Sonoma State Star

Issue date: 2/1/06 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Courtesy// library.gatech.edu

First published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, author Sylvia Plath never imagined that her novel "The Bell Jar," which has many parallels to her own life, would affect so many people's lives.

At first "The Bell Jar" had difficulty getting published, many publishers, who felt that it was not "serious work," turned it down.

When the book was first published in London, Plath was considered the female counterpart to J.D. Salinger, author of "Catcher in the Rye."

Plath did not welcome this, wanting to be recognized for her own work.

Once "The Bell Jar" was finally published it did not amaze British critics. They gave it halfhearted reviews, stating the main character Esther Greenwood was a "hopeless neurotic," and shortly after the British publication of the novel, Plath took her own life.

It wasn't until years later that the book made it's away across the seas and to America.

By the time it debuted in 1971, Sylvia Plath was a household name due other pieces of work she had written.

So much change had come about since its first publication in 1963 that "The Bell Jar" became a female rite-of-passage novel and became a "touchstone for American youth," just like its counterpart "Catcher in the Rye."

Set in New York City during the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood, the narrator or the novel, spends a month as the guest editor for a New York fashion magazine after winning a scholarship.

At the magazine Esther befriends other scholarship winners and begins to get a taste of the life of an editor, but when she returns home, nothing within herself is how it was when she left.

Struggling with herself, unable to read, write or sleep, Esther goes to a doctor and later agrees to begin shock treatment that will hopefully help with her troubles. But it only makes matters worse once she starts to contemplate suicide.

Eventually Esther almost succeeds in killing herself, which results in having to recover at a private city hospital and then a mental hospital, but it is there that she meets a psychiatrist that she feels she can trust.

It's a story of rebirth and coming to terms with who we are, a part of life that everyone must deal with at some point.

The title "The Bell Jar" is a fitting theme that runs throughout the entire book, "[W]herever I sat-on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok-I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

The theme of "The Bell Jar" is something that everyone can relate to, at one point or another we ave felt trapped inside ourselves, unable to break free and be whom we wish to be.

For Esther, it was the fact that no matter where she was she was stuck in the hell that she had made up for herself in her own mind, suffocating within herself, trapped with no way out.

Esther must come to terms with who she is, whether she likes herself or not.

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