The bell jar, by Sylvia Plath

a) I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I’d been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I’d totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue. (page 2)

Who were the Rosenbergs?

What did she buy the clothes for?

Why do her successes mount to so little in Madison Avenue?

b) I guess one of my troubles was Doreen.  Doreen singled me out straight away. She made me feel I was that much sharper than the others, and she really was wonderfully funny. (page 4)

Why does Esther describe Doreen as one of her troubles?

 c) Of course, somebody had seduced Buddy, Buddy hadn’t started it and it wasn’t really his fault. (page 66)

What do we learn about Buddy based on that comment?

 d) “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security”.

 “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from”. (page 67)

 Who made these comments? What do we learn about this person from these opinions?


e) I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn’t shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. (page 119)

What has just happened to Esther?

What will happen following this passage?


f) Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. (page138)

What has just happened?  Why was this deemed necessary?

 
g) The basin felt cold as a tomb. I smiled. This must be how they laid the bodies away in the hospital morgue. My gesture, in its small way, echoed the larger gesture of the doctors and nurses. (156)

Where is Esther and what has she just done?  Why?

 h) I felt the darkness, but nothing else, and my head rose, feeling it, like the head of a worm. Someone was moaning. Then a great, hard weight smashed against my cheek like a stone wall and the moaning stopped. (page 164)

 What is being described?

 i) Blue sky opened its dome above the river, and the river was dotted with sails. I readied myself, but immediately my mother and my brother each laid one hand on a door handle. The tyres hummed briefly over the grill of the bridge. Water, sails, blue sky and suspended gulls flashed by like an improbably postcard, and we were across. (page 178)

Where is Esther going and who has made this possible?  What do she and this mysterious person have in common?

 j) I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded. (page 195).  Discuss

 k) But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice – patched, retreaded and approved for the road. (page 233). Discuss