The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, “So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.”

“Not bad.” I thought it was dreadful.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

“Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.” She paused. “I knew you’d decide to be all right again.”

I was disappointed. It was just like a man to do it with a gun.

My mother hadn’t cried either. She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn’t have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen.

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway?

Ever since I’d learned about the corruption of Buddy Willard my virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.

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

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?

“I’ll go,” I said, and I did go, and all during the simple funeral service I wondered what I thought I was burying.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road,