The Art of Dying

...What follows is a series of deaths and rebirths: the Rosenbergs, the birth of a baby watched by Esther and her premed boyfriend, dead babies in laboratory jars, Esther's attempts to kill herself and her rescue, the successful suicide of a friend, and Esther's eventual renaissance and own baby...

...The title is a symbol for the isolated world of the insane, and the experiences and people portrayed in the novel were close enough to the author to exclude U.S...

...The first sentence?It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs"—provides Esther's era (1953) as well as two of the novel's principal themes: death, and the shock therapy that precipitates Esther's suicide attempt and eventually helps to cure her...

...As if the end of Sylvia Plath's novel had been rewritten and clarified for this edition, we know that the bell jar will descend one final time...

...she is barely saved from an overdose of sleeping pills, and the remainder of the book chronicles her treatment and recovery...

...at least, that otherwise they would not have attracted so much notice so soon...

...Nevertheless, one comes to the conclusion that Miss Plath's poems were brought to the considerable attention they have received by her early death?or...

...it shows her sitting on a sofa with a rose in her hand, smiling as if she were on the verge of tears...

...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell THERE IS a moment in The Bell Jar when Sylvia Plath's heroine, Esther Greenwood, is sitting on the breezeway of her mother's house trying to write a novel about a girl sitting on the breezeway of her mother's house...

...I, for one, think her poetry has been overpraised, but she was without question a skilled and appealing writer...

...I counted the letters on my fingers...

...publication until eight years after her death...

...I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue...

...Elaine...

...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...

...Psychologists tell us that while schizophrenics are often extremely gifted in a particular area, they frequently turn against their natural gift...

...The letters grew barbs and ram's horns...

...There were six letters in Esther, too...

...Pancreas and Dr...

...To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream...

...Accordingly, Esther loses the ability to read...

...As Esther begins to fall apart, the metaphors become surrealistic...

...It seemed a lucky thing...

...It is a harsh thing to say of any writer that his life adds interest to his work, inasmuch as one would like to believe that art stands by itself...

...Miss Plath's honesty and talent make The Bell Jar an engaging book, far better than the average first novel, even though it owes its revival chiefly to the public's growing interest in the author...

...Esther cannot reconcile herself to her possible futures, or rather, she cannot choose between them...

...There are six letters in Sylvia, too, and Miss Plath, who first published her book in England under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, described it as "an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past...

...Esther's desire to be a poet, since we never see or hear of her writing poems, is a case in point...

...Syphilis...

...I watched them separate, each from the other, and jiggle up and down in a silly way...

...My heroine would be myself, only in disguise...

...The structure of the book is associative...

...She would be called Elaine...

...But Esther is not steering—in fact, she is about to crash...

...Take, for example, the description of Esther's reaction when her boyfriend gives her a lesson in anatomy by undressing in front of her: "I stared at Buddy while he unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet...

...They're cool,' he explained, 'and my mother says they wash easily.' Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept staring at him...

...Similarly, in one scene, as Esther is about to cry, a fashion photographer seats her on a sofa and puts a paper rose in her hand, saying...

...Miss Plath's story is fascinating because we are aware of her tragedy...

...On the dust jacket of The Bell Jar there is a picture of Miss Plath taken the summer she won a guest editorship to Mademoiselle...

...but to Esther, about to be released into the world, the future again looks possible...

...Look what can happen in this country, they'd say...

...An American Cinderella, she knows her success is the epitome of every coed's dream...

...She imagines her future as a branching fig tree: "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...

...Later she hears the doctors in the hospital introduce themselves as Dr...

...The mother's character is encapsulated in her maxim, "Even the apostles were tent makers...

...When Esther starts to feel the bell jar shutting off the world outside, the image of desirable figs changes to one of empty white boxes...

...The Bell Jar is a slight novel...

...Lois Ames, a former classmate who is Miss Plath's biographer, has written a short afterword to The Bell Jar, revealing the real names of some of the people and places in the book, and synopsizing the author's eventual success and tragic suicide...

...A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car...

...In a poem written in 1963, the last year of her life, the protagonist, "Lady Lazarus," confesses: "Dying/ Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well...

...Yet Esther is equally reluctant to emulate the unfeminine women she knows who have sacrificed everything to their careers...

...The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed...

...Gradually, it becomes apparent that Esther is dangerously suicidal...

...How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again...

...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...

...Yet Miss Plath had an excellent ear and an original sense of metaphor...

...This gives a particularly eerie mirror-image effect to the story...

...they had to live just the way we do...

...I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it...

...Her drive is slipping away, and with it, her sense of identity...

...Then they associated themselves in fantastic shapes, like Arabic or Chinese...

...Although it is clear at the beginning that she is telling her story from the vantage point of some years, that she is married and has a baby, her own long-range prognostication is not wholly optimistic...

...No one can say how she would have developed and matured if she had lived...

...Her mother, embittered by having to support the family after her father's death, is concerned that she develop a practical skill, like shorthand...

...In what she left us, however, death is the paramount theme, and reading her work we recognize the shock of prophecy fulfilled...

...Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem...

...The protagonist is an ambitious college junior who has won a summer guest editorship at a fashion magazine in New York...

...Esther's boyfriend goes farther, telling her that she won't want to write after she becomes a mother...

...So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private totalitarian state...

...Miss Plath did not have enough detachment from her heroine to create a true work of the imagination, and certain details seem to be auto-biographically instead of artistically motivated...