It shelters the magnificent enchanted rose, a very important element from the movie Beauty and the Beast, which is in fact a curse – it said if the beast doesn’t find love until the last petal falls, he is doomed to remain a beast forever.
However, have you ever wondered how would you feel like sitting inside a bell jar? Just like the rose, probably your petals would fall one by one. Would they? Sylvia Plath talks about and describes in each little detail how it feels like to live under a bell jar for a lifetime in her only novel, The Bell Jar.
The Bell Jar is an autobiographical novel in which the protagonist is Esther Greenwood who, long story short, is just Sylvia’s alter ego. It was originally published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” in 1963, the year Sylvia committed suicide.
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Summary
Esther spends a month as a guest editor in New York, where she struggles with a desperate desire of having fun just like her fellows who’d also had the same destiny as hers. When Esther comes back home, she is deeply troubled by something she called a “mysterious force inwards”. She later realized that she couldn’t write or read anymore. She also had insomnia due to the chaos in her mind and soon she gets to see a psychiatrist and receives electroshock treatment and starts considering suicide. She tries a lot of alternatives and she almost succeeds in killing herself by swallowing a large quantity of sleeping pills. At last, Esther finds a psychiatrist whom she can trust and after some time, she “checks out” from the mental hospital.
Themes
The role of women in the 1950s
Sylvia couldn’t stand that men had the most interesting jobs and went to all interesting places while women were only to stay at home, taking care of the entire house and children.
Death and rebirth
We could say that just like the Phoenix, Esther through the book, goes from being merely dead on the inside and suffering a lot due to her failure in attempting suicide to slowly recovering both her body and soul.
The pressure society puts on people
I would say I am almost sure this sounds at least familiar to you-society putting pressure on people and not only through media, news and social media, but even ordinary people have become adepts of those 3 and they worship society’s wrong concepts about life as if they were sacred.
The post-war obsessive psychiatric care of the American population
We may say it is somewhat expected that people put emphasis on psychiatric care after wars, especially after a World War, but the things went too far and too many people were getting therapy, one of the treatment methods was electroshock treatment, somewhat new at that moment.
În ambianţa Librăriei Humanitas Foto: Andrei Ţiburcă
Reality check
Because The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiography we could compare moments or events from Esther’s experience with events from Sylvia’s life such as:
In real life, Sylvia also won an internship at a magazine in New York.
Sylvia’s father died when she was only 9, while Esther’s father died when she was 9 as well.
They both attempted suicide in the same way.
They were both bothered by conformism.
If only I had a magic pill to bring Sylvia back. I think we’d have got along great with each other.
I hope that you will hold this book in your hands as soon as possible, because it is truly worth reading, it’s a unique thrill that will constantly follow you.
VIDEO EDITING: ANDREI ŢIBURCĂ
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