"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" (3).
"I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls like me all over American 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 pocketbook to match" (2).
Sylvia Plath. She was played in a movie by Gwyneth Paltrow. People who have never read either her poetry or her novel are familiar with her tragic, romanticized life—and death. A storied college career at Smith College. Marries an older well-known British poet, Ted Hughes. Publishes two heralded poetry collections before her suicide at the age of 30. The Bell Jar published posthumously under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She experienced a success after her death that she never had in her short 30 years of life. Her life becomes an example of the difficulties of being a modern woman and an artist in the years after World War Two. Here is a brief biography of her.
I admire The Bell Jar for many reasons—and I'm not alone. The writing is, in my opinion, gorgeous. Plath is known, rightly, for her rigorously crafted poetry. But she has crafted a tight narrative in this, her only novel, that manages to communicate the inner being of Esther Greenwood. Few books in my reading experience come close to this book in portraying the terror of, as Olivia Babuka Black termed it two years ago, "spiraling out." Esther's first person narrative puts us right in the middle of the tornado that is her life at this moment. We know that she will have a child in the future, and with that, the possible assurance that she has put her life back in order. But other than that detail, the narrative keeps us firmly in the moment. And the moment, given no commentary from the future Esther, leaves us living Esther's life with her as it teeters toward a terrible spiral.
So:
1. Reaction to the book so far? Like? Dislike? Neutral? What particular moment or line or scene stays with you? Quote from the novel in your answer (but avoid the quotes I've used above).
2. How do we see Esther struggling here in this first chapter? Pick one example of this—and how it shows her as a young woman struggling.
3. The fact is, as we will discover, Esther suffers from a mental illness. At the same time, Plath presents a world that Esther exists in that is terribly unhealthy, confusing, and destructive (I would argue) for her. From what we see in this chapter, how is this world conspiring against Esther? Name one way we see it as a unhealthy, confusing, or maybe even destructive force? And if you find yourself in agreement with someone else's assessment (perfectly possible), do your best to add to that classmate's argument. That would be the same for any of the questions above.
Below is Plath interviewing writer Elizabeth Bowen at the time in which The Bell Jar is set.
