Loved this book and really admire the writing, flair and spirit in it. My thoughts are my own.
Poetry is not my passion, so I’ve never read much or studied poets and their output. However, Sylvia describes incidents in a way that captured my interest. She uses the word “ptomaine poisoning” to describe an outbreak of shellfish poisoning which happened to her and ten of the girls on her secondment as an assistant editor to a prestigious New York Magazine. Ptomaine is now an outdated term , but so powerful, I can almost taste the crab.
As “The Bell Jar” is Plath’s only published prose book and is regarded as semi autobiographical, I came to it with a freshness and curiosity, with my ears ready to listen to a story and I was not disappointed.
I found myself fact checking some of the details in the book . Sylvia Plath was indeed a straight A student and I believe had the potential to have been a top academic if she had wanted. The Physics class she took reluctantly and excelled in then used her success to persuade her college that while she would attend Chemistry classes(which she hated) there was no need to sit an exam. Only someone who knew how to play the academic system could have done that so successfully and with such aplomb.
I suppose it was the era that she was born in that defined her view on relationships with the opposite sex. A ” woman’s role” to keep house, have children and worship her husband (the main bread winner) seems like something that she would grow to hate. Perhaps she did or perhaps she didn’t. The scene in the bell jar where the the diamond pin man tries to rape her and she sticks her stiletto heel in his thigh and leaves him to search around in the grounds for the diamond pin that he gave her and then insisted she gave him back was classic sassy woman. Sylvia could give as good as she got when she needed to .
I love the descriptions of her mother, whom with such a talented daughter , verging on genius as a writer had to support her both emotionally and financially taking into account Sylvia’s sensitivities. I appreciate Sylvia’s honesty in describing how her mother made her feel, but my overall impression was that she knew she was loved and also that she had many people around her that cared for her too.
What strikes me as sad, is it was all based on competitive writing, she wanted to win competitions , earn money for short stories from Publishers of Magazines , win , win , win. She could do it to, really she was invincible and curious and had a lot to offer the World. Did she stop winning, or did she stop believing she could win.
I don’t think those times were easy, there was not much money floating about. I love her frankness in saying that her family would run out of financial sympathy for her and she would be moved from expensive private psychiatric hospitals to public facilities where her treatments would be inferior. She wanted to get better before that happened. Which indeed she did,as at the end of the book she does return to college and eventually goes to Europe, the rest is history.
I will return to the Bell Jar again and again, because it’s language, it’s descriptions and it’s story are absolutely fascinating, so much better than J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” which as a coming of age novel left me slightly doubtful of it’s characters. Plath’s writing was heartfelt and visceral and frank. There was nothing phoney about her.
