Name: The Bell Jar
ISBN: 9781551997346

Sylvia Plath

The only novel by Sylvia Plath, one of America’s most famous and significant female authors. Based on her own struggles, it chronicles a young woman’s descent into depression and eventually into suicidal behaviour, coupled with her quest to discover herself at a time when self-discovery, for a woman, meant navigating traditional models of social propriety on one side and new ideas of freedom and self-determination on the other. It is widely cited as one of the 20th century’s greatest novels. Pwnguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

The Bell Jar

Larissa Campos

What do you have in mind after you graduate" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.

'I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it

It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really

 is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.

'You'll never get anywhere like that. Jay Cee paused. 'What

"Oh, I can read a bit of French, I guess, and I've always wanted to learn German.' I'd been telling people I'd always wanted to learn German for about five years.

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, "Do you know what a poem is, Esther?" 

Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, "So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together." 

And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone. 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 Constantin 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.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know. "Oh, sure you know," the photographer said. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything." I said I wanted to be a poet. Then they scouted about for something for me to hold. Jay Cee suggested a book of poems, but the photographer said no, that was too obvious. It should be something that showed what inspired the poems. Finally Jay Cee undipped the single, long-stemmed paper rose from her latest hat. The photographer fiddled with his hot white lights. "Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem." I stared through the frieze of rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee's window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey cloud puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if, when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it. I felt it was very important to keep the line of my mouth level. "Give us a smile." At last, obediently, like the mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up. "Hey," the photographer protested, with sudden foreboding, "you look like you're going to cry." I couldn't stop. I buried my face in the pink velvet facade of Jay Cee's loveseat and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room. When I lifted my head, the photographer had vanished. Jay Cee had vanished as well. I felt limp and betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on.

Doctor Gordon's features were so perfect he was almost pretty. I hated him the minute I walked in through the door. I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying "Ah!" in an encoraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out. Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end. And then, I thought, he would help me, step by step, to be myself again.

Cal was supposed to be very intelligent, and Jody had said over the phone that he was cute and I would like him. I wondered, if I'd been my old self, if I would have liked him. It was impossible to tell.

...pode ser uma doida mas é muito engraçada 

"I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?" Doctor Nokn paused. Then she said, "Tenderness." That shut me up. "I like you," Joan was saying. "I like you better than Buddy." And as she stretched out on my bed with a silly smile, I remembered a minor scandal at our college dormitory when a fat, matronly-breasted senior, homely as a grandmother and a pious Religion major, and a tall, gawky freshman with a history of being deserted at an early hour in all sorts of ingenious ways by her blind dates, started seeing too much of each other. They were always together, and once somebody had come upon them embracing, the story went, in the fat girl's room. "But what were they doing?" I had asked. Whenever I thought about men and men, and women and women, I could never really imagine what they would be actually doing. "Oh," the spy had said, "Milly was sitting on the chair and Theodora was lying on the bed, and Milly was stroking Theodora's hair." I was disappointed. I had thought I would have some revelation of specific evil. I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.

Eu esperava tão mais, talvez o problema seja a expectativa. Sendo bem sincera, os inúmeros trabalhos, projetos, representações artísticas que vi desse mesmo livro, grande maioria eram muito melhores que o livro em si. Foi bom finalmente ler e acho que trouxe um desapego aos clássicos que eu precisava—longe de mim nunca mais lê-los, mas Sylvia Plath saiu do pedestal e enfeitará a estante como aprendizado de muito e lembrança de um momento específico da minha vida. O livro é triste, da pior forma que um livro pode ser triste, quase sem emoção, arrastado. A escrita é ultrapassada, de um jeito muito incômodo. A admiração pela escritora segue comigo, pela coragem e pela vida. O livro perde um pouco de sentido inclusive quando releio analogias que salvei do mesmo. Concluo que sou a árvore de figo e eles não estão caindo apodrecendo enquanto eu sofro, tudo vem das minhas escolhas e há sempre novos frutos.

há anos que eu queria ler esse livro e estava apenas aguardando uma melhor oportunidade, por saber dos temas pesados. e confesso que foi um tanto decepcionante.

a história é terrivelmente sentimental e é ainda mais triste saber que são baseados em fatos reais e em experiências da autora. o que mais me deixou de coração apertado de fato foi o tom fortemente depressivo, com ainda mais profundidade por ser narrado tão bem em primeira pessoa.

no entanto, a obra tem inúmeros tons desnecessários e preconceituosos que não são nem um pouco agradáveis — especialmente como a maioria surgem na história sem fundamento, e parecem funcionar apenas para demonizar uma personagem que, na minha percepção, não deveria ser. são retratos da época no qual o livro foi escrito, mas não é por isso que devem ser assistidos de olhos fechados e passados em branco.

no mais, sinto muito pela história que nos foi contada nesse livro </3

há anos que eu queria ler esse livro e estava apenas aguardando uma melhor oportunidade, por saber dos temas pesados. e confesso que foi um tanto decepcionante.

a história é terrivelmente sentimental e é ainda mais triste saber que são baseados em fatos reais e em experiências da autora. o que mais me deixou de coração apertado de fato foi o tom fortemente depressivo, com ainda mais profundidade por ser narrado tão bem em primeira pessoa.

no entanto, a obra tem inúmeros tons desnecessários e preconceituosos que não são nem um pouco agradáveis — especialmente como a maioria surgem na história sem fundamento, e parecem funcionar apenas para demonizar uma personagem que, na minha percepção, não deveria ser. são retratos da época no qual o livro foi escrito, mas não é por isso que devem ser assistidos de olhos fechados e passados em branco.

no mais, sinto muito pela história que nos foi contada nesse livro </3

The Bell Jar

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