The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

Above all she was amazed by the possibility of madness descending like a tornado into a typical bright young woman’s life out of nowhere—“That could happen? I could hardly believe it.”

The big questions: how to sort out your life, how to work out what you want, how to deal with men and sex, how to be true to yourself and how to figure out what that means—those things are the same today.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

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.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I collected men with interesting names.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,”

He had what no American man I’ve ever met has had, and that’s intuition.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

You can’t coddle these sick people, it’s the worst thing for them, it’ll spoil them to bits.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

The figures around me weren’t people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.

I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it.

The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn’t take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.

“A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.”

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

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?