On the page, “The Bell Jar” tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a high-achieving college student from Massachusetts who has been selected to spend a summer in New York City working at the prestigious “Ladies Day” magazine. Esther is confronted with the artifice and isolation of city life, the inevitability of a motherhood she is not sure she wants, and increasingly debilitating depression. The book is named for a bell jar, a thick glass container used to create a vacuum and protect fragile items — a metaphor for Esther’s feelings of confinement. Upon returning to her small suburban town, she succumbs to her struggle with mental health. “The Bell Jar” culminates with Ether’s suicide attempt and then life-saving shock therapy at a mental institution.
“The Bell Jar” brought a vivid and eerily rational description of exactly what mental health struggles feel like into the general discussion.
Off the page, “The Bell Jar” is really Sylvia Plath’s story. Originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas (to spare her mother’s feelings), “The Bell Jar” would not make it to U.S. bookshelves until 1971, after Plath’s own suicide.
When you read or reread this book today, you should remind yourself just how courageous and groundbreaking Plath’s depiction of depression and anxiety were at the time. “The Bell Jar” brought a vivid and eerily rational description of exactly what mental health struggles feel like into the general discussion. Decades later, few have even come close to encapsulating what it’s like to walk through life struggling in this way.
More than 60 years since “The Bell Jar” was published, mental health has become a serious, widespread issue in the U.S. People are hurting. According to Mental Health America, a leading nonprofit dedicated to mental health advocacy and education, nearly 21% of adults said they’ve experienced a mental illness — that is more than 50 million Americans.
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