The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
(Faber and Faber, 1963)
It was a queer 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. … I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
Page 1.
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.
Page 2.
I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and form parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus.
Page 2.
I always had a terribly hard time trying to imagine people in bed together.
Page 6.
All the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something.
Page 6.
I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights.
Page 7.
I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.
Page 9.
It’s amazing how many college boys don’t drink or smoke. I seemed to know them all.
Page 10.
I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it.
Page 12.
I felt like a hole in the ground.
Page 15.
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.
Page 15.
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
Page 18.
I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
Page 19.
I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up.
Page 25.
The stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.
Page 28.
All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to ge true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.
Page 29.
I had a way of persuading my Class Dean to let me do irregular things. She regarded me as a sort of interesting experiment.
Page 31.
It was only by a horrible effort of will that I had dragged myself through the first half of the year.
Page 33.
Marks were really a bit silly anyway, weren’t they, when you knew you’d always get an A?
Page 33.
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
Page 41.
It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
Page 43.
I collected men with interesting names.
Page 48.
I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.
Page 50.
I hated the idea of serving men in any way.
Page 72.
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
Page 72.
When I was nineteen, pureness was the greatest issue.
Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.
Page 77.
At Christmas I almost wished I was a Catholic.
Page 83.
It was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days.
Pages 99-100.
It was my last night.
I grasped the bundle I carried and pulled at a pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flag of truce, once, twice … the breeze caught it, and I let go.
A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it would come to rest.
I tugged at the bundle again.
The wind made an effort but failed, and a batlike shadow sank towards the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
Page 107.
I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment on to the station platform, and the motherly brat of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station-wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.
Page 109.
They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid façade of pine trees, and surrounded by scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bats badminton nets, croquet wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies - the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.
Page 112.
Children made me sick.
Page 113.
I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three … nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
Page 118.
I was still wearing Betsy’s white blouse and dirndl skirt. They drooped a bit now, as I hadn’t washed them in my three weeks at home. The sweaty cotton gage off a sour but friendly smell.
I hadn’t washed my hair for three weeks, either.
I hadn’t slept for seven nights.
Page 122.
I began to feel pleased at my cleverness. I thought I only need tell him what I wanted to, ad that I could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all the while he thought he was so smart.
Page 125.
I had never been to Chicago, but I knew one or two boys who went to Chicago University, and it seemed the sort of place where unconventional, mixed-up people would come from.
Page 127.
She said, as we glided under the cool, deep-sea shade of the elms, ‘Doctor Gordon doesn’t think you’ve improved at all. He thinks you should have some shock treatments at his private hospital in Walton.’
Page 130.
It’s easy enough to find directions on a map, but I had very little knowledge of directions when I was smack in the middle of somewhere.
Page 133.
What bothered me was that everything about the house seemed normal, although I knew it must be chock-full of cray people. There were no bars on the windows that I could see, and no wild or disquieting noises. Sunlight measured itself out in regular oblongs on the shabby, but soft red carpets, and a whiff of fresh-cut grass sweetened the air.
Page 135.
Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal lates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite.
I shut my eyes.
There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath.
Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.
I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.
Page 138.
It would take two motions. One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you counted changing the razor from hand to hand. Then I would step into the tub and lie down.
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
Page 142.
I thought drowning must be the kindest way to die, and burning the worst.
Page 151.
I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and tried pulling the cord tight.
But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my hears and a flush of blood in my face my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.
Then I saw that my body ad all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash.
Pages 152-153.
The only thing I could read, beside the scandal sheets, were these abnormal psychology books. It was as if some slim opening had been left, so I could learn all I needed to know about my case to end it in the proper way.
Page 153.
The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.
Page 154.
I brought my hands to my breast, ducked my head, and dived, using my hands to push the water aside. The water pressed in on my eardrums and on my heart. I fanned myself down, but before I knew where I was, the water had spat me up into the sun, and the world was sparkling all about me like blue and green and yellow semi-precious stones.
Page 154.
I had been a Methodist for the first nine years of my life, before my father died and we moved and turned Unitarian.
Page 157.
Church … no matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.
Page 158.
I didn’t want any priest in my home town to know I’d thought of killing myself. Priests were terrible gossips.
Page 158.
I thought it odd that in all the time my father had been buried in this graveyard, none of us had ever visited him. My mother hadn’t let us come to his funeral because we were only children then, and he had died in hospital, so the graveyard and even his death, had always seemed unreal to me.
Page 159.
Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one.
At first noting happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.
The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.
Page 163.
I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head.
Page 176.
So Mrs. Guinea had flown back to Boson and taken me out of the cramped city hospital ward, and now she was driving me to a private hospital that had grounds and golf courses and gardens, like a country club, where she would pay for me, as if I had a scholarship, until the doctors she knew of there had made me well.
Page 178.
I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
Page 178.
Miss Huey began to talk in a low, soothing voice, smoothing the salve on my temples and fitting the small electric buttons on either side of my head. ‘You’ll be perfectly all right, you won’t feel a thing, just bite down …’ And she set something on my tongue and in panic I bit down, and darkness wiped me out like chalk on a blackboard.
Page 205.
I looked at Joan. In spite of the creepy feelings, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, or her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.
Pages 209-210.
Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been though, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.
Page 210.
Whenever I thought about men and men, and women and women, I could never really imagine what they would be actually doing.
Page 210.
‘What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,’ I had told Doctor Nolan. ‘A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.’
Page 212.
The baby’s mother smiled and smiled, holding that baby as if it were the first wonder of the world. I watched the mother and the baby for some clue to their mutual satisfaction, but begore I had discovered anything, the doctor called me in.
‘You’d like a fitting,’ he said cheerfully, and I thought with relief that he wasn’t the sort of doctor to ask awkward questions. I had toyed with the idea of telling him I planned to be married to a sailor as soon as his ship docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and the reason I didn’t have an engagement right was because we were too poor, but at the ls moment I rejected that appealing story and simply said ‘Yes.’
I climbed up on the examination table, thinking, ‘I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes here all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did they would do anyway, regardless’
Page 213.
Gradually the suspicion that Catholics had X-ray eyes diminished, and I grew easy. I had done well by my shopping privileges I thought.
I was my own woman.
The next step was to find the proper sort of man.
Page 213.
Joan grew wistful. ‘You’ll come visit me, wont you, Esther?’
‘Of course,’
But I thought, “Not likely.’
Page 215.
It was only after seeing Irwin’s study that I decided to seduce him.
Page 216.
Irwin had a queer, old-world habit of calling women ladies.
Page 216.
After months of wholesome, dull asylum diet, I was greedy for butter.
Page 217.
I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him. Irwin was a full professor at twenty-six and had the pale, hairless skin of a boy genius. I also needed somebody quite experienced to make up for my lack of it, and Irwin’s ladies reassured me on this head. Then, to be on the safe side, I wanted somebody I didn’t know and wouldn’t go on knowing - a kind of impersonal, priestlike official, as in the tales of tribal rites.
Page 218.
Ever since I’d learned about the corruption of Buddy Willard my virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck.
Page 218.
I thought how lucky it was I had started practising birth control during the day, because in my winey state that night I would never have bothered to perform the delicate and necessary operation. I lay, rapt and naked, on Irwin’s rough blanket, waiting for the miraculous change to make itself felt.
But all I felt was a sharp, startlingly bad pain.
‘It hurts,’ I said, ‘Is it supposed to hurt?’
Irwin didn’t say anything. Then he said, ‘Sometimes it hurts.’
Page 218.
It occurred to me that the blood was my answer. I couldn’t possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of a great tradition.
Page 219.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
Page 227.
I didn’t know who would marry me now that I’d been where I had bene. I didn’t know at all.
Page 231.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am.
Page 233.
There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.
Page 233.