The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I recently bought the novel ‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath. This came about as follows. I have now lived in Mainz for over ten years. Bookshops exert a strong attraction on me. It is therefore strange that I had never entered the shop ‘Shakespeare and so …’ which I must have passed very many times. Now I have done so. I had nothing special in mind and I had no definite plan to buy anything. I spent quite some time looking around the shelves and in the end I did buy a book, ‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath. I knew the title of the book and the name of the author but not much more than that. So why did I feel attracted to it? I guess that it is due to the fact that forty years ago Ali Smith talked to me positively about the author. I do not know if this is really the case but it seems to me plausible. I suppose that the recommendation has slumbered in my unconscious all the time and was brought out again by the chance encounter with the book. I did once have a flat-mate who was writing a PhD on Ted Hughes, the husband of Sylvia Plath, but I do not think that the recommendation came from him. In fact I must have read at least one poem by Plath at that time since on the way home the following fragment which must have been lodged in my memory came into my mind: ‘ebon in the hedges fat’. After I got home I was able to find out that it comes from a poem called ‘Blackberrying’, which must have impressed me as a student. On the way home in the tram I read the first few pages of the novel and it became clear to me that it was a piece of luck that I had bought the book. I had the delicious experience of beginning to read a book and immediately feeling at home.

Reading the book was a positive experience for me from beginning to end, although it includes things I experienced as frightening perspectives. I had warm feelings towards both the protagonist and the author. The book has now been given a place of honour on the bookshelf containing those books I esteem most. I do not feel that I have to provide a justification for the feelings I have just expressed but I will at least mention a couple of aspects of the book which have played a role in producing these. One is the remarkable objectivity with which Plath describes all kinds of things which in principle could have a strong emotional impact. Here I think of Jünger although the authors’ subjects are so different. A second is the way I experience many of Plath’s sentences. When the sentence starts you think it is going in a certain direction and then it suddenly turns and goes in quite a different one. A third is the fact that the book presents a picture of mental illness as seen from the inside. Here I think of the shell-shocked veteran in Mrs Dalloway who I see as portraying some part of Virginia Woolf’s illness. A fourth is that I was struck by the fact that the main character assesses the attractiveness of men by the sound of their names. I never proceeded in this way when deciding how attractive I found women but in this point, where in a sense language overrules reality, and in several others in the book I felt ‘This could be me’. As a last point I simply mention the great originality of the book which is quite different from any other book I have read. This originality is not just an effect of the book as a whole but instead impregnates the whole text.