Esther Greenwood’s breakdown under the weight of 1950s expectations opened up questions we hadn’t planned on: what the history of psychiatric treatment tells us about which kinds of distress got taken seriously, whose suffering got medicated, and whose was simply disciplined out of sight.
We discussed the racism embedded in the novel’s language, what it means that Plath is still held up as a feminist icon given those elements, and how the book handles queerness and sexuality. And we asked the question the book almost forces: in what ways is 2025 not that different from 1953?