At worst this period is an absolute identity crisis as we are thrust into the world kicking and screaming, ready or not. She half-heartedly decides to spend the time instead writing a novel, but soon devolves into a full-blown depression.īeing a brand-new, freshly-minted young adult is at best an exciting time full of unknowns. Giving up on her new glamourous life, she heads home to Massachusetts only to discover that she has been rejected from a writing course taught by a famous author. Instead the experience falls flat and ends in Esther’s attempted rape.

On paper it is the stuff of dreams and a gateway into the glamourous big-city life filled with beautiful and interesting people. The story opens with Esther having secured a sought-after apprenticeship at a prominent New York magazine, Ladies Day, for the Summer. Her seemingly unlimited ambition and her pursuit of writing struck a chord with me. Throughout the first part of book, I identified closely with Esther Greenwood.

Of course glass is transparent, and from some angles can even seem invisible to the naked, untrained eye of an outsider.Ī novel that seems to have barely aged since its first publishing, The Bell Jar focuses on timeless human emotions. The sea around her becomes a black void waiting to envelop her, bell jar and all, absorbing her into its unknowable depths. Through the deformations of the jar, the warm glow of the sun becomes too intense – even menacing. The world inside the bell jar seems more real, more textured than the flat distorted world outside. A bathing Esther frozen in time deciding whether to drown herself, trapped under the titular bell jar. It is the above moment in the book that I felt particularly moved to illustrate. The whole scene feels like a rather literal foreshadowing to the famous quote that appears at the end of the novel “… I am, i am, i am.” I imagine that, to her in that moment, the water felt like a portal to another world where the pain didn’t exist. She makes a silent and unannounced attempt to drown herself, but fails due to her body’s innate sense of self preservation.

Esther, suffocated and disconnected, goes to the beach with her friends and a boy suggested (she speculates) by her mother. It’s been a few years since I first read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, but one scene has always stayed with me.

Sylvia plath inside the bell jar