The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is the only novel written by American poet Sylvia Plath. It is an intensely realistic and emotional record of a successful and talented young woman's descent into madness.
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9recommend
21mentions
19people
2014–2026years
43% recommend52% neutral5% critical
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What Hacker News says
- My point is not about whether this or that word is part of someone’s (active) vocabulary, ie. whether they can explain the meaning of the word if asked without checking external sources. The reason why I evoke modernist masters is that each of those words have a plain English equivalent that more or less matches the meaning of the more abstruse one. This is usually a dead giveaway that the author felt the level of their prose would be greatly heightened by searching for a synonym of the more hipsterist variety - I know, since I have done it myself often enough, before maturing somewhat. Even if the words actually were something they use every day, I’d still argue more plain prose would be better every and which way. Obscure language a good writer does not make. Hoe often you need dictionary when reading The Sun Also Rises? Or Homage to Catalonia? Or The Bell Jar?
In short, having have to read extremely jargony and difficult to understand academic or professional text more or less daily - text that by nature sorta have to be difficult and abstract, since the subject it - the benchmark for journalistic writing should be that it can be understood by a 11-year-old. Interestingly, Borsook herself seems to recognise this, the author of this article less so.
- I feel like I read a different piece than everyone else?
I didn't interpret any of this piece to be about regretting having kids, or anything else. And sure, there is a sort of glorifying of Felix, but the writer is very aware of that. He points out that in his mind, Felix is forever 25. The most important part of the piece, IMO, is the end:
This piece is to me, ultimately about loving your life while acknowledging that every decision you make closes off other opportunities, and sometimes you grieve them. All decisions come with a tradeoff, and it's not unfaithful to your life to acknowledge them. You can love your child and not love parenthood itself. You can choose your partner simply because they feel like a better bet and you can see building a life with them, even though someone else more viscerally lit your fire once upon a time. You can feel sorrow at having lost total independence, even though you feel the satisfaction of connection and responsibility. I have conversations like this with friends all the time.I often think about Felix’s freedom. But my memory plays tricks on me. I never told you about it being so lonely in that apartment that I cried ...there was nobody there but me... When I think of that time, it’s a Forever Summer. I don’t remember the Winters. I bet they sucked...Cufflinks! Horse Bridles! I think the most honest thing we can do for our Felixes is to dive further into the fantasy. To flesh out the details of their life. Make them concrete. When I think about Felix’s partner or children, I can’t help but picture a life similar to my own. Because he also wanted children. He wanted a partner. He wouldn’t have stayed in that neighbourhood. And anyways, that place is not the same as it was sixteen years ago. Felix probably made choices akin to my own. Made compromises. The only alternative I can imagine to compromise, accommodation, negotiation is to never allow yourself to love. It’s 5:30am now. The sun is beginning to rise. M had gone to sleep 3 hours ago and I am all alone. Sometimes I sit there and think that I am lucky. So very very lucky. I feel it in my weaselly little bones.Modern life tries to sell to us that if we're being "authentic", we can have it all and give up nothing. I simply don't think that's true. The truth is that every significant decision closes 100 doors, and refusing to acknowledge that we would have liked to have walked through some of those doors... to me, that's just fear of facing the weight of our choices.
Makes me think of the famous Fig Tree section of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar": https://www.favoritepoem.org/poems/plath-the-fig-tree/
Jacob, if you see this: it spoke to me, and gave me some peace as I've been ruminating over similar things. Thanks for writing :)
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- I am in (perhaps) a tiny minority in that I love American literature but just don’t get what the fuss is about The Great Gatsby. I just don’t think it’s that good a novel. Off the top of my head I could come up with a list of at least 10 American novels that I have read that I think are significantly superior.
In no order here goes
1. Blood meridian
2. The Bell Jar
3. Of Mice and Men
4. Mason and Dixon (everyone’s gonna say “Gravity’s Rainbow” but I think since this is an explicitly American list, the themes of Mason and Dixon of the North/South divide etc put it more squarely on this list)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Moby Dick (I’m not the biggest fan of this actually but it’s way better than Gatsby for me)
7. Walden (Does this count? Anyway whatever. Walden)
8. Portrait of a Lady
9. Infinite Jest
10. Go tell it on the mountain
Honestly this is right off the top of my head and looking back I haven’t even got any Hemingway on here, or Ralph Ellison, or Toni Morrison. I could make a case for Slaughterhouse 5 or Catch-22 or The Naked and the Dead or a bunch of other things. Like even though I think he’s a total tool, Bonfire of the Vanities probably has a good case for being on the list
I just genuinely don’t get the fuss about Gatsby. I’m glad people like it, but there seem far, far better American novels.
Edit to add: And yes I did read it. Twice in fact, once in my late teens after I had read a lot of serious literature and thought it was ok but not great and then again in my late 30s because I was sure I must have missed something and was very disappointed to come to the conclusion that I really hadn’t.
I have two theories for why maybe people like it so much. Firstly, because the author is such a stylist and they get strung along by some of the prose. But when you read a truly jawdropping stylist like for example in my book Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Cormac Macarthy, F. Scott Fitzgerald really doesn’t stand well in that company.
Second theory (perhaps cynical) is that it’s the first novel in the US school syllabus that gets really serious literary criticism applied to it and so for a lot of people it is the book that awakens them to the power of literature. I could totally see that if you had a really great teacher introducing you to proper literature by means of the book you might love the experience and, because of that, the book.
- Are you reading by opening up to page 1 and reading through to the end? Don't do that. I know, I know, spoilers, but unless you're reading mysteries, it's not a big deal. The best fiction isn't just the ending. Everyone knows Captain Ahab dies at the end of Moby Dick, but that doesn't spoil anything.
So, read the first chapter. Read the beginning and end of the rest of the chapters – a few paragraphs, a page, something. Read the last chapter.
Analyze the story: make a list of characters and their relationships to each other. If there are people related to each other, make a family tree. Consider the locations: map them out, especially if they reference real world locations. Get a feel for how the story moves through the world. Tolkien's books are famous for including the family trees of his characters, timelines, and world maps. Do that.
Try reading a novel that's been made into a good film. Follow along reading and comparing the film adaptation to the novel. Something like C. S. Forester's book The African Queen and the 1951 film directed by John Huston.
Pick a novel that riffs on subjects you're already into. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar involves psychology as a major plot element, as do One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Requiem for a Dream. All three have been adapted into excellent films.
- > They are almost invariably driven by unrealistically evil people, and the stakes are typically too high to bear any relevance to most of human life.
Usually authors try to make high stakes feel relevant by making you feel close to the characters or by connecting the high stakes situation to universal themes, although not always successfully. More interestingly, many good novels make relevant and fairly ordinary stakes feel like high stakes. Kurt Vonnegut's short stories[0] and The Bell Jar are great examples.
I don't want to pile on or try to convince you that novels are actually for you (sounds like they aren't), but I think this is an interesting distinction to make about "high stakes."
[0] Presumably his novels too, but I haven't read them yet.
- Charles Murray, author of
* Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
* Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
* Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality
* Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
Oh, and The Bell Jar, although that doesn't somehow imply that 1950 was the peak of White Culture.
