The Bell Jar (2 page)
Although her illness was never
actually diagnosed, several researchers in the field have noted Plath’s
unerring description of schizophrenic perception: a hallway becomes a menacing
tunnel, a person approaching has an enormity that threatens to engulf the
viewer the closer they come, objects loom out of all proportion, the alphabet
letters on a page become impossible to decipher, and virtually everything seems
both unreal and dangerous. Despite the interventions of the last
quarter-century, from Librium to Prozac, Plath’s vivid, entirely rational,
almost steely description of that world remains true and uneclipsed by any
later writer. Now that it’s become socially acceptable to talk about such
things, it’s easy to forget that reading
The
Bell Jar
brought us
an understanding of the experience that made such openness possible.
And what about the novel’s
larger relevance to today’s young reader? At a time when Holden Caulfield’s
sensitivities seem unrelated to the hard edges of today’s world for many
readers, does
The
Bell Jar
still have any meaning? After all, the
novel was pre-drugs, pre-Pill, pre-Women’s Studies. In the survivalist mode of
the
‘90s,
suicide may seem like a loser’s option. But the adolescent
suicide rate has quadrupled since World War II, and if suicide isn’t quite as
romantic as it was when
The
Bell Jar
was first published here,
statistics indicate that it’s definitely on the rise. Depression has become
almost epidemic in America in the meantime.
When I asked an informal focus
group of bright young women in their twenties what they thought about the book,
they were unanimous: they loved it. Although some of them found it depressing,
others found it surprisingly undepressing. The issues, they pointed out,
haven’t changed; yes, the social elements of teas and dating and the accepted
conventions have changed, but they’re not unfamiliar, since they’re the stuff
of old movies. The big questions: how to sort out your life, how to work out
what you want, how to deal with men and sex, how to be true to yourself and how
to figure out what that means--those things are the same today.
For contemporary readers who
look back on the fifties as simply being cool, it may be difficult to see how
daring Plath really was. In the clutches of postwar conformity and rampant
conservatism, even enjoying one’s own body was an incredibly risky thing to do.
Plath had another rein to wear: because she was poor, everything depended on
keeping her scholarship and winning prizes. If she was less than perfect, she
could lose it all in a moment. For anyone going through the college admissions
process today, Plath’s anxieties are all too familiar.
Perhaps because she died young,
Plath has almost always been viewed by critics as a contemporary. I remember
one prominent feminist critic who aspired to be her biographer saying, about
Plath’s difficult last year of marriage: “I don’t get it--why didn’t she just
walk out?” as though that would be an obvious option for a young American
woman” stranded in the British countryside with two small children and no funds
in the very early sixties.
But it may be equally true that
readers feel she’s a contemporary because her voice has such intensity, such a
direct edge to it. Almost everything Plath wrote in her short life--and it was
extraordinary how much she did write, exhausting three typewriters and writing everything
from poetry to plays to radio dramas to fiction--has that quality, the
immediacy of a letter just opened. It’s heartbreaking to think of what she
would have written, what wisdom and maturity would have brought to this
stunning voice.
There are also things we can see
from this distance that we couldn’t see before. When the novel was first
published, her death was still a fresh tragedy, leaving her family in a huge
amount of pain that any new Plath publication only intensified. For readers,
the posthumous publications were of course seen as messages from the grave,
clues to the mystery of what really happened. The jacket of the first edition,
with its dried-blood color and lugubrious tone, certainly gave no hint of the
hilarity inside. In fact, this is a very funny book--the intervening
twenty-five years give us a good reason to delight in Plath’s amazing humor, a
quality she herself thought would make her career as a novelist.
Even such a powerful personal
legend as Plath’s recedes in the enduring presence of the work itself, which is
of course as it should be. After Janet Malcolm’s penetrating piece on the Plath
legend appeared in the
New Yorker
in 1994, the artist Pat Stier, one of
the many readers to respond, noted “The poetry soars over everything.” This
novel too has wings--it takes its readers where they need to go, and shows no
sign of losing altitude.
New York, 1996
THE
BELL JAR
It
was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the
Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New
York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me
sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers--goggle-eyed
headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling
mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help
wondering what it would be like, being bummed alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst
thing in the world.
New York was bad enough. By nine
in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight
evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of
their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled
and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.
I kept hearing about the
Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldn’t get them out of my
mind. It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward, the
cadaver’s head--or what there was left of it--floated up behind my eggs and
bacon at breakfast and behind the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible
for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were
carrying that cadaver’s head around with me on a string, like some black,
noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
(I knew something was wrong with
me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how
stupid I’d been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp
as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I’d totted up so happily
at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts
along Madison Avenue. )
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 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. )
There
were twelve of us at the hotel.
We had all won a fashion
magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs,
and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York
for a month, expenses paid,
and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion
shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet
successful people in the field of our desire and advice about what to do with
our particular complexions.
I still have the makeup kit they
gave me, fitted out for a person with brown eyes and brown hair: an oblong of
brown mascara with a tiny brush, and a round basin of blue eye-shadow just big
enough to dab the tip of your finger in, and three lipsticks ranging from red
to pink, all cased in the same little gilt box with a mirror on one side. I
also have a white plastic sunglasses case with colored shells and sequins and a
green plastic starfish sewed onto it.
I realized we kept piling up
these presents because it was as good as free advertising for the firms
involved, but I couldn’t be cynical. I got such a kick out of all those free
gifts showering on to us. For a long time afterward I hid them away, but later,
when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still have them around
the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week I cut the plastic
starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with.
So there were twelve of us at
the hotel, in the same wing on the same floor in single rooms, one after the
other, and it reminded me of my dormitory at college. It wasn’t a proper
hotel--I mean a hotel where there are both men and women mixed about here and
there on the same floor.
This hotel--the Amazon--was for
women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted
to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and
deceive them; and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy
Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they
had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to
executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting
to get married to some career man or other.
These girls looked awfully bored
to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying
to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one
of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in
airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the
men in Brazil.
Girls like that make me sick.
I’m so jealous I can’t speak. Nineteen years, and I hadn’t been out of New
England except for this trip to New York. It was my first big chance, but here
I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.
I guess one of my troubles was
Doreen.
I’d never known a girl like
Doreen before. Doreen came from a society girls’ college down South and had
bright white hair standing out in a cotton candy fluff round her head and blue
eyes like transparent agate marbles, hard and polished and just about
indestructible, and a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer. I don’t mean a nasty
sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if all the people around her were
pretty silly and she could tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to.
Doreen singled me out right
away. She made me feel I was that much sharper than the others, and she really
was wonderfully funny. She used to sit next to me at the conference table, and
when the visiting celebrities were talking she’d whisper witty sarcastic
remarks to me under her breath.
Her college was so fashion
conscious, she said, that all the girls had pocketbook covers made out of the
same material as their dresses, so each time they changed their clothes they
had a matching pocketbook. This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a
whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.
The only thing Doreen ever
bawled me out about was bothering to get my assignments in by a deadline.
“What are you sweating over that
for?” Doreen lounged on my bed in a peach silk dressing gown, filing her long,
nicotine-yellow nails with an emery board, while I typed up the draft of an
interview with a best-selling novelist.