This classic was undeniably beautiful and tragic. The prose was extraordinarily good resulting in my copy being heavily highlighted. The first half of the novel felt extremely relatable; just a young woman looking for her place in the world, with fears, anxieties, and expectations that are deeply familiar. The descent of her mental health really hurt me. I read a little bit about Plath's own life, and teared up when I found out this was pulling from real life experiences. I hate that the world is the way it is. With 1950s mental health "care" even more so. I feel extremely lucky to have been born in more progressive times in a lot of respects, and yet Esther's journey really touched me. I'll be chewing on this for a while.

Edit. I had some more thoughts I wanted to share;

Esther had quite a few thoughts and musings about Buddy's medical internship where she first saw human dissections, as well as unborn babies in jars. I think her metaphor of the bell jar, and the fact that she hates children and thinks that having a normal family-oriented life would take away from her career and her own interesting life, all echo the same sentiment. She sees herself frozen and suspended in time, like one of these unborn babies floating in formaldehyde, almost as if aborted in the middle of life, dead at 19-years-old, or more accurately, not yet even born. She feels as a child as she struggles with her own self-image and belonging to the world, at the same time as the outer world is trying to tell her to bear children and get married now that she is still young and beautiful. But she doesn't even feel like she started her life yet. She wants to be a writer, but all she has known is school and getting good grades, and being a good girl. She has not made her own decisions, lost her virginity, traveled, or done anything "noteworthy" to record in her writing. Thus, she falls into a deep dissociative depressive episode and suicidal thoughts, thinking she cannot write. She doesn't have a career in front of her. Dead before she's even born. Electrocuted like the Rosenbergs, but for what? What was her crime other than the melancholy of youth? When you google the Rosenbergs, you can read that they were spies during the Cold war, executed by the electric chair in 1960s. The husband had provenly been in contact with the Soviets, but Ethel's (the wife's) innocence was speculated. And yet, both the husband and the wife faced the same sentence. Only that the wife didn't die straight away. Electrocuted repeatedly, smoking, and suffering. I think that is at the heart of this novel. She feels unjustly sentenced to end her life before it even starts. To undergo ECT to fit the norm. And whenever she speaks of the bell jar as something suffocating, a symbol of her depression, I think she means that it suspends her in formaldehyde like an anatomical section, just dust, just a poem. Not a woman.