The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

Only 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 trolley-bus.

and a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer. I don’t mean a nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if all the people around her were pretty silly and she could tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to.

Ordering drinks always floored me. I didn’t know whisky from gin and never managed to get anything I really liked the taste of.

‘I’ll have a vodka,’ I said. The man looked at me more closely. ‘With anything?’ ‘Just plain,’ I said. ‘I always have it plain.’

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 god-like.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.’ I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s,

I collected men with interesting names.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

He swung up from the wicker rocking-chair and gave it a sharp little unnecessary push. Then he dropped a pale blue envelope with a Yale crest into my lap. ‘Here’s a letter I meant to leave for you if you weren’t in. There’s a question in it you can answer by mail. I don’t feel like asking you about it right now.’ After Buddy had gone I opened the letter. It was a letter inviting me to the Yale Junior Prom.

While he kissed me I kept my eyes open and tried to memorize the spacing of the house lights so I would never forget them. Finally Buddy stepped back. ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Wow what?’ I said, surprised. It had been a dry, uninspiring little kiss, and I remember thinking it was too bad both our mouths were so chapped from walking five miles in that cold wind. ‘Wow, it makes me feel terrific to kiss you.’ I modestly didn’t say anything. ‘I guess you go out with a lot of boys,’ Buddy said then.

From the first night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about.

Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone. I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe

and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

But then Eric wrote me a letter saying he thought he might really be able to love me, I was so intelligent and cynical and yet had such a kind face,

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all. That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.’

going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

‘Oh, sure you know,’ the photographer said. ‘She wants,’ said Jay Cee wittily, ‘to be everything.’ I said I wanted to be a poet.