The Bell Jar
A student on a magazine internship losing her hold, and the treatment that follows. Written very close to the life.
Wherever I sat, on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok, I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
Esther Greenwood narrates her own descent: a gifted young woman who wins a month at a New York magazine and finds, on returning home, that the ordinary machinery of wanting and doing has stopped working. The account stays inside her perception, so the reader registers the flattening of appetite, the failure of plans, and the slow narrowing of possibility as she experiences them rather than as a case history reports them.
The middle chapters move through breakdown, a suicide attempt, and committal to a psychiatric hospital, including a botched course of electroconvulsive therapy and a later, more careful one. Plath renders treatment from the patient's side of it: what is done to Esther, how the clinicians appear to her, what she withholds and why.
Published in 1963 under a pseudonym, weeks before the author's death, the novel draws closely on Plath's own hospitalisation. For a clinician it holds the gap between a composed surface and an interior that has gone silent.
About the author
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932 to 1963) was an American poet and novelist. Born in Boston, she wrote with unusual precision and force about inner life, family, and identity. She is best known for her novel The Bell Jar, published in 1963, and for the poems collected in Ariel, published posthumously in 1965. Her earlier volume The Colossus established her reputation. Her writing remains widely read and studied, and her work continues to draw new readers.
Details
- 1963
- Faber and Faber
- Faber and Faber
- 9780571081783