The Books: “The Bell Jar” (Sylvia Plath)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The Bell Jar (Modern Classics), by Sylvia Plath. Like many high school girls, I went through a huge Plath phase when I was about 17. I didn’t just read The Bell Jar, Plath’s only novel, but I read the poems, the letters, the diary, the short stories, everything. Here’s a gigantic post I wrote about Plath. Like many authors, I have now had almost a lifelong relationship with Sylvia Plath. I have gone through phases with her. There was the first feverish adolescent phase, when I idolized her, and she seemed to express some of the desolation and disorientation I felt as an adolescent girl. The Bell Jar is often just remembered as the autobiographical novel about her suicide attempt, but to me – in high school – it was about what it was like to be a girl. Now Plath was writing about the much more restrictive 1950s – and what those restrictions did to an unconventional (internally, I mean) female spirit. Plath was a perfectionist, and a high achiever. She did all the things she was supposed to. She was a genius at school, she published her poems, she got scholarships, she really had a wave of huge successes as a young woman. But there is a mania there, which can really be seen when you read her journals (not to mention her letters to her mother, which are truly disturbing). The whole sex thing, and the good girls don’t thing … absolutely trapped her. She knew what was going on, she looked around and saw how the social rules were different for boys, and it is my opinion that it is THAT that caused her to crack up in college, NOT the fact that she didn’t get into the writer’s workshop she wanted to get into and was forced to spend the summer at home. The Bell Jar makes that pretty clear. The social restrictions were unfair, and Plath questioned them. But life was a howling wilderness, it was pre-sexual revolution, and for someone like Plath – the pressure on being normal was enough to make her go nuts. It really was. She found herself split off from herself. There was the good girl and then … the other girl. The real girl. Nobody can sustain a split for that long without either one or the other side winning. Plath, instead, cracked, tried to commit suicide and spent a year in a mental institution. So she fell into the own crack in her psyche. That’s what The Bell Jar is about.

I have read The Bell Jar many times, and while I was captivated by it in high school, it doesn’t really hold up as a whole, when I read it now. Her poems are another story altogether. But I’ll get to those when I get to my poetry bookshelf, which, at this rate, should be sometimes in the year 2018. The Bell Jar is a kind of selfconscious work, stilted at times – and there is much that is quite wonderful about it – and there are set-piece scenes that I will remember forever. The entire intern staff getting food poisoning in the hotel. Breaking the thermometer in the hospital and playing with the mercury. Seeing the baby born. And the excerpt below. Not to mention the stunner of a first sentence:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

The writing is cold, and mean. Plath was not a “nice” person, and that was one of her biggest problems. Women are supposed to be “nice”! I think Plath found it very freeing in her writing when she stopped putting the pressure on herself to be nice. And when she started ignoring her mother’s usually malevolent advice to be “nice”. I actually don’t think Aurelia Plath was well-intentioned. I think she had a lot of anger and jealousy towards her daughter – she was at the same time living vicariously and also trying to suppress her. Talk about being angry at the restrictions placed on women – I think Aurelia Plath’s rage at her OWN life was titanic in nature. But she covered it up with a sickly sweet “nice”ness … Now I’m seeing her thru Plath’s eyes, it is true – but seriously – read her simpering defensive preface to Letters Home, and you’ll see what I mean. What I hear in her words is rage. Plath eventually realized that the relationship with her mother was toxic and basically had to move to England, to put an ocean between them.

All that being said, I don’t think The Bell Jar holds up very well. It seems to me to be MADE for adolescent girls, who want to be “deep”, or who are relishing their own deep-ness. I went through that phase, and The Bell Jar was perfect for me at that time. But as a grownup, I read it and think, “Oh, come now, dear, I know it seems horrible now, but it’ll pass. Just go out and get laid, don’t worry so much about the rules, you’ll be fine, dear … just CHILLAX.” And so the book loses its oomph if you think that our main character is, well, kind of over-reacting.

Again, the poems are completely another story altogether – I’m choosing now to just focus on The Bell Jar.

It is the story of Esther, a college student, who has won a prestigious summer internship at a ladies magazine in New York City. There are only 11 girls or something like that, and they are all put up in a women’s hotel. Esther is an over-achiever, a scholarship girl, and is overwhelmed by New York City. She’s kind of fragile, in some ways. She has internalized the “good girl” restrictions to such a degree that she has become rigid. But, tellingly enough, the other girl she befriends is a blowsy platinum blonde bombshell named Doreen, who doesn’t seem to give a hoot about the world’s restrictions, and she does whatever she wants. There’s something freeing about being with Doreen. She’s not portrayed as a slut, just as a woman of the world … and Esther is envious, wishes she could be like that. Meanwhile, the Rosenbergs are going to be electrocuted, and Esther starts to obsess about it. Not about the case or the trial … but about the fact of electrocution and what it must be like. (Later in the book, when she goes through electroshock treatment, she finds out). It upsets her.

The first third of the book takes place in New York. Then Esther goes home, bringing the second section of the book – hoping that she will receive the letter accepting her into the writer’s workshop in Boston … her mother picks her up at the station and tells her that she was rejected. So now the summer yawns before Esther – she has nothing to do, nothing to look forward to … and she begins to spiral downward. Her mother wants her to take shorthand classes, just so she will have a backup career (until she gets married, of course). Esther begins to lose it. She begins to forget that she has any good qualities, that she can do anything well … she feels trapped by the suburbs (Plath’s evocation of that kind of claustrophobia is pretty damn great) … and things get so bad that she is finally brought to see a psychiatrist. He recommends electroshock therapy on an outpatient basis. Good idea, bro! The therapy is brutal, handled awkwardly and unsensitively, and Esther comes out of it disoriented and upset. This goes on until she finally can’t take it anymore, and tries to commit suicide.

The last third of the book takes place in the mental institution where Esther is in recovery. She’s there for a long time. And she actually ends up getting a GOOD doctor, as opposed to the asswipe she saw earlier. This doctor is a woman, and there’s something about her that Esther finds deeply encouraging … not to mention the fact that the doctor seems to understand what the real problem is: the whole good girl/bad girl sex thing … and basically gets Esther fitted for a diaphragm, and tells her not to worry so much about it. That she can be free, too. Just be safe. As Esther starts to recover, she is allowed “out” on short jaunts, and during one of those jaunts – she decides to lose her virginity. Let’s get this thing OVER WITH so I can just MOVE ON. I can’t remember now who she chooses – some guy she meets … and the virginity-loss goes unbelievably badly (like 1 in a thousand badly) and she begins to hemorrhage. She has to go to the hospital. But somehow, in the chaos of all of that, Esther finds herself better. In the head. Her boyfriend from college Buddy comes to visit her in the hospital – and she no longer is tormented by the fact that Buddy seems to want to domesticate her (he says stuff to her, smugly, like, “When we get married, you won’t feel like writing poetry anymore…”) … all of that stuff is still going on with Buddy, but Esther just laughs at it now. She doesn’t care. Buddy can’t “get” her, if she doesn’t want to be gotten. She’s free. Truly free. That is not to say that she is “back to normal” because that is just the point. “Normal” is too high a bar for some people. And trying to fit into “normalcy” is too much pressure for some people. I’m one of those people. I’m not a wack-job, but I’m not “normal” and I came to terms with that a long time ago. If I tried to “fit in”, if I worried about the concerns of others and why don’t those same things concern me?? … I’d be crushed. I still struggle with it … but I have pretty much won the battle as a whole. Esther is in no way, shape, or form, normal. There’s one sentence in the book that suggests Esther has gone on to get married and have a baby – and it totally doesn’t work for me. Plath has created a character (let’s forget about the autobiographical elements for a minute) who seems like she will NEVER fit in with societal norms, and her journey is such to accept that. So it’s inconceivable that she would go on to have some sort of domestic harmony!

One last thing and then I’ll get to the excerpt:

I haveThe Bell Jar on tape – read by Frances McDormand – and I HIGHLY recommend it. It was given to me as a gift, years ago, and I remember one day I just put it on and cleaned my whole apartment, listening to it. And sometimes laughing out loud. I had forgotten how funny some of it is! Or – it was revealed to me, by McDormand’s line readings, how FUNNY a lot of it is. It’s mean humor, all of it is mean observational humor … but it was great. This was recently, and so yet another level of that book was revealed to me. Like I said – it’s a lifelong relationship.

Plath’s major work is her poems. As a poet, she ranks among the best of her generation. As a novelist, not so much. It’s the poems that really set her free.

And I can’t let this post go by without providing a link to Cara Ellison – who read one of my Plath posts in 2006 – and went on a tear. She had never read her before. Cara took obsession to a whole other level, and it’s been so fun to watch and read her stuff about Plath.

EXCERPT FROM The Bell Jar (Modern Classics), by Sylvia Plath.

“I’m so glad they’re going to die.”

Hilda arched her cat-limbs in a yawn, buried her head in her arms on the conference table and went back to sleep. A wisp of bilious green straw perched on her brow like a tropical bird.

Bile green. They were promoting it for fall, only Hilda, as usual, was half a year ahead of time. Bile green with black, bile green white white, bile green with nile green, its kissing cousin.

Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.

I’m so glad they’re going to die.

I cursed the luck that had timed my arrival in the hotel cafeteria to coincide with Hilda’s. After a late night I felt too dull to think up the excuse that would take me back to my room for the glove, the handkerchief, the umbrella, the notebook I forgot. My penalty was the long, dead walk from the frosted glass doors of the Amazon to the strawberry-marble slab of our entry on Madison Avenue.

Hilda moved like a mannequin the whole way.

“That’s a lovely hat, did you make it?”

I half expected Hilda to turn on me and say, “You sound sick,” but she only extended and then retracted her swanny neck.

“Yes.”

The night before I’d seen a play where the heroine was possessed by a dybbuk, and when the dybbuk spoke from her mouth its voice sounded so cavernous and deep you couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman. Well, Hilda’s voice sounded just like the voice of that dybbuk.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

So I said, “Isn’t it awful about the Rosenbergs?”

The Rosenbergs were to be electrocuted late that night.

“Yes!” Hilda said, and at last I felt I had touched a human string in the cat’s cradle of her heart. It was only as the two of us waited for the others in the tomblike morning gloom of the conference room that Hilda amplified that Yes of hers.

“It’s awful such people should be alive.”

She yawned then, and her pale orange mouth opened on a large darkness. Fascinated, I stared at the blind cave behind her face until the two lips met and moved and the dybbuk spoke out of its hiding place, “I’m so glad they’re going to die.”

“Come on, give us a smile.”

I sat on the pink velvet loveseat in Jay Cee’s office, holding a paper rose and facing the magazine photographer. I was the last of the twelve to have my picture taken. I had tried concealing myself in the powder room, but it didn’t work. Betsy had spied my feet under the doors.

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

This was the last round of photographs before the magazine went to press and we returned to Tulsa or Biloxi or Teaneck or Coos Bay or wherever we’d come from, and we were supposed to be photographed with props to show what we wanted to be.

Betsy held an ear of corn to show she wanted to be a farmer’s wife, and Hilda held the bald, faceless head of a hatmaker’s dummy to show she wanted to design hats, and Doreen held a gold-embroidered sari to show she wanted to be a social worker in India (she didn’t really, she told me, she only wanted to get her hands on a sari).

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.

“Oh sure you know,” the photographer said.

“She wants,” said Jay Cee wittily, “to be everything.”

I said I wanted to be a poet.

Then they scouted about for something for me to hold.

Jay Cee suggested a book of poems, but the photographer said no, that was too obvious. It should be something that showed what inspired the poems. Finally Jay Cee unclipped the single, long-stemmed paper rose from her latest hat.

The photographer fiddled with his hot white lights. “Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.”

I stared through the frieze of rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee’s window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey cloud puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if, when it passed out of sigh, I might have the good luck to pass with it.

I felt it very important to keep the line of my mouth level.

“Give us a smile.”

At last, obediently, like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up.

“Hey,” the photographer protested, with sudden foreboding, “you look like you’re going to cry.”

I couldn’t stop.

I buried my face in the pink velvet facade of Jay Cee’s loveseat and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room.

When I lifted my head, the photographer had vanished. Jay Cee had vanished as well. I felt limp and betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on.