![]() The Bell Jar, the short stories and the dense prose of the journals aside – Plath was at her core a poet. The Bell Jar is a novel that teems with the contempt and self-loathing that flourishes in an oppressed girl’s heart. Esther Greenwood wants to go against the world view that aims to label her against her will she wants out of the shop window, to expand herself, become more, undress and throw her clothes into the New York night, not as a gesture of self-annihilation but one of omnipotence: “I am, I am, I am.” Esther Greenwood’s heart beats, in a perfect image of the self’s expansion through writing. It is about depression, suicide, female sexual liberation, hatred of one’s mother and traumatic electro-shock treatment in a world that lacks the language for what a girl goes through. The Bell Jar is an autobiographical account of being a young woman in the US of the 1950s, which transports a trojan horse up on stage when the reader least expects it and releases an entire cavalry of the taboo topics of the time. ![]() Yet she did write one, and it’s brilliant. Her entire writing life, Sylvia Plath scolded herself for not managing to write a novel. ![]()
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