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| Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar | ||||||||||
| When I bought The Bell Jar from Barnes and Noble along with a few other books, the woman at the counter asked if it was for school.� Normally I would be suspicious when someone implies the only reason you might be reading a book is if you were forced to for a class.� I said no, it wasn't for a class, and she asked me if I'd read her poetry.� I considered quoting lines from "Mad Girl's Love Song", but refrained.� Instead I told her yes, I just started reading her poetry, and I liked it.� "It's good," the woman at the counter said, "but flawed.� Not that most of us are." Then she corrected herself quickly: "I mean aren't." | ||||||||||
| Flawed and beautiful, beautiful and flawed.� Oh, the irresistible appeal of the poetically insane.� The Dickenson syndrome of cloistered sensitivities, incompatible with the brutish, butterfly wing-breaking rough shoulders of the world.� As if insanity were merely an excess of poetic sensibility.� Esther Greenwood, drifting with neurotic appeal through New York apartments, calling people hypocrites or "stupid moon-brains", eating crab-meat at luncheons hosted by Ladies Weekly, artfully throwing up in taxi-cabs.� But the ideal madness is of course undermined by the dreadful, stale, insulin-choked fatness and greasy-haired morbidity, not a lovable Ophelia but a discolored dull-witted patient coveting privileges in a hospital ward.� The threat of self-destruction, when serious, is never romantic.� Attraction to this kind of zombie would verge on necrophilia. | ||||||||||
| Scary is the way the bell jar falls into place, without a "clink" or definable moment or reason a non-autobiographical novel would require.� If Plath was a worse writer she would use phrases like "that's when I started to feel something was wrong" or "I knew the way I was thinking wasn't normal".� The narrator is trapped in the Bell Jar without a wimper of will or objective reflection. | ||||||||||
| The relentless pushing of biography on the part of the publisher makes the novel one long note on the scene of a suicide--book on a string hanging from a broken neck.� Actually, I haven't looked up how Plath committed suicide, exactly, and I don't think I will.� The insinuation is that we can rest assured she wasn't bluffing, the novel is legitimate because she wasn't around to enjoy the (highly successful) publicity stunt. | ||||||||||
| This was one of the few books I finished the same night I started it.� I say that not to imply a "couldn't put it down" endorsement, but to observe that the insomniac madness of the book (she talks about a third phase somewhere outside of night and day) takes on more lurid colors at 4:00 in the morning. | ||||||||||
| The novel has the strengths of a poem, voice like a charming woman dying of poison but talking to her guests even though her face puffs out and her words become acid.� | ||||||||||