does, it takes on a different, and far more profound meaning. Plath still needed to work in her time, so (In my opinion,) she wrote the Bell Jar to attack the restricted role of a woman in society, and she conveniently provided an out for any harsh critic, namely, that the main character is insane. To read it now, and interpret the main character as an insane, or unreliable narrator does a great disservice to what Plath intended for this work.
Plath, like Esther, was perhaps the smartest woman in America during her time. She won countless scholarships, and like Esther, a guest editing slot at Mademoiselle. Now a woman of her talents would be at Harvard on a full ride, but during her day, Esther, and Plath could only hope to someday become the editor of a glamor mag, forever telling women how to tell if their lover is cheating. Not much of an existance for a bright young woman.
Plath vents this frustration in the Bell Jar.
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