Book The Bell Jar

296 pp. $6.95.

WHEN first I packed my grandmother's trunk to take to Radcliffe College, in it I put my A's from high school, my virginity, my square man who wouldn't screw, the articles my grandmother cut out of Reader's Digest, tears that came and wouldn't go for days on end, the parents I never had, and my black patent pocket book and patent heels with a black patent belt to match the heels and the pocket book. This three-piece patent suit I had bought at Saks Fifth Avenue for the history teacher I would adore, and for dates at the Ritz, but the remaining items I would learn to feed to the Charles. Indeed, why else was I going to Radcliffe? A year later, my grandmother's footlocker was still locked, keeping me in stocks at the end of my Lowell House bed. It was patent I no longer needed shoes, pocket book and matching belt; I let them go on Anderson Bridge. In return, the Charles fed me dreams of suicide, and best wishes for the success I deserved. In a fit of mourning. I left the rest of my trunk unpacked; the A's, the virginity, the square man, tears and parents are still in grandmother's black box.

Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar stands on the sun roof of the Amazon Hotel for single girls and lets fly with her forty dollar city dresses into the New York City night. She and cloven other college girls had won a month with a well-known women's fashion magazine, and now they were all going back home. For Esther it was home to her mother and a New England suburb for the summer. She was quitting the city and she hadn't even found a drink she liked, "My dream was ordering a drink one day and finding out it tasted wonderful."

And then it was three weeks later and she hadn't yet changed her clothes or washed her hair or slept any. She envied the Barnard girl down the street who married the Columbia architect; they were Catholic and she was ever pregnant behind her ratty baby carriage. Esther tried writing a novel about herself and that didn't work. And then she tried different ways of killing herself and one way worked better than the other so they put her away. As Sylvia Plath says in her poem "Daddy," "They pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue." The Bell Jar is a description of their jar of glue and the way their fusty inept hands fumbled Esther's embarrassed and bruised parts. Her hilarity is as black as it is defiant; she refuses to be retrieved.

THE BELL JAR. Sylvia Plath's only novel, was published in Great Britain under the name of Victoria Lucas one month before her death in 1963. Her first book of poetry, The Colussus, was published in 1960; Ariel was published in 1965. and Uncollected Poems in 1965. Although her novel goes far towards explaining her poems, it is not an appendage; it stands on its own. Sylvia Plath's legend is as ruthless and as individualistic as Joan Didion's, But where Joan Didion's Play It As It Lavs describes nothing leading to no suicide, The Bell Jar describes every thing hilarious you and I have ever done leading to suicide. She never tells us there is nothing; she just informs us of the process of obliteration.

The Bell Jar is a novel of mourning. Sylvia Plath's inability to leave death alone is her inability to find the kind of joy she had known when she was "nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father before he died." In her novel she remembers "that I had never cried for my father's death." At nineteen Esther can cry and unharbor the funeral she never attended. Like a magnet to its opposite, the daughter need not follow from her life into her father's death. In her own life, though, the mourning was too persistent; Sylvia Plath could find nothing to hold her, no wit or skill greater than her own, no love greater than her own for her father. She killed herself February 11, 1963.

An American Bergman, her realm is purely psychological, obsessed with blockage in relationships. Like Bergman, too, externalities are sucked into the personal in such a way as to become a metaphor for the personal. Her book opens with the electrocution of the Rosenbergs; the newspapers are hungry for their execution. Esther imagines how it would be to be burnt up all along her nerves. In the asylum she is given shock treatments as cure for her insanity. "I'm stupid about executions." she says. In the way that the Vietnam war figures in Bergman's Persona, the Extermination figures in "Daddy." Her father was a German; she feels herself a Jew.

As a woman, too, she feels herself a Jew. "Every woman adores a Fascist, the boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you." When her square boyfriend, Buddy Willard, takes down his pants for her benefit she says, "The only thing I could think of was turkey gizzards and I felt depressed." Hating her virginity she gets a man to give her the rack and the screw and hemorrhages violently. Her suicides are novel.

In the end, I'm sure they found her, her A's under one arm, the Reader's Digest article under the other arm, a persistent virginity between her two children and her two legs, her black patent size seven heels on her two feet, and her father's death through her heart.