The Bell Jar

⚖The case for it

The fig tree is the passage readers quote from memory: every future Esther could have hanging on one branch, and choosing means watching the rest go black. Readers who have been depressed say the book names what they could not, “a slipping, tugging falling feeling” rendered with a “precise, detailed, chilling presentation of Esther’s loss of sanity.” The voice carries it, dry and funny in places a book about a breakdown has no business being funny, and “that girl’s inner dialogue was something else” is the common reaction. The electroshock chapters stand as a record of what 1950s psychiatry did to women. Critics in 1963 called it the “raw experience of nightmare.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Esther is “insufferable and snobbish” to a substantial minority, which matters more than usual in a book that is two hundred and fifty pages of her company. The racial descriptions have not aged, and readers who love everything else say so plainly rather than filing them under period. The fragmented timeline is “a pain to follow” unless you are tracking her state instead of the calendar. Critics in 1963 found the register too clinical, “cold, unfriendly humor” that “lacks the weight and complexity sufficient to the subject.” Modern readers add that the feminism is that of one educated white woman in 1953. “It hurt to get through it, and I think it’s self-indulgent.”

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings