Classics Without All the Class discussion

In a letter while at college, Plath wrote that "I've gone around for most of my life as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell jar." Is this the primary meaning of the novel's titular bell jar? What other meanings does "the bell jar" have?

Thank you for confirming that we're reading this.

Well, since bell jars have all the oxygen extracted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_jar) could the title imply that the protagonist, Esther, feels she's suffocating?

Could it also imply the fishbowl effect? I've finished chapter 4 but there isn't the sense that there exists in Esther's current situation much respect for her privacy, or for that matter, that she's treated with any integrity for her as an evolving individual.

I thought it referred in a coy way how the lightbulb indicating that the shock treatment was in session was in-cased in a bell jar outside the treatment room where the next victims waited. It was the signal to those waiting to start panicking because they were next.

She mentions a couple of times in a book that the air in a bell jar is stale and suffocating. It seems to me that the image symbolizes being trapped by an impersonal force outside of one's control.

I also think of being in a bell jar as re-breathing your own air...stuck in an atmosphere of your own making. She hasn't yet found the courage to be...what? And she is suffocating in that atmosphere.

Sounds like it's a combination of all of those things! She feels every single one of those things, so the bell jar seems to encompass a physical representation of all of that for her.

I've often felt of being cut off from the rest of the world. I used to feel like there was a glass wall between me and everyone else, that I could never really belong or that I couldn't connect to people, during the worst of my depression.