The bell jar

Title:

The bell jar

Author:

Plath, Sylvia, author.

ISBN:

9780060174903

Edition:

50th anniversary edition

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Suggested Age	Status
Book	Searching... Gallaher Village Public Library	PLA	Adult	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Guyandotte Public Library	PLA	Adult	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... West Huntington Public Library	PLA	Adult	Searching... Unknown

Summary

A Special Hardcover Edition to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of Sylvia Plath's Remarkable Novel

"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." -- USA Today

The shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by iconic American writer Sylvia Plath.

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her neurosis becomes palpably real, even rational--as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.

Author Notes

Sylvia Plath's best poetry was produced, tragically, as she pondered self-destruction---in her poems as well as her life---and she eventually committed suicide. She had an extraordinary impact on British as well as American poetry in the few years before her death, and affected many poets, particularly women, in the generation after. She is a confessional poet, influenced by the approach of Robert Lowell.

Born in Boston, a graduate of Smith College, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge University, on a Fulbright Fellowship and married the British poet Ted Hughes. Of her first collection,The Colossus and Other Poems (1962), the Times Literary Supplement remarked, "Plath writes from phrase to phrase as well as with an eye on the larger architecture of the poem; each line, each sentence is put together with a good deal of care for the springy rhythm, the arresting image and---most of all, perhaps---the unusual word."

Plath's second book of poetry, Ariel, written in 1962 in a last fever of passionate creative activity, was published posthumously in 1965 and explores dimensions of women's anger and sexuality in groundbreaking new ways. Plath's struggles with women's issues, in the days before the second wave of American feminism, became legendary in the 1970s, when a new generation of women readers and writers turned to her life as well as her work to understand the contradictory pressures of ambitious and talented women in the 1950s. The Bell Jar---first published under a pseudonym in 1963 and later issued under Plath's own name in England in 1966---is an autobiographical novel describing an ambitious young woman's efforts to become a "real New York writer" only to sink into mental illness and despair at her inability to operate within the narrow confines of traditional feminine expectations. Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. In recent years, there have been a number of biographies and critical evaluations of Plath's work.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

Guardian Review

It was the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. I couldn't stop wondering what it would be like to be burned alive. It was like the first time Buddy Willard showed me a cadaver; I felt as if I was carrying the head around with me on a string. New York was bad enough. Just 19 years old, a scholarship girl winning a prize to work on a fashion magazine, I was meant to be having the time of my life. Truth is I was just bored. I sat back with Doreen and let the world slip though my fingers. We were meant to be going to a party, but our cab got stuck in traffic. Some guy said he was a DJ and chatted up Doreen. No one noticed me so I drank neat vodka and thought some more about how stupid Buddy Willard was. Doreen's breasts popped out of her dress, so I popped home and locked the door. She came back later and knocked on my door but I couldn't be bothered to get out of bed and open it. I figured if I mentioned Buddy Willard a third time it might generate a curiosity in the reader I couldn't muster myself. Normally I wanted to write poems; now I just lay around with food poisoning not thinking of much. I would have gone to the movies, but they were all Technicolor. I only liked shades of grey. Everyone assumed I was going to marry Buddy Willard when he came out of the TB clinic in the Adirondacks. I'd adored him till I found he was a hypocrite. After he took me to watch him cut up cadavers and deliver babies at medical school, he took off his clothes. He invited me to get undressed too, but I couldn't see the point. I asked if he had had an affair before. He said yes. I felt betrayed. I wasn't jealous; just unreasonable. I thought of all the things I couldn't do. I couldn't cook. I couldn't drive. I couldn't emote. But I reckoned I could sleep with Constantin, a short, ugly interpreter for the UN whom Mrs Willard had introduced me to. "Do you want to sleep with me?" I asked. "No," he replied. "You're too much like hard work." Mr Willard took me to the sanatorium. Buddy showed me a poem he had written. It was awful. Just like some Ted Hughes doggerel. "I'm not going to marry you," I said. "You made me ski straight down a hill and break my leg." He thought I was being neurotic. Typical male bastard. Someone called Hilda - I would explain who she was, if I remembered or cared - said she was glad the Rosenbergs had fried. I went on a date with Marco, a real woman-hater. You can always tell a woman-hater. They are every man I've ever met. I hit him. He called me a slut. Or maybe it was the other way round. I'm a little vague sometimes. My mother told me I hadn't made it on to the writing course. Maybe you can see why. Buddy Willard wrote that he had an infatuation with his nurse and I started to write a novel. This might even be it. I decided I needed experience. I began reading Finnegans Wake and the doctor sent me to a psychiatrist. I didn't trust Dr Gordon. He was a man, smooth talking, good looking. You might be wondering by now if I had issues with men, as every man I met was a complete bastard. Don't. I was fine. This is a protean feminist novel; all men are bastards. Especially Ted. Dr Gordon gave me some electric shock treatment. It didn't work so I went home and tried to hang myself. That didn't work either so I tried to shoot myself. Then drown myself. Eventually I took an overdose of sleeping pills and woke up in a private hospital where I was greeted by Buddy Willard's first girl-friend, Joan. "I tried to kill myself just like you," she said. "But now I'm better." The bell jar was still stifling me as I was shunted from Dr Pancreas to Dr Syphilis. I then found myself speaking to a kind and beautiful psychiatrist, Dr Nolan. "I hate my mother," I said, for the first and last time showing any insight or interest in my condition. "You need some more ECT," she replied, "though my ECT will be a touchy-feely feminine ECT, not like the treatment that electrocuting male chauvinist bastard gave you." I could finally breathe. The bell jar had lifted, though you wouldn't have noticed it from my writing, which was as lifeless and un-self aware as ever. "I'm leaving to be a psychiatrist," Joan told me. There's no chance of me seeing you, I thought charitably, as I made an appointment with a doctor to get myself fitted with a coil. I needed a world free from babies where I could have sex with the right kind of man. Even though the right kind of man obviously didn't exist. "Ouch," I said. Irwin had warned me losing my virginity might hurt; he had been right. What a bastard. I started haemorrhaging profusely and took a cab back to the hospital, where the nurse greeted me with the news that Joan had hanged herself. I couldn't remember who Joan was till Buddy Willard asked me whether it was a coincidence that both his girlfriends had been depressed. I smiled enigmatically, told him not to worry as I wasn't going to see him again anyway and then went round to hit that jerk Irwin for my $20 cab fare to the hospital. I wasn't going to see him again, either. I was no longer a blob. I had been reborn. Well, maybe. John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays. Caption: article-digclas21.1 I thought of all the things I couldn't do. I couldn't cook. I couldn't drive. I couldn't emote. But I reckoned I could sleep with Constantin, a short, ugly interpreter for the UN whom Mrs [Buddy Willard] had introduced me to. "Do you want to sleep with me?" I asked. "No," he replied. "You're too much like hard work." Dr [Gordon] gave me some electric shock treatment. It didn't work so I went home and tried to hang myself. That didn't work either so I tried to shoot myself. Then drown myself. Eventually I took an overdose of sleeping pills and woke up in a private hospital where I was greeted by Buddy Willard's first girl-friend, Joan. "I tried to kill myself just like you," she said. "But now I'm better." I could finally breathe. The bell jar had lifted, though you wouldn't have noticed it from my writing, which was as lifeless and un-self aware as ever. "I'm leaving to be a psychiatrist," Joan told me. There's no chance of me seeing you, I thought charitably, as I made an appointment with a doctor to get myself fitted with a coil. I needed a world free from babies where I could have sex with the right kind of man. Even though the right kind of man obviously didn't exist. - John Crace.

Library Journal Review

This 25th-anniversary edition of Plath's posthumous autobiographical novel includes a new foreword by the book's original editor, Frances McCullough; biographical notes; and eight previously unpublished drawings by Plath. Bravo to HarperCollins for putting all this together at a reasonable price. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

The Bell Jar Chapter One 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 burned 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-lame 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.) 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. That was another thing--the rest of us had starched cotton summer nighties and quilted housecoats, or maybe terry-cloth robes that doubled as beachcoats, but Doreen wore these full-length nylon and lace jobs you could half see through, and dressing gowns the color of skin, that stuck to her by some kind of electricity. She had an interesting, slightly sweaty smell that reminded me of those scallopy leaves of sweet fern you break off and crush between your fingers for the musk of them. "You know old Jay Cee won't give a damn if that story's in tomorrow or Monday." Doreen lit a cigarette and let the smoke flare slowly from her nostrils so her eyes were veiled. "Jay Cee's ugly as sin," Doreen went on coolly. "I bet that old husband of hers turns out all the lights before he gets near her or he'd puke otherwise." Jay Cee was my boss, and I liked her a lot, in spite of what Doreen said. She wasn't one of the fashion magazine gushers with fake eyelashes and giddy jewelry. Jay Cee had brains, so her plug-ugly looks didn't seem to matter. She read a couple of languages and knew all the quality writers in the business. I tried to imagine Jay Cee out of her strict office suit and luncheon-duty hat and in bed with her fat husband, but I just couldn't do it. I always had a terribly hard time trying to imagine people in bed together. Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenly didn't think they had anything to teach me. I fitted the lid on my typewriter and clicked it shut. Doreen grinned. "Smart girl." Somebody tapped at the door. "Who is it?" I didn't bother to get up. The Bell Jar . Copyright © by Sylvia Plath. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Available:*

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Guardian Review

Library Journal Review

Excerpts

Excerpts