Reflections on The Bell Jar from the author, Sylvia Plath...

"...pressures of the fashion magazine world which seems increasingly superficial and artificial, the return home to the dead summer world of a suburb of Boston. Here the cracks in her [Esther Greenwood's] nature which had been held together as it were by the surrounding pressures of New York widen and gape alarmingly. More and more her warped view of the world around-- her own vacuous domestic life, and that of her neighbors-- seems the one right way of looking at things."

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