fuck, man. this is a book worth crying over. so beautifully constructed, taking you along this journey and constructs everything---esther's life as well as our own---to a perfect, melancholy, chilling fallout that resonates 60 years later. the amount of women who relate to the narrative to this day proves that the bell jar does indeed hang over our head, trapping the noxious gases of our current societal systems until we choke on our oppression. the synopsis finds plath's description of esther's insanity as "completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies," as if the other depiction of insanity is the absolute truth. sometimes insanity is a reminder of the completely irrational world we live in. it's something we've become desensitized to. take teenage girls giggling and sneering at sylvia's suicide, or finding the female suicide in classic novels as something beautiful and sacred...constantly trying to redefine their own stance in society as something palatable or humiliating even in death. who stays sane in a system that has violently upheld itself for centuries while millions die at its brutal hands? it's even worse when you don't recognize the bell jar that remains, instead finding it as only inner turmoil, some wicked curse among the self. external forces---even neglect---are equally important in considering the modern psyche of the american individual, that depressed hopelessness that's consumed the generation. it's something modern psychology and therapists hardly keep up with, even when evolved from insulin therapies and electroshock treatments. and thus the bell jar is as much a modern tale of womanhood as it was in the sixties.