After a discouraging time of walking about with the silk cord dangling from my neck like a yellow cat's tail and finding no place to fasten it, I sat on the edge of my mother's bed and tried pulling the cord tight.'īut each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again. I thought with longing of the house my grandmother had before she sold it. The ceilings were low, white and smoothly plastered, without a light fixture or a wood beam in sight. 'The trouble was, our house had the wrong kind of ceilings. The funniest entry in this bleak résumé of self-murder has Esther trying in vain to hang herself. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at. She starts to cut her wrists but stops because 'the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it.' 'I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists,' she writes. She buys a package of Gillette razor blades and fills the bathtub with warm water. I'd already read in the papers about people who'd tried to shoot themselves, only they ended up shooting an important nerve and getting paralyzed, or blasting their face off, but being saved, by surgeons and a sort of miracle, from dying outright. When she goes swimming in the ocean, she tries to drown herself, but she keeps popping back up 'like a cork.' A gun? She always had trouble with mechanical things, thought she might blow it: We learn the many different ways that Esther Greenwood - presumably a stand-in for Plath - toys with so many different ways to do it. The book also may serve as a manual on suicide.

And the ultimate message is clear: living in a world where no one understands despair can drive one to self-murder. If that surprised us, it was because we hadn't read The Bell Jar which is a chronicle in words of how words mean nothing to those in the bog of despond.

The same year she stuck her head in the oven and killed herself. In 1963 she published The Bell Jar, her first and only novel. Plath got everyone's attention the hard way.

The bell jar