The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Literary Reflection by Iriam Chapa

There are books we read, and there are books that read us.

Esther and me.

Me and Esther.

Her fig tree, my hall of doors.

With some mortification, I must confess that I often found myself nodding in recognition at Esther’s strange behaviors and erratic thoughts. I saw myself on the pages of the book as if they were not filled with ink, but mirrors. Mirrors reflecting an uncomfortable truth: I wasn’t just reading about Esther’s hysteria — I was recognizing my own. Whether Esther was simply a narrator or a reflection of Sylvia herself, their madness didn’t feel foreign — it felt like a memory.

At nineteen, I too, hated my mother.

I felt so sad I’d thought I’d die. I despised the Doreen in my life. I felt wise and cynical as all hell yet craved change and excitement. I wanted to be everything. The range of emotions and contradictions that Esther — and perhaps Sylvia — navigates, to me, sounds like a common female experience: the full realization of expectations placed upon us, the longing to be limitless crashing with the fear of not being enough.

“I felt perfectly inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along; I simply hadn’t thought about it.”

How many times have I stood in my own hallway of locked doors, wondering which one, if opened, would cost me all the others? Just as Esther sat at the crotch of her tree and wondered which figs would plop to the ground at her feet — writer, wife, adventurer, scholar.

While her figs rot, my doors lock.

The perfect metaphor for the paralysis of choice: the quiet anxiety that too many possibilities can bring. And like Esther, I too ache for all those doors that I will never be able to open and walk through, while she starves, I stand still.

All those lives unlived.

There isn’t enough time to walk through one door and still return to choose another. If I chose tomorrow to become a lawyer, how could I also become a monk? I can no longer be the youngest neurosurgeon in the country, or a full- time ballerina. It’s not only sadness that consumes Esther, but grief for all those versions of herself that she will never get to know.

She was ambitious. She wanted to be everything.

And in that, I do understand her: her dissatisfaction, her unraveling, and the deep human heartbreak of realizing that we have so little life and so much longing for it. What I once dismissed as fiction began to feel disturbingly familiar.

It’s almost funny, in hindsight, how real the paranoia felt—that the world was out to get you. That everyone was whispering behind your back, judging you for everything you aren’t and hoping for everything you could be. A tragic little lie the mind insists is true — without a shred of proof. Growing up means learning that no one is thinking about you as much as you think they are. We are mostly alone in our heads. Especially at that age, many of us are, as far as I know, quietly drowning in our own despair, sealed inside our own bell jars.

Some readers wish Sylvia had gone into more depth about her sadness and dissatisfaction with life, or wish for a more inspiring story. But that was never the point. The Bell Jar is an authentic portrayal of the real-life experience ofbeing depressed. That is what makes it so strong. Depression doesn’t always come with a why. It rarely presents itself as something poetic.

You just are.

Your feelings are just there, no reasoning behind them. Events just happen to you, no perspective other than yours. You barely have the energy to comprehend your own numbness, let alone perform resilience for others.

When you’re as numb as Esther, the future becomes unbearable to imagine.

Confessional literature wasn’t meant to be an analysis of one’s persona, but a mere acknowledgment of the broad spectrum of human emotions. Sylvia understood this perfectly. She was not trying to persuade us of how miserable she felt or striving to inspire us. She was letting us witness her. This book is a confessional work, not a moral guide. She wrote what she felt as she felt it, what she lived, as she lived it. The crude, dull, sometimes rude, and thoroughly uninspiring reality of that bell jar summer.

And yet, there was something ludicrous threaded through her misery.

Sylvia’s comedic tone was so well timed, I found myself laughing before realizing the weight of what she was actually saying. As Frances McCullough said, it is in fact a very funny book, and Sylvia’s dark humor is part of what makes it so palatable. Her dry remarks about the women around her, the puking marathon with Betsy, her half-serious musings on suicide methods, and her one-sided vendetta with Mrs. Tomolillo – all of this added a strange lightness without trivializing the severity of her pain.

Because pain isn’t always solemn. Even in despair absurdity lives. And that makes it all more human.

And through The Bell Jar, Sylvia’s humanity persisted.

And we related.

Perhaps that’s why the book still feels relevant today. Sylvia’s voice, at least to me, gave no hint of the era she lived in — it felt modern, familiar, like it could have easily belonged to someone today. It was surprisingly easy to forget that Esther lived in the 1950s. Yes, the era reveals itself in her descriptions of fashion and social events, but I believe that her inner world — and the way she voiced it — resonates with us all. If not for the very antiquated electroshock therapy, a less attentive reader might not even notice.

The Bell Jar is not a book we can disregard as obsolete or archaic.

Yes, as a society, we’ve progressed in how we address mental health, but in many other ways, the world Plath wrote about continues to exist. Consider how women-only hotels, once a symbol of outdated gender norms, have resurfaced today for security and comfort. With the quick rise in right-wing agendas, purity politics — under the guise of morality — is gaining momentum again. Racism, cruelly, is still embedded in many people’s daily experiences.

And despite progress, societal expectations for women to adhere to certain roles are still prevalent.

This has not been a review but a free verse ode to a book that the more I read, the more I realized how meaningful and substantial its impact really was. The Bell Jar didn’t just speak to me: it recognized me. How privileged are we that The Bell Jar was published and did not go up in a bonfire?

To Sylvia, wherever you are, thank you. For the rawness of your disdain for life. For the honesty in your uncertainty. For those self-revelations you could have kept secret but didn’t. For opening the conversation on mental health. And for, even in the seriousness of it all, making us laugh.

Thank you, because in your pain, I was seen.