Reviews with content warning for Abandonment - The Bell Jar

This book is excellent. I see why it is a modern classic. I connect so deeply with Esther and Sylvia Plath has always spoken to me in a way no other author or poet has. Esther is such a deeply timeless and relatable character and I love the frankness, honesty and bluntness Sylvia Plath wrote with. Men have been acting with the same violent wilful idiocy for all of time and it’s insane how many of the experiences plath writes about here I and every single afab person I know have experienced. I love this book so much.

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darlessa's review against another edition

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sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

This book is often seen as a classic feminist work with literary merit, but I found the book to be severely lacking in all the above and hardly worth the two stars I have given it.

The possibly feminist tropes are so small and sparse, the word loses all meaning. The story is about a woman who does not want to get married, yet connects her self worth to her experiences with men throughout the entire book culminating in an act of freeing herself for which she still believes she needs a man.

Plot lines are introduced and cut short before the protagonist has any time to express any sort of emotion or absence thereof.

Apart from the scene where Esther is scared of receiving a certain type of therapy, the only scene in my opinion in which we actually see the protagonist, I found the book poorly written.

We don't really get to know Esther. We get to know what happens in her life, but not really how she experiences it. This is partly due to the factual and cold writing style. Lacking any literary or poetic prose.

The blatant racism in the book, which is not once condemned, giving the reader the message that it is okay and perhaps in line with the opinion of the author, took away any little enjoyment that the book might be able to offer after taking the above points into account.

In its time this book might have added a new perspective, one not often explored. But perhaps it's time to look at books we revere as classics and ask ourselves if they still hold any class or if we are mistaking the word for simply old and poorly aged.

It just made me very sad to see how much praise this book still receives and how all the readers that praise this book seem to ignore how racist it truly is.

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xseulgiii's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

As a young woman who held far too high expectations for myself on top of the expectations society put on me, I could feel my younger self relating to Esther. This is quite scary considering the mid-twentieth century setting of the novel. From the fig tree to the racehorse to the bell jar itself, I went through many of the same experiences and thought processes as Esther did and was lucky enough to survive. This was an amazing read, but not one I could have handled even three years ago.

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