The Bell Jar - chapters 1-5
Meeting Esther Greenwood, Doreen, and Ladies Day
Here we are for the first few chapters of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. ICYMI, we’re buddy-reading the novel over the next few weeks, and each Friday, I’ll post something like this, with bits and pieces to read, watch or listen to at your own pace, and the comments are open for you to discuss.
The buddy reads are for everyone to join in on, but if you’re considering a subscription, you’ll gain access to writing prompts and community posts, plus discounts on our courses and workshops. This Substack is reader-supported, and paid subscriptions mean I can do more of it!
Spoilers ahead!!
We’ve just read up to the end of chapter five, so here’s a quick runthrough of what’s happened so far…
Esther Greenwood is away from home for the first time, living in a hotel in New York with the other winners of a prestigious magazine’s summer internship. She feels like an outsider compared to most of the other girls, who seem to fit into the glamorous lifestyle of going to parties than she does. She befriends the only other outsider, Doreen, and they sneak out to a bar together, ending up drunk and in the apartment of a DJ.
The girls (minus Doreen, who is off gallivanting with her DJ,) go to a banquet, and Esther tearfully recounts her meeting with the magazine editor about her indecisiveness over a career. All of the girls at the banquet get horrendous food poisoning from eating seafood which has been baked under the harsh photography lighting. They’re each given a book of short stories as an apology, and Esther is looked after by Doreen.
Recovered, Esther gets an invite to lunch at the UN, and she reads the book of short stories, where she finds a passage about a fig tree. She thinks about Buddy Willard, the boy who wants to marry her, and how much her feelings towards him changed as soon as he started to pay attention to her.
I’ll pop some food for thought in the comments below, and we can discuss there, but feel free to comment your own thoughts on these early parts of the book!
And, as promised, some things for you to read/listen to pulled out from this first quarter(!) of the novel…
Anne Sebba on the fictional afterlives of Ethel Rosenberg
Literary Censorship and The Bell Jar from Katelyn Nelson
Can’t discuss The Bell Jar without talking about the parts that have really not aged well. Here’s Jessica Zhan Mei Yu on Plath’s writing of people of colour, and the novel she wrote in response, for The Guardian.
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Still to come:
Friday 31 May — chapters 6-10
Friday 7 June — chapters 11-15
Friday 14 June — chapters 16-20
The Bell Jar was my first introduction to Plath - and I am loving the opportunity to re-read it all these years later.