The Bell Jar (Perennial Classic) Best Price
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I think more than anything else, The Bell Jar is a book about uncertainty and failure. Like the main character, when I first entered college, I thought that anyone who encounters these two horrific obstacles is stuck forever in a trap, and nothing short of a flawless record is ever worthy of existence. I didn’t realize that if you live long enough, you’re certain to encounter such setbacks, and if you live even longer, you’re certain to get through them as well.
The actual book title is a bit puzzling initially, but it ties in really well with the story and this theme about life being full of times when you’re imprisoned in an incredible streak of depressing, non-successful ventures. Even something as simple as sleep becomes a struggle to accomplish. It’s like the hand of God has abandoned you, and you just have to wait for it to come back.
The modernized world has great expectations of us all, and we have great expectations of the modernized world. But sooner or later, both parties will fall short of these expectations. We expect to have no problems getting through school, succeeding in a career, finding love, and starting a family. We don’t expect setbacks and failures such as divorce, suicide, inadequate talent, infidelity, car accidents, miscarriages, and bad economic times to play enough of a factor to damage our plans. And the world doesn’t expect us to fall into these things. But in truth, none of us is above a single one of these failures falling upon us.
ABC’s “How To Be A Millionaire” sums up a good portion of The Bell Jar for me in the statement, “I’ve seen the future. I can’t afford it.” It’s a statement I agree with. Despite our expectations, we can’t afford the future. But somehow, miraculously, with a lot of hope and a lot of help, there just may be a way to get through it. So believe it or not, The Bell Jar leaves me with a strong feeling of optimism, at this, the closing of the year.
Overview
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.
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Customer Reviews
Changed My Life - Shanon Collins -
When I first read The Bell Jar, I think I was in 8th grade. I got very into Plath and her poetry shortly thereafter. The love and respect that I have for Plath is not easy to put into words. I ended up studying her extensively in Grad School and writing my thesis on The Bell Jar. After reading feminist criticism by Julia Kristevia who studied Jacques Lacan, I knew I had to base my thesis on this. My argument was that Plath used feminine language in her novel that was in direct opposition with the 50s stereotypes that she was being forced into. The only way for Ester Greenwood to back to what she felt was true was to descend into “madness” which was not madness at all but a way to cope with the life she was being FORCED to lead by those around her. Ester was able to overcome her demons by basically rejecting the “masculine or symbolic” language and embracing the semiotic or feminine language that Kristevia described. Plath rocks!
A classic every woman should read - A. Poush - Federal Way, WA United States
I read this book a few months back and really enjoyed it. I feel like it spoke to me and will speak to many women who have been through depression or even just life changing events. A must read for sure!
Much ado about nothing - Cogitus - KY, USA
At first one is struck by the surprising, fresh, and often delightful descriptive metaphors that light up the pages of this book (3 or 4 of these are so strikingly apt that they may stick with the reader; e.g., the “eye of a tornado” already on p.3), but beyond mid-book even these have become tiresome through overuse. “Much metaphor and a dash of feminism, both gratuitous” pretty much sums up this work. The purported insights (deep or otherwise) into mental illness and a plunge into it, are simply not there, except perhaps for those so young or naive as to have never thought or experienced much. There is that sort of caste to it which is familiar in that which seems often to appeal to histrionic and/or etiolated young females. Beyond that, and its feministic arrogation, one can perhaps see one other reason for its apparent popularity among a certain readership: its lack of any real nexus (other than serving as a cathartic for SP, herself) invites emotive readers to read into it what they will, including their own themes and prejudices.
Tragic - Sargon - Albuquerque, NM
How depression feels to a young woman trying to make it throught the obstacle course of life. Imminently readable but a heroic tragedy just the same. An intelligent woman who left her mark on the world while a disease attacks and confuses her at every turn. Note that she concentrates on the negative and ignores most of the positive–classic symptoms of depression, in additon to frequent crying and sleepiness. For a brief moment she stood at the mountain peak–the toast of the town. Very sad.
Product Information : Feb 01, 2010 17:15:10
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