I just finished The Bell Jar, one of those books that's been hanging over my head for 20 years.
What struck me was just how funny it is, how much I enjoyed the character of Esther Greenwood, and The Bell Jar's redemptive conclusion.
For a book that deals with madness, and the 1960's tragic prescriptions for madness (esp. electroshock treatment), The Bell Jar is surprisingly light and readable.
I can see it having a profound impact on seminal feminists in the 1960s, dealing humorously with dating, marriage, sex and the limited number of options women faced, especially brilliant women like the central character (read: Plath herself).
Maybe Plath would have committed suicide anyway. Or maybe, had she not been constricted by the mores that forced women in the 1960s to get married and pregnant, Plath would have soldiered on and churned out books and poems and screenplays and penned more lines like,
"the face that peered back at me [in the mirror] seemed to be peering from a prison cell after a prolonged beating. It looked bruised and puffy and all the wrong colors. It was a face that needed soap and water and Christian tolerance."
See, that's fucking hilarious, I'm sad she didn't spend the last 40 years writing.
