THE BELL JAR

by Sylvia Plath ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 1971

It is difficult to read Sylvia Plath's novel (which appeared in England under a pseudonym in the year of her death, 1963) with any degree of objectivity since it deals with her earlier breakdown and suicide attempt. The telltale lesions are everywhere and in the hindsight of what has happened, the experience of the bell jar (""To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream"") becomes even more fateful. Certainly any marginal illusion of fiction is nullified. When first met Esther is a naive nineteen-year-old who reads and writes poetry, who remembers with some irritation the first boy she really dated at college, and who comes to New York for a few weeks in the summer of her junior year having won one of those magazine apprenticeship awards. Esther broods over the Rosenbergs' electrocution (some of Miss Plath's parallels are too obvious to even be justified as symbols); she overeats; she becomes immobilized in indecision and returns home to lie in bed and never sleep. After one or two visits with a non-verbal psychiatrist who gives her shock treatment, she attempts suicide and the rest of the account deals with her institutionalization and An occasional line (""A heavy naughtiness pricked through my veins"") offends, but there's some remarkable writing with a straightforward and irreducible simplicity: ""The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."" There is no mistaking or evading the airless suspension of life within the bell jar.

Pub Date: April 7, 1971

ISBN: 0899668151

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1971

Categories: FICTION