A beautifully written work. The prose is poetic (even musical) and elegant, contrasting with the ugliness of its subject: depression. Esther’s inner world is raw and intense, yet her words remain carefully crafted, never escalating into overly emotional territory. This restraint, paradoxically, drew me even closer to her turmoil. The novel has everything I love in a book: captivating storytelling, vivid imagery, entertainment of any sort, and a sense of tranquility in the writing.
There’s a liberating feeling I get from reading her words. I enjoyed being cynical with her, sarcastic with her, and mean with her, and I would have a good giggle at her dark humor, feeling like it was allowed. It made my ugliest thoughts feel less shameful, giving me the freedom to explore those darker corners of my mind without judgment. As for Esther, I see her bitter attitude as a shield against the judgments and expectations placed on young women in the 1950s, reflecting her struggle to reconcile her inner complexity with confining societal norms.
The cause of her depression is difficult to pinpoint. It’s a tangled web of internal conflicts, existential crises, family and societal pressures, unfulfilled expectations, unresolved trauma… all intricately woven into her sense of self. When I think of Esther, I can feel what it must be like to be her: so intelligent, so capable, so full of potential, yet so multi-layered, so vulnerable, and so weighed down by unhealed wounds. The author does an excellent job showing the complexity of a mental breakdown. A masterpiece!
Seeing Doreen supported in my arms and silent except for a few wet hiccupts, the woman strode away down the hall to her cubicle with its ancient Singer sewing-machine and white ironing-board. I wanted to run after her and tell her I had nothing to do with Doreen, because she looked stern and hard-working and moral as an old-style European Immigrant and reminded me of my Austrian grandmother.
I thought it was a lovely story, especially the part about the fig-tree in winter under the snow and then the fig-tree in spring with all the green fruit. I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.
These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I’d really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying ‘I guess so’.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a very happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socraties and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
As I stared down at Constantin the way you stare down at a bright, unattainable pebble at the bottom of a deep well, […]
A great white light seemed to shoot out of it, illuminating the room. Then the light withdrew into itself, leaving a dewdrop on a field of gold.
I picked up my pocket-book and started back over the cold stones to where my shoes kept their vigil in the violet light.
I could have torn the metal cover off with my bare hands, the lock was so feeble, but I wanted to do things in a calm, orderly way.
My mother told me I should be grateful.
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I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever 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.
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I sank back in the grey, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir.
I could tell he thought I was crazy as a loon, because I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
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I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.
But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stiffling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
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