The Bell Jar (1972, first 1963) by Sylvia Plath

Biographical Note by Lois Ames / Drawings by Sylvia Plath

eVersion 3.0 / Notes at EOF

From Back Cover:

"The Bell Jar is a novel about the events of Sylvia Plath's twentieth year; about how she tried to die,
and how they stuck her together with glue. It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last
poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Franny might have written about herself ten years later, if she
had spent those ten years in Hell." -- Robert Scholes, The New York Times Book Review

"On February 11, 1963, a 30-year-old American poet, separated from her husband and living with
her children in a cold London flat, gassed herself and passed into myth. Eight months later ten of
her last poems, written at a speed of two or three a day, 'written,' she said, 'at about four in the
morning. . . that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby's cry, before the glassy music of the
milkman, settling his bottles,' appeared on two pages of Encounter magazine and caused a
sensation. In 1965 her husband brought out a posthumous collection, Ariel. . . In the eight years
since her death Sylvia Plath has become a major figure in contemporary literature." -- Richard
Locke, The New York Times Book Review

Extracts from the novel:

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.

I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America
who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes
I'd bought in Bloomingdale's one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt and black patent
leather pocketbook to match. And when my picture came out in the magazine the twelve of us were
working on -- drinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lamé bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud
of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-
American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion -- everybody would think I must be
having a real whirl.
Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for
nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and
wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.
Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to
parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have
been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still
and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the
surrounding hullabaloo.
(p. 2)

I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

I began with cooking.
My grandmother and my mother were such good cooks that I left everything to them. They were
always trying to teach me one dish or another, but I would just look on and say, "Yes, yes, I see,"
while the instructions slid through my head like water, and then I'd always spoil what I did so
nobody would ask me to do it again.
 I remember Jody, my best and only girlfriend at college in my freshman year, making me
scrambled eggs at her house one morning. They tasted unusual, and when I asked her if she had
put in anything extra, she said cheese and garlic salt. I asked who told her to do that, and she said
nobody, she just thought it up. But then, she was practical and a sociology major.
I didn't know shorthand either.
This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a
plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again.
Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and
she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter.
The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling
letters. Besides, those little shorthand symbols in the book my mother showed me seemed just as
bad as let t equal time and let s equal the total distance.
(p. 79)

Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs. Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr.
Willard's old suits. She'd spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens
and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs. Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on
the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it
was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five
and ten.
And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a
woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her
to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat
Hadn't my own mother told me that as soon as she and my father left Reno on their honeymoon --
my father had been married before, so he needed a divorce -- my father said to her, "Whew, that's a
relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves"? -- and from that day on my mother never had
a minute's peace.
I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I
would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was
true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward
you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.
(p. 89)

The doctors were having their weekly board meeting -- old business, new business, admissions,
dismissals and interviews. Leafing blindly through a tatty National Geographic in the asylum
library, I waited my turn.
Patients, with accompanying nurses, made their rounds of the stocked shelves, conversing in low
tones, with the asylum librarian, an alumna of the asylum herself. Glancing at her -- myopic,
spinsterish, effaced -- I wondered how she knew she had graduated at all, and, unlike her clients,
was whole and well.
"Don't be scared," Doctor Nolan had said. "I'll be there, and the rest of the doctors you know, and
some visitors, and Doctor Vining, the head of all the doctors, will ask you a few questions, and then
you can go."
But in spite of Doctor Nolan's reassurances, I was scared to death.
I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay
ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.
I kept shooting impatient glances at the closed boardroom door. My stocking seams were straight,
my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans. Something
old, something new. . .
 But I wasn't getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice -- patched,
retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor
Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder.
"All right, Esther."
I rose and followed her to the open door.
Pausing, for a brief breath, on the threshold, I saw the silver-haired doctor who had told me
about the rivers and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey,
and eyes I thought I had recognized over white masks.
The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a
magical thread, I stepped into the room.
(END)