Some great lines from The Bell Jar

I got it into my head that I wanted to re-read The Bell Jar. I'm not trying to make a ham-handed joke about depression but I read this about 20 years ago in college and it's, well, depressing how little I remember.

Sylvia Plath was so freaking talented. This book is really beautifully written.  And engaging. Even when Esther is not having a bang-up time at bar in New York City or touring her boyfriend's (whom she rather hates) medical school, I'm having a blast reading about it. You can tell she was a poet.

Here is her rapturous description of a luncheon thrown by a homemaking magazine where Esther and her fellow interns all later got food poisoning:

None of our magazine editors or the Ladies' Day staff members sat anywhere near me, and Betsy seemed sweet and friendly, she didn't even seem to like caviar, so i grew more and more confident. When I finished my first plate of cold chicken and caviar, I laid out another. Then I tackled the avocado and crab meat salad.

Avocados are my favorite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison. 

As stupid as this sounds, it's hard to imagine a girl who could so rapturously describe stuffing herself with free caviar and avocado would kill herself so soon afterwards. Also, that recipe sounds revolting.

Here's a funny anecdote about Esther attending a luncheon at her scholarship benefactor's house where she first encounters a fingerbowl:

The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done. 

I like that she reads just like me (here from a book of short stories that the magazine editors gifted to everyone who got food poisoning from the crab salad):

I flipped through one story after another until finally I came to a story about a fig tree...I thought it was a lovely story, especially the part about the fig tree in winter under the snow and then the fig tree in spring with all the green fruit. I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree. 


This tree turns up later:

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 Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat 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. 

How much of Esther's depression is a result of her limited options. She talks in the opening lines about the Rosenberg executions which would make the setting the summer of 1953. She is chafing against the double standards between men and women. She doesn't want to go to school only to be a housewife like Buddy's mother. She doesn't want to study poetry just to leave school and be a secretary (for this reason, she refuses to learn shorthand from her mother.) She's bright and ambitious but she's lost and I don't feel like all of that can be laid at the foot of her brain chemistry. 


When she gets home from New York (after narrowly escaping a sexual assault), it becomes evident this is a major depression descending although Plath shows instead of tells:

I reached for the receiver. My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp. I forced it toward the receiver again, but again it stopped short, as if it had collided with a pane of glass.