The Bell Jar
“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
I recently finished reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. It’s hard to explain why I read it. I’m still not sure, really. Anyway, I picked out some of the passages I highlighted and thought I’d share them with you.
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
The character begins the novel midway through her college years, working for a magazine in New York. She’s young and in the city for the summer. She should be happy. Everyone says she should be. Everyone else is.
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.
I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time.
I felt like a hole in the ground. 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.
The bell jar analogy comes later, but I really like the way she describes the feeling of being in a room and feeling removed from it and everyone in it. Being a hole in the ground.
I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.
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 be true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.
“What do you have in mind after you graduate?”
“I don’t really know,” I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.
All these quotes share a similar theme of not knowing. You can feel the character’s opinion of herself slipping, drowning in her thoughts.
I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence. I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.
She’s removed from the conversation. Instead of living in her house, she lives in her head.
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
It was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days.
I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. But even that didn’t shut out the light, so I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
That’s at the center of it all. “I had nothing to look forward to.” Apathy.
The minute I hung up I knew I should have said I would come.
Every time you say no, what could have happened?
Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.
Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.
I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.
These three are about writing, I just found them interesting.
Inertia oozed like molasses through Elaine’s limbs. That’s what it must feel like to have malaria, she thought.
This is a passage from the novel she starts to write. It’s one of the best metaphors I’ve read.
At first I felt hopeful.
To me, this is the most meaningful sentence in the book. Five words, “at first I felt hopeful.” In those five words, Sylvia Plath manages to capture so many different life stories. At first,we are hopeful. Then things change. There’s another passage later on in the book where she writes “I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.” At first she felt hopeful. Then things happened.
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.
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.
I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
Why wash today when you have to wash again tomorrow? Why do anything today if you have to do it tomorrow?
What did I think was wrong? That made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong.
My mother smiled. “I knew my baby wasn’t like that.” I looked at her. “Like what?” “Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.” She paused. “I knew you’d decide to be all right again.”
Just imagining hearing those words in regard to a mental illness is infuriating.
I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
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 cafe in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
And so they retreat into their head.
But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
There’s always the fear that this illness will come back. That it never really left.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
