It's so hard to sit down and write a review about someone's journals, specially someone so important and significant in the literary world while I can barely understand her poetry all the way through.

It's weird to feel entitled to analyze someone's struggles or even say I relate to them in 2022 with all the advances women have made and the advantages I have because of them, yet I can't help but say that I do relate.

Early on we see her agony with being an ambitious person in the body of a woman who should be cheerful, beautiful and pure while almost secretly obsessing on her inteligence to better her writing. The Journals themselves appear to only exist as an exercise of writing. Later on Plath repeats several times that she should keep quiet about her goals and aspirations and not bother her husband about it. Maybe because she thought people would doubt her capability or judge her progress but she stood many things on her own.

I kept thinking of A Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, where the different protagonists get lost in their own obsessions, turning into what people love to call "hysterical". It's hard to not bring the feminist issue here, women at the time were expected to play a certain role in society, one which almost completely erases their inteligence. Lots of the struggles that come with this role are supposed to be suppressed and kept down and when she finally bursts and collapses people will simply say she's another woman gone mad, the weaker sex, the second sex.

The Bell Jar changed my life and made me want to know more and more about Plath, her Journals bring many discussions for the table and her life ends up being a social study which often turns very insensitive, I hope I did her justice with this review.