Published 1963 / Length 258 pages
Esther Greenwood is an all-American, straight-A student, her life ahead seemingly planned out to the last detail. As the novel opens, she is in New York, having won a prestigious contest to work there for a month. She is supposed to be steering the city ‘like her own private car. Only [Esther isn’t] steering anything, not even [herself].’ This semi-autobiographical tale of a 1950s teenager’s breakdown has lost none of its power over the decades. With characteristically brilliant imagery, Plath vividly evokes Esther’s psychological journey, tracing both the experiences that led to her condition and her mental collapse. A feminist classic that puts women’s roles firmly under the spotlight, The Bell Jar is a compelling book that scrutinizes social pressures, mother–daughter relationships, sexual hypocrisy and the constructs of femininity.
‘No writer exposed the self in extremis more eloquently but frighteningly than Sylvia Plath. Her novel … was so close to tormented autobiography that it was first published under a pseudonym.’ – The Guardian
• Plath once wrote to her mother: ‘Perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it’ (Letters Home, 1975). How does The Bell Jar suggest that 1950s society pigeonholes women into limited, mutually exclusive roles? Does this remain a dilemma for women today?
• Is Esther self-aware, or self-deceiving? When do we, as readers, realize she’s mad – or isn’t she?
• ‘Joan was the beaming double of my old best self.’ How do the other characters illuminate Esther’s position, and her choices? Why do you think Plath gives Joan the fate she does?
• The Bell Jar is semi-autobiographical. Can you tell? If so, does it detract from the story or empower it? The Observer said that the book ‘gains its considerable power from an objectivity that is extraordinary’. Do you agree that Plath is objective?
• By the end, has Esther defeated her demons or been subsumed by them? What were they in the first place?
• Plath was a celebrated American poet who posthumously won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her Collected Poems. The Bell Jar was her only novel.
• The book is a fictionalized account of Plath’s own breakdown as an adolescent: she tried to kill herself in August 1953, having become depressed after failing to make it into a summer-school class at Harvard. Almost ten years later, on 11 February 1963, she committed suicide.
• The novel was first published in Britain in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It went on to spend twenty-four weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. SALINGER (see here) – another 1950s adolescent breakdown, this time told from a male perspective.
• Girl, Interrupted by SUSANNA KAYSEN – an autobiographical account of the author’s treatment in a psychiatric hospital in 1967; Kaysen was treated at the same clinic as Plath.
• Prozac Nation by ELIZABETH WURTZEL – a less poetic account of mental illness, published in 1994.