| The Bell Jar, first published in 1963 under a pseudonym, is probably Sylvia Plath's most famous piece of writing. The novel's heroine (of a sort) is Esther Greenwood, a young woman who in so many ways resembles Plath herself. This novel is not only deeply autobiographical, but gives a stunning view of clinical depression- life under the bell jar- and the state of the mental health system at the time. It also offers an interesting commentary of American women in the 1950's. Esther's struggles to stay alive and in one piece throughout both her own depression and the mental hospitals it lands her in are an insight into Plath's own life and mind... ....I could write you a whole essay on this book, and likely at some point in the next four years i will, but for now, I'm going to save you from that and just put up passages that mean something to me instead. I'll probably just put up a couple at first and add them slowly, as they come up, so expect more of them as time goes on. You can also probably expect me to change this page quite a bit as I do so. |
| The Bell Jar |
| The sight of all that food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It's not that we hadn't enough to eat at home, it's just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, "I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound," which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast. -page 21 |
| By standing at the left side of the window and laying my cheek to the woodwork, I could see downtown to where the UN balanced itself in the dark, like a weird green Martian honeycomb. I could see the moving red and white lights along the drive and the lights of the bridges whose names I didn't know. The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well have not been there at all, for all the good it did me. |
| .... The mirror over my bureau seemed slightly warped and much too silver. The face in it looked like the reflection in a ball of dentist's mercury. I thought of crawling in between the bed sheets and trying to sleep, but that appealed to me about as much as stuffing a dirty, scrawled-over letter into a clean envelope. I decided to take a hot bath. There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I say: "I'll go take a hot bath." I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water's up to your neck. I remember the ceiling over every bathtub I've ever stretched out in. I remember the texture of the ceilings and the cracks and the colors and the damp spots and the light fixtures. I remember the tubs, too: the antique griffin-legged tubs, and the modern coffin-shaped tubs, and the fancy pink marble tubs overlooking indoor lily ponds, and I remember the shapes and sizes of the water taps and the different sorts of soap holders. I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath. I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water. -page 15-16 |