The Bell Joe

The Bell Joe is one of the novels that everybody thinks about when they think think about mental illness in literature so what are your thoughts on those ones? I think sometimes her work can be quite dismissed because it's so tightly tied to the author's biography and it's an absolutely key foundational text. Plath explores the difficulties for 1950s women in a consumerist society but she doesn't have all the options open to her that she wants. She talks about a fig tree and how on one branch she can see like you know being a mother or being this amazing poet or this fabulous writer but she can't have it all which is actually kind of interesting.