The Bell Jar

I finally read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and thoroughly enjoyed it. I haven’t read Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in a long time, but The Bell Jar seemed like a worthy female correlative of Salinger’s famous book. First-person narration of preppy New England/NYC teenage angst, with an overflow of themes for all ages, with both books coming in that post-war, pre-hippie, roughly defined Eisenhower era of 1951-61.

What I especially liked about Plath’s book was the flow of the language and the sensitivities of the main character, Esther. The book for me divides into the first half – light and bouncy with dark undertones – and the second half – darker but retaining some sparkly undertones of wit and humor. The vocabulary and flow, especially in the first half, is what you’d expect of a teenage girl who finds herself living for a summer in New York City – spontaneous, unfiltered, and somewhat random. In this case, it’s an especially bright and sensitive girl, so you get lots of crisp images for both internal and external phenomena, and lots of startling metaphors and analogies to keep you engaged. Some of it is dark – I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Plath’s heroine is a cynical and suicidal sort – but even in the passages that are painful to read, the teenage girl’s mind flitting from one crystal image to the next continues to charm. There are a lot of ethnic references – none of them malicious, but what do you expect of a teenage girl suddenly in the middle of NYC with Manhattan’s patchwork of ethnicities as her reference points? You don’t expect 2020s-era political correctness, but when Esther wonders on the subway about how fat people feel about being fat, or how their mothers feel, it seems true to teenage girl’s innocent if politically incorrect mindset. Don’t forget, though, the innocence Esther carries with her is combined with a very strong intelligence and a very dark suicidal angst. It’s that combination that gives the book the depth that calls you back for multiple readings.

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