36. The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath’s Tragedy

0:10I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in 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 E.G. the amazing editor and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America and another fig was Constantine 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.

0:58I 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.

1:13Dominic Sandbrook: Hello everybody, so that is a very celebrated passage from The Bell Jar by the poet Sylvia Plath and Plath published it in Britain in January 1963. She published it initially under a pen name, Victoria Lucas and it was published just weeks before she took her own life and we will be talking about that obviously, it's quite a tragic story and if you have small children in the car or something, be warned that it's... It's quite disturbing content I think. Yeah, it could be. This episode is brought to you by Klarna. When I finish the final chapter, I often find that I have more questions at the end than I started with.

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2:30Dominic Sandbrook: Now your everyday spending, your payments and your card are all together and in your control. download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money so that you can think about well anything else so the book wasn't published in the United States until 1971 but it became a sensation in the 1970s and 80s became a kind of great feminist classic and to some extent the book is a roman a clay so it's a disguised autobiography by Sylvia Plath talking about a lot of her own experiences growing up and as you get a sense of it from that opening reading it's about a young woman very bright young woman who is um suffocating um under the weight of her anxiety and her depression she wants to fulfill her ambitions she has all kinds of ideas about what she might become as we can tell in that reading the kind of branching fig tree yeah the fakes but she's in 1950s america and she feels stifled by the expectations of her society.

3:36Dominic Sandbrook: And this sort of internal battle, this uncertainty, this search for a sort of a role and for meaning takes her to some very dark places indeed, doesn't it, Tabby? It does. And the book is famous for, in fact, it's sort of been mythologised for, this very raw, unflinching take on mental illness, on depression, and also simultaneously this idea of female rage against societal convention, against patriarchy. And it's become, in the years since its publication, I think probably still is, wouldn't you say? A subversive cult classic. And Sylvia Plath herself, I mean, she's a literary icon. She's almost become a posthumous cultural luminary.

4:18She's so famous, more famous than her work almost, I think. You know, she's sort of been deified.

4:25Dominic Sandbrook: Well, Virginia Woolf actually is a good comparison to a writer who you might see on a T-shirt. Yeah, definitely. That's very, very true. But it's a mystique born not only of her book, of her poetry, but also I think probably the romanticization of her very tumultuous marriage to Ted Hughes, another famous British poet. her tortured inner life you know her depression and then also her tragic early death at only 30 I think it's sort of being sensationalized maybe arguably slightly overshadowing her work and who she actually was but we'll discuss that a bit more later before we do so what did you make of it Dominic because I often try to make a prediction for what you will think of a book really do yeah and I actually didn't really know what to think this time.

5:17Dominic Sandbrook: Please tell me, Tabby, that I sometimes surprise you, that I'm not utterly predictable. You actually often surprise me. I have to say, it pains me to say it. Oh, that's good to know. Well, the point of reading is to be open-minded, isn't it? And to surprise yourself. That's definitely not something anyone could accuse you of, is kind of being closed-minded, I think, or predictable. Oh, thank you. Wow, we should end the podcast here. This is great. Totally. I think sort of leaning into my stereotype or my caricature a bit, if I'm allowed to do that. To be clear, Tabby, it's unbelievable that you started branding me as Toe to Toe Hall when actually in the episode you said I was rat.

5:51I know, you are rat in silence.

5:52Dominic Sandbrook: And you made me very happy with that. Yeah. No, but to be honest, I hadn't read it because for the reason that so many men don't read these kinds of books, because basically a lot of men think it's not really for me, it's a feminist classic. and the branding of the book positions it very much as a book for sort of anxious women. I mean, that sounds like a mad thing to say. Yeah, I don't think you're wrong, though. But anyway, I read it and I really enjoyed it. I read it on a holiday. It's an odd holiday read, but I loved it, actually. I loved the portrait of 50s America. I thought, as you say, raw is the word.

6:27That also plays into the stereotype slightly, doesn't it?

6:30Dominic Sandbrook: Of course. It underplays the artistry of the book, I think, and the skill with which it is written. But I found it, I thought it was moving. I thought it was very evocative. You know, it's an odd thing to say for a book about depression and a book about some very dark things. But I really enjoyed it. And I thought she wrote, I thought Sylvia Plath wrote about depression. The narrative voice, the way she conveyed it, I thought was extremely skillful and very well handled. Yeah, I actually agree. And I don't think that you're sort of totally off base when you say you thought it would be a book about kind of female anxiety or whatever.

7:06I had actually slightly avoided the bell jar because I thought it would make me feel a bit depressed. I thought it would like it was all about teen angst. And I just didn't know if I kind of, you know, sometimes things leave their imprint. And I was like, oh, God, I don't know if I can bear it. I think I was so wrong. I think to read it as just that is to flatten the bell jar and also Sylvia Plath as just anxiety and depression and psychological torment. Because, yeah, the subject matter of the book is bleak, but actually the book is not. It's quite bright. Like the colours of the book are quite bright.

7:39I love the voice of the narrator, Esther Greenwood, because she's cynical and wry and self-knowing. I actually found so many parts of the book really funny, unexpectedly. unexpectedly i think plath is a is a great sharp writer she always cuts off the fat the

7:56Dominic Sandbrook: characterization of the different people very skillfully done i also think you know i love lots of people love books about kind of 50s america and we'll talk about this and i think she evokes that world really well yeah but also i do think i can see why it means so much to so many people because certainly the first half of the book i think is surely relatable to most young people who are trying to you know work out what they want to do maybe they've been in institutions realising that actually the world doesn't just kind of play ball with dreams or whatever. Yeah. But particularly, I think, for the female adolescence of 50s America.

8:27Dominic Sandbrook: Just to give people a sense of the context, it's set in the summer of 1953, this incredibly well-known opening line, a brilliant line, by the way. So good. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. And we'll just talk about that line a little bit in a second. so we are in eisenhower's america cold war america less than a decade after the end of the second world war this is the era of the affluent society you know america is booming massive cars big fridges all of that sort of thing but it's also the world of mccarthyism so mccarthy the red scares reds under the bed search for communist enemies within and i think the tendency among a lot of writers now is to slightly overdo the the discussion of this as a as a world that is so repressive and terrible and suffocating all this kind of thing i mean it's a world in which most people are better off than anybody else on the planet and are better off than anybody in history has ever been so there's definitely a lot of good things about 1950s america as well as the bad things yeah because it's also the post-war boom isn't it it is the post-war boom and people who tend to write about this in the context of sylvia platt so for example one of her biographers heather Clark says this is a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the best minds of a generation crazy.

9:46Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, how true is that? You know, it's obviously a world in which a lot of people are going to university in greater numbers than ever before. They have opportunities that nobody's ever had. However, you know, there is perhaps a sort of conformity to it. It's quite a conservative society and one in which, in particular, women, young women, sort of can be stifling expectations of them and the roles that they're going to play. You know, this is the absolute peak of the post-war nuclear family you know people are getting married extremely young there is an expectation that oh you know the woman will be the the perfect kind of housewife and mother the kind of kitchen goddess and all this kind of thing so there's a tension i suppose in this book as in so many fictional portraits of 50s america between on the one hand the bright breezy you know the world of the prom and of the diner and of the white picket fence and everybody in these lovely massive dresses it's like suburban prosperity isn't it you know you get the image of the the see you later honey and the guy leaves the briefcase the wife looking with pearls coiffed hair waving him off exactly that and i know this is a it's from a few years later but the world of madmen the opening series of madmen yeah that's a good point sort of don and betty draper that sort of world but obviously sylvia plath and in this book is slightly pushing against that so you described it as subversive i I mean, what she's obviously, this is a book written by somebody who feels like an outsider, who finds a lot of this stuff, who does find it repressive.

11:12Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And does find it. Stifling. Yeah, exactly. And actually that takes us back to the opening line. The opening line, it was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of betraying the US, giving secrets to the Soviet Union and stuff. So there you have the dark side, I guess. right there in the opening line you have the the thing that she reaches for is something that tells you about her view of that society and of the sort of ugliness of it i guess the suspicion or the paranoia or the violence throughout the book i think that there's a tension between that and then there's the the massive meals and the cars and the sort of consumerist sort of world that's quickie clean aesthetic isn't it bright colors so it's one of a number of books sort of set in the 50s there's like the stories of john cheever or something or have you read revolutionary road tabby i i've never read it but i know of it um because that's also doing the same thing isn't it it's showing the dark side to the domestic i don't know prosperity or pleasantness of that time the same thing with a um a woman a young woman who was chafing yeah the expectations and motherhood and stuff like that but as sylvia plath's protagonist in this is chafing as she did in real life but we will get on to plath in a second first of all um just a very quick plot rundown for people that aren't familiar with the book and actually it's no coincidence that the plot is strikingly similar to plath's own life um so the protagonist is esther greenwood she is clever high achieving she's 19 years old um she's a 19 year old undergraduate student and for the first quarter of the book she's in new york because she's won this prestigious summer internship at ladies magazine thanks to her wealthy benefactor i love this name philomena guinea he's the writer of um crap women's fiction but it's that technical uh that's crap that's technical literary term but rather than feel excited and happy like she says in the very earliest pages i was supposed to be having the time of my life she feels wiki dull and empty and anxious and she is overwhelmed by the work which her peers seem to love she finds the fashion world repellently artificial and materialistic.

13:26She feels that herself and the girls that she's with are sort of objectified wherever they go. She makes friends with this sardonic, quite fun girl called Doreen, who she goes to loads of parties and stuff with, but it all ends up quite badly. Another thing is, though, to say, Esther is, while she's chafing against this society and its constrictions and its traditions, she is also still an American teen. So she's thinking about, you know conventional things like losing her virginity she's thinking about the yale prom all the while though she's disintegrating and she starts to reject all of these sort of stepping stones or kind of the furniture of american adolescents for instance signified by the fact that at one point she throws all of the gorgeous clothes that she's got from this internship off a roof in New York.

14:18I would never do that. Off the roof, exactly. But you can see that she's like, right, that's it. I'm rejecting this artificial materialism.

14:25Dominic Sandbrook: But I think that's very nicely done, the fact that she's torn between the two things, because that's how people, you know, normal people think. You never like just one thing or the other. You might be tempted by this particular world and at the same time repulsed by it. Yeah, of course. And deep down we all want to fit in, no matter how unhappy or anything we are. Yeah, agreed. Completely. So then she goes back, doesn't she to new england to her small town her father is dead she lives with her mum and it's there that actually um she really starts to become undone and there's this moment that i think is in many ways the turning point of the book uh we might talk about this passage later because i think it's actually brilliantly written when she finds out that she hasn't made it onto a writing course and this is just like i mean she says it's like being punched in the stomach yeah she feels that basically she has been a bright girl a massive achiever and she's done really well in school and then she feels oh my god you know that's led to nothing that's basically what that's going to lead to is a boring suburban marriage to this boring suburban boyfriend who has the unimprovable name of buddy willard he's such a snore honestly i have no time for buddy he's a medical student isn't he which means that he's very eligible you know her mom her mom is very keen that they keep together yeah he's absolutely going to be the man who leaves with the briefcase yeah first thing in the morning and then comes home and says honey i'm home and what's for dinner exactly honey i was just about to say it will be meatloaf you just know it's meatloaf it's at this point that i think we first get the metaphor of the bell jar yeah the idea of the sort of suffocating the kind of cloche or whatever descending over you and this is a sort of this is the the obviously the metaphor that really defines the book the idea of suffocating and being trapped and she sinks into depression uh the depression gets worse she thinks about um suicide she goes through this extremely traumatic course of electroshock therapy again i have to say a brilliant passage not overdone almost quite understated and yet still again i think we'll talk about that passage later yeah and yet so visceral you know so shocking listeners be warned because some people may find this very distressing yeah uh she uh tries to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills she wakes up in hospital and then the last part of the book is about her time in a mental institution and this obviously sticks in a lot of readers minds it's based on the mclean hospital where sylvia plath herself was hospitalized and actually all the stuff we've talked about pretty much happened to sylvia plath so it's a novel and it's written with a novelist's craft and yet obviously in some ways this is bookers and work of autobiographies and it's happy it's a thinly veiled autobiography of a very particular period in sylvia plas life but beyond the bell jar we can get such a strong sense of her stronger than so many of the writers that we've done on the show because she was a prolific writer she wrote letters so many of which we have we still have and journals many of which we also still house she wrote she started writing her journals when she was 11 and kept it up pretty much constantly didn't she and kept it up pretty much until her death yeah the thing that really came across to me and which i was delighted by was she was a woman of really powerful appetite it was as though she wanted to experience uh all of life you know she loved um literature she loved romance she loved colors she she loved nature actually i think that's been slightly um underplayed element of sauvia plaque and she loved food so her friends i know her friends always used to moan that she would eat and eat and eat and eat she was always hungry but she never gained weight and one of her absolute favorites was a deluxe peanut butter sandwich spiced with onion mayonnaise and bacon which i think sounds abhorrent so american i think that's so american it's like that math thing that americans do where they will mix sweet and savory and this is worthy of patrick bateman this dish yeah it is what is it mayonnaise peanut butter mayonnaise and peanut butter together is insane crazy mayonnaise peanut butter with onion yeah bacon what's the bacon doing in there deranged it's so this is the kind of stuff that you remember when we went to that diner when we were on tour in america i remember and i asked for biscuits and gravy because i was curious this was an extraordinary moment well it was a vast trough full of this white sludge anyway it's best not to recall food aside the other thing that really comes across about plath is that she could be very catty she could be quite bitchy particularly about women actually women that she felt sort of threatened by that comes through in the first that comes through in the belgium but she was what she was extraordinarily witty you get the sense that she's sort of always willing to be more emotionally exposed than i think most people probably are and physically she was tall very tall slender she was quite elegant and she was um ambitious from a young age and extremely industrious so she's doggily determined to be a successful writer she published her first poem when she was eight and in fact she was something of a literary project prodigy and when they tested her iq they found that she was actually a genius um okay she had an amazing capacity to kind of overcome rejection she she had so many rejections one journal rejected her one of her poems 45 times or something 45 yeah that's a lot of times a lot of times um and she was very careful with money she's very sort of organized but you do get the sense a bit like esther in the novel she struggles to square this sense of herself as an ambitious writer an ambitious young woman with the other things that she seems to want which is kind of love and romance the desire to fit in and kind of be glamorous and because that's another thing that comes out again and again in her journals is the search for romantic love, an equal who won't undermine her, who won't kind of steal her thunder and will kind of allow her hopes and dreams.

20:15And she often felt incomplete and off balance and insecure without a man. She was a prolific data. So she wrote, which I think is so witty, wittily written, oh, how agreeable I am that I need 50 blazing brutes to tell me so. You know, how wonderfully self-knowing. She kind of needed romantic validation despite, you know, her search for independence. It's likely why she ended up choosing Ted Hughes, a man who she probably thought would share her ambitions. And we'll talk about that in a sec because that's surely one of the most famous or iconic literary marriages of all time. Wouldn't you say?

20:47Dominic Sandbrook: Of course, I would indeed. But just to sketch her background a second, she's born in Boston, Massachusetts. She's a New Englander. Her mother was the daughter of an Austrian immigrant. Her father, Otto Plath, was a German-American academic, wasn't he? Yeah. He was an expert. But he taught German, I think, at Boston University, but also biology. Yeah. And he's massive on entomology, so insects, but also bumblebees are the big thing. He loved bumblebees, as I do, and as Sylvia Plath did. She loved bees. Do you love bumblebees? I do. They make me feel warm and sort of not cynical. Yeah, what if they sting you?

21:22It's true, yeah. Well, then the cynicism comes back in force.

21:26Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly, exactly, yeah. So it's quite a traditional family upbringing. So, I mean, because obviously so much of this book and her sort of mystique is about women trapped by a patriarchal society. And Otto is a bit of a patriarch, isn't he? And actually she has a very conflicted and interesting attitude to him. So you put me onto this actually, Tabby, the poem Daddy. It's one of my favorite poems. But it's quite a dark, it's a very dark poem, actually, about her attitude to her father. She's been a bit criticised for it because she makes a connection between basically totalitarian dictatorship.

22:03Yeah. Second World War sort of totalitarian dictatorship and patriarchy and fatherhood. Yeah. But I love it. I love the metre of it. I like the clean prose of it. Right. And you can find online, on YouTube, a recording of her reading it and it's fabulous. Oh, no way.

22:18Dominic Sandbrook: So anyway, he died. I mean, part of the reason she has a conflict statute towards him, I think, is that he died when she was, what, eight? Yeah. He had a foot amputated for diabetes and the operation went wrong. He had thought for years he had cancer. Yeah. And he was just too scared to go and check it out. Turns out it was diabetes. And so Sylvia Plath, the rest of her life, had this kind of weird feeling that he'd almost, he'd subliminally taken his own life. Really? Because he never checked it out. He could have, you know, he could have survived. So in a sense, does she almost blame him? Maybe.

22:51Dominic Sandbrook: You know, for not having had it checked out or whatever? and she's definitely haunted by it isn't she so at one point in the book in the bell jar esther asylvia plath avatar says i was only happy for the beginning first nine years of my life before my father died and actually plath wrote about this herself she said that um there was a division between before daddy's death and afterwards and the years before was shut off like a ship in a bottle beautiful inaccessible obsolete a fine white flying myth lovely writing lovely writing Anyway, I suppose to some extent she feels the loss of her father, but also she feels the pressure of having to live up to her mother's expectations, really.

23:31Because they were very poor after Otto died. So money was always an issue and her mother had to go back to work.

23:37Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, and she feels almost that her mother's love is itself a burden for her. So you found this letter, didn't you, that she wrote to her? When I say you found it, I mean, you read about it. Yeah, no, it's original, actually. It's an original discovery. Plath academics all over the country are pulling their hair out. To be clear, Tabby read this in a book. I did read this in a book. She wrote a letter to her brother Warren in 1953. It's a frightening thing that mother would actually kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all that she wanted to do for us. She's an abnormally altruistic person.

24:11Dominic Sandbrook: And I've realised lately, and this is such an interesting line, that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would against a deadly disease. and you can sort of see what that means I think especially for a child a parent who is almost too loving who projects so much onto you that can be a very very heavy burden to carry I think she felt a bit sort of strangulated a by the love but also the fact I mean she shared a bedroom with her mother until she was in her late teens as Esther does in the book and so that constant presence must have just come to suffocate her, I suppose. Anyway, she went to high school in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

24:51She graduated in 1950. She then got a scholarship to a private women's liberal arts college, Smith, also in Massachusetts. And like Esther in the novel, she's an academic star. She's brilliant. She's actually unusually intelligent. The thing that's interesting, though, is if you read her letters from this time and then you read her journals at this time, there's always just a discrepancy in terms of how she's feeling during this period because she often writes to her mother things like oh mumsy i'm so happy here i could cry but in her journals she's often feeling quite low maybe that's that thing again about trying to please her mother i don't know trying to please her mother or different states of mind i mean it sounds like a mad

25:31Dominic Sandbrook: comparison i'm appalled at myself but different platforms you know you you use for different for different feelings almost god you're so like hip love that for you thank you the suffocating i i i'm struggling with the suffocating expectations of you mocking everything i say of your co-presenter yeah completely anyway she then like hess like esther in the novel she wins this um mademoiselle magazine fiction contest in 1952 which earns her a very coveted internship in New York. And she's working as a guest editor for a month in June 1953, living in this fancy hotel. But she did not enjoy it as she had expected.

26:14She found the pressure exhausting, the environment very intense. She thought that she was going there to meet like Dylan Thomas and Truman Capote. And it was far from that. It was, she found it boring, didn't like the materialism. And she actually wrote that she felt that all these young girls were kind of trotted out and sort of objectified wherever they went. sort of how they looked or whatever. And that experience, that summer experience is exactly what inspired the bell jar. And actually so true to life is her portrait of that time in the book that some of the women that she was on the course with in New York later said that her account of their lives in New York was so accurate that they could never look at each other again.

26:56And some even blamed her and the bell jar for breaking up their marriages. I'm looking at you, Doreen.

27:03Dominic Sandbrook: I think that's really harsh. I will say. I think that's harsh. I think the first quarter of the book or so, the stuff in New York, I absolutely loved that. Yeah, I agree. I thought it was so well written. And as you say, very, very funny when they have food poisoning. Yeah, no. Or when they go to a fancy dinner and she has a finger bowl to clean her hands in and she ends up drinking it because she thinks it's a soup. Yeah. Anyway, this time it's the real catalyst for a shocking downturn, a dangerous downturn in the Soviet class mental health. Because she returns home after this month in New York to the news that she too, like her hero, has been rejected from a Harvard writing course.

27:46Brought on terrible anxiety, insomnia, depression. So that's when she underwent her first extraordinarily traumatic course of electric short foot therapy. And it was traumatic because it was badly administered. She wasn't given anesthetic, which means that she was essentially being electrocuted. And she was so frightened of this experience that she might have to relive it. That part of the reason, I think, that maybe she was driven to take her in life, but also because she wrote a letter to a friend just before the worst phase of her depression, that she would rather die than lose her independence and her free will.

28:26and she didn't want her family to remember her as just a mental patient. Someone kind of turned into a mummy by this electroshock therapy. She wanted them to remember her as she was.

28:37Dominic Sandbrook: So the electroshock therapy is, as you say, the catalyst for her first suicide attempt, which was in August 1953. Plath crawled into this little space underneath the family home and she took sleeping pills and three days passed before she was found and it actually was reported in the local newspapers. this brilliant college girl disappears. And like her heroine, like Esther, she is hospitalized. She gets psychiatric treatment at McLean Hospital. And this is funded by her patron, you know, just as Esther has a patron, so Sylvia Plath had a patron who was called Olive Higgins Prouty. But, you know, the book ends not long after, the book cuts off, so we don't find out what happens to Esther.

29:18Dominic Sandbrook: But what happened to Sylvia Plath? She recovered, she graduated from Smith, did really well, She got a scholarship to Cambridge University, to Neenum College, a women's college at Cambridge. She went there. At first, she's very excited about going to England. She thinks it'll be a liberation. You know, America is stuffy. England is exciting. But actually, it's a very common experience among Americans who actually come to Oxford and Cambridge. They arrive and they find it very disappointing. They struggle with the weather. They struggle with the sort of unfriendliness for locals. Snobby English people.

29:50Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, so she found it bleak and all of this. She didn't have any heating. Of course, its 50s Britain, so, you know, some way behind America economically. Yeah. She felt like an imposter, like an intellectual interloper. I mean, obviously a very common experience for people at university. She felt that people found her too American, too enthusiastic. And I have to say, very disappointingly, Tabby made the point to me that she believes I would be one of the people who would be horrible to Sylvia Blatt. I did so see you turning your nose off at some you know enthusiastic American in a tutorial to be fair having said that having said that you you're very fond of America and Americans and you actually once told me that you like their Jolena their positivity so I misspoke I do like their positivity I do like their positivity exactly thank you Tabby you've been very Tabby's been very cruel sometimes god maybe I need to take a look in the mirror it's my enthusiasm and idealism that you poke fun out in your cynical way no oh my god this is a harrowing come to god moment for me it is it is all right so anyway she um she went through a dark night of the soul a little bit that first winter you know god who am i i sit in the library tonight the lights glaring overhead there's my date this weekend someone who believes i'm a human being not a name merely and these are the only indications that i'm the whole person not merely and not of nerves without identity.

31:12Dominic Sandbrook: I am lost. Horrible. Again, though, not perhaps immensely unfamiliar among young people. No, well, that's the thing. I think relatable. Far from home, you know, it is, yeah, I think a lot of people reading that would say, yes, I felt like that. It's a period in your life where you're desperately trying to search out your identity and kind of think you have to have one rather than being able to have lots sort of thing. Yeah, that's so true. When people say, who am I? They think there's a sentence that actually sums it up or a defined role. I couldn't agree with more. Anyway, you've described her earlier on and her appetites and stuff.

31:45Dominic Sandbrook: She has a real zest for life, I think. She really does. She throws herself into it. There's a sort of optimism when she travels around Europe, that she's sort of soaking up all the experiences. She writes at one point that she is solidly, realistically joyous. So it's not all doom and gloom and introspection and misery. You picked out a line here, didn't you, from 1955 about writing to her mother. It's cold, biting with blizzard flurries. I bike home from classes and market, laden with apples, oranges, nuts and daffodils. I love that. You might almost say it's carefree, but do you think she's manicuring it?

32:21Dominic Sandbrook: She's sort of curating it for her mother, do you think? She absolutely is. She's painting a perfect portrait of life, even as she's struggling. She's a very brave thing to do, I think. But then it's two weeks after they're writing those words about cycling home with all this stuff that she has the meeting that basically changes her life. At a literary party, she meets a young poet called Ted Hughes. Yeah, so they meet at this Cambridge party. Sylvia Plath had read some of his poems and liked them, so she was kind of curious about him. They're both young, unpublished poets, serious about writing, very ambitious.

32:54And when Sylvia Plath described this meeting in her journal, she wrote it was immediate and intense. And there's a story that at that party, he tried to kiss her, and she bit him on the cheek in retaliation, long and hard.

33:10Dominic Sandbrook: In a flirty way or in a... I think in a kind of flirty but, you know, how day, but flirty. Yeah. And he was a famous Lothario. He was very arrogant. He had a deep voice and she wrote to her mother that he was used to walking over women like a blast of Jove's lightning and described him as a singer, storyteller, lion and world wanderer with a voice like the thunder of God. Isn't that great? Yeah, it's lovely. What have you written in your notes at this point? I've written, I suspect that at this point, DS will make the inevitable comparison. He is very proud of his own voice. I mean, I am proud of him.

33:46Dominic Sandbrook: Well, I don't think about my voice, but I never thought... You do, you are. I've heard you say before that one of your best features is your voice. Literally, when we're not recording, what normally happens is I'm lecturing Tabby about my best features. Have you noticed that today it's slightly deeper? Slightly different time. Nicole, Nicole, how do I sound? anyway um i have never i mean that ted hughes comparison is not one i'd ever anticipated but i you know i suspect that sylvia plath really liked the challenge that ted hughes posed you know lothario untouchable in the belga esther kind of talks about always wanting what she can't have and her fear that the minute that she commits to a romantic relationship or something she'll go off them she'll start seeing the cracks and you can see how sultry and confident plath is about winning him she wrote after this as well in her journal kiss me and you'll see how important i am um right and i think maybe also not to be too pop psychology but maybe she's drawn to his masculinity his height his intelligence you know possibly the fulfillment of a lifetime miss looking for her father something like that this this great big man i mean in daddy for instance yeah that poem which i love and it's actually slightly tragic insight into the future of their relationship she wrote i was 10 when they buried you at 20 i tried to die and get back back back to you i thought even the bones would do i made a model of you a man in black with a mein kampf look and a love of the rack and the screw and i said i do i do so in a weird way even even though she's always trying to be free yeah trying to be free from the expectations of others and to find her own independent voice and stuff yeah there's a bit of her that do you think i mean this is massively pop psychology is there a bit of her that perhaps likes the dominant alpha male side of ted hughes do you think yeah and she allowed herself to be extremely codependent with him very quickly so she wrote away from you my own judgments are out of kilter and also i think he liked about her the fact that she was simultaneously quite dark and quite kind of anxious but also fiercely determined very intelligent quite catty quite witty so you can see it's two forces of nature coming together and then they're married four months later in june 1956 they moved back to the u.s for a time in 1957 she resumed therapy working with this woman called ruth boucher who was the doctor who had helped her recover from her first after her first suicide attempt then they settled back in england and also during this period just you can see how hard she's working she's got a job in the day and she's feverishly writing poetry at night yeah then they settled back in england in december 1959 they're living near primrose hill and they're between october 1960 and january 1962 they have two children um a son and a daughter and sylvia plasco's collection of poetry colossus is published in 1960.

36:46So it's initially a very literary marriage.

36:48Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And it's one of those, I mean, there are some marriages in literary history or cultural history that people have poured over, and this is absolutely one of them. Of course, I'm always a little bit wary of this because I think you can never truly know what goes on in somebody else's marriage. I mean, people in a marriage themselves, you know, they only know 50 % of it, of course, because they don't ever, they can never access the other person's mind. Anyway, at first, I mean, this is proper pop psychology now and sort of gossip to an extent which is why i'm sometimes a bit wary about it but anyway at first it seems like they were they were genuine partners do you not think that they were they read each other's drafts they both submitted work to journals together they helped each other advised each other they're slightly different in temperament ted hughes is more impulsive he's he writes in these sort of manic bursts almost sylvia plath is more uh disciplined she's more methodical she has a schedule and stuff i mean she you know lots of people listening might say of course she has to because as the wife as the mother yeah you know her time is more limited and she can't be self-indulgent and not only that but she's also the secretary to both of them she's submitting all his poems as well as hers she's typing both of them up i mean there's an argument to be made if someone did make it that i read that without that administrative role that she took on he would never have got himself together enough to submit type up and submit all that be so so often that is the case isn't it i mean so often i mean i don't want to sound like i've become i mean i am i am super woke on this issue um uh so often you read the biographies of of inverted commas great male figures and there's a woman behind them who's actually doing all the cooking and cleaning all the washing up all the secretarial work basically Or cheerleading.

38:34Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, at first, it's sort of mutually inspiring and energising. She wrote in her journal, Ted is the only one who understands my poems. You know, they're really both getting something from this. But basically, what happens at the end of the 1950s is his style rockets and hers doesn't. So she's getting lots of rejections. He's becoming, you know, the great meteor of kind of English poetry. Also, of course, at this point, she has two very small children. And anybody listening to the show who has ever had even one small child will know. Yeah. Particularly for the mother, this absolutely takes over your life.

39:12Dominic Sandbrook: And it's very, very difficult to carve out any time away from it. And she said that, you know, when she had just her daughter, Ted would look after her in the mornings. And as long as she had her mornings to write, everything else was fine. And then when she had Nicholas, her son, she lost her mornings. So no time. Exactly. And she wrote in her journal, I am a secretary, cook, maid and a poet. So the poet has turned into almost like an afterword. And of course, the other thing that lots of listeners will probably know, there's subsequently been a lot of talk about whether there was domestic abuse in the relationship or whether Hughes was controlling or whether he was violent.

39:46Dominic Sandbrook: Worth saying, his family have very, very vigorously denied. and it's really hard to know the truth of these things because it's become obscured with so much kind of cultural and gender politics that sometimes the only honest answer is to say we just don't know and we never will anyway she had a miscarriage in 1961 that's obviously incredibly traumatic for her in her journals you get the sense of anger and despair and abandonment and it's in 1961 in august that she actually she's been writing the bell jar and she to sort of work through i suppose a lot of what she went through in the 1950s and she finishes it in august 1961 yeah and and we'll tie up um plath's story at the end of this episode after the second half but before then so how did she come to write the bell jar how was it received so she'd always intended to write a novel kept stalling she wins this fellowship grant to write the book in 1960 and then she doesn't really do much with it and then in february 1961 she goes to hospital for a brief time and it reminds her of her initial breakdown in hospitalization in 1953 um so she thinks well you know i'll do i'll write a thinly veiled biography of everything that i've gone through um but it's not her own life is actually far from the only inspiration so the second half of the bell jar where esther is in and out of medical institutions after a suicide attempt that bears a striking resemblance to the Snake Pit by the American author Mary Jane Ward, which is an autobiographical account of her own recovery from mental illness.

41:20And it shows harrowingly the terrible conditions inside psychiatric hospitals at that time. And Sylvia Plath had read a review of this. It had gone down an absolute storm and she realized, oh, actually, people do want to hear about the truth of mental illness and what goes on and what goes on inside these hospitals. So that was one of many things

41:39Dominic Sandbrook: has spurred her on and then there are literary inspirations too so i think sometimes what's lost with the belge are because people reduce it to a book about mental health and anxiety and expression sort of a scream of pain is what is lost is the literariness of it so dostoevsky is a big influence we're going to be doing um white knights aren't we on the show um dostoevsky's short story she's wrote her undergraduate thesis i think on um on doubling in dostoevsky's books um and there's a bit of that in the bell jar, sort of Esther looking in mirrors and things like that. Virginia Woolf, of course.

42:14Dominic Sandbrook: So Mrs. Dalloway, which we talked about, one of my favorite books. So the idea of a female character whose world is kind of fracturing, whose sense of reality is kind of fracturing. He feels under tremendous intolerable pressure. And actually another book, I was thinking about this while I was reading particularly the New York sections, jd salinger's the catcher in the rye um so the cynical slightly flat narration the deadpan rye humor of holdman caulfield of jd salinger's narrator you can see that the esther's narration is not wholly dissimilar i would say and the sort of sense of a teenager disillusioned and caustic about their world so yeah she wrote it in what mid 61 yeah the summer of 1961 she wrote a very quickly.

43:04So then she finished it and she submitted the manuscript to Harper and Rowe in the US. It was turned down flat. Their editors declared it disappointing, juvenile and overwrought. But with her typical doggedness, she then submitted it to the British publisher, William Heinemann. Later, Faber and Faber, they agreed to publish it and she was closely involved with editing it, working on it right until it was approved for printing. And she chose to publish it under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas to protect her privacy, but also the privacy of all the people that she had based her characters on very closely.

43:43And it was published in January 1963 under the pseudonym. And then she died 28 days later. So she never saw it published under the name Sylvia Plath. And she never saw her wonderful poetry collection, Ariel,

43:55Dominic Sandbrook: published yeah which was published later wasn't it and at first when the book came out not a great reaction people were kind of polite about it they didn't hate it but they weren't you know they weren't enormously blown away by it and then what happened it was ariel that changed it wasn't it so ariel came out what 1965 two years later and ariel because of it it is so um it feels so like a sort of confessional yeah yeah i'm trying not to use the word raw but i know yeah yeah it is it's extremely emotionally exposed yeah that is actually to just say that i think is doing it a disservice because it's also so tight you know she has a wonderful way with um imagery and meter i think the tendency when you're talking about authors like this who write slightly confessional things about the darker things that happen to you suffering and stuff is that you actually miss the craft yeah it goes into it i mean this is the case you know the very first episode we did the show weathering heights we talked about that yeah people underestimate emily brons's craftsmanship as a writer and i think they do that with sylvia plath as well definitely anyway so uh the bell jar finally comes out in 66 under her own name kind of her reputation people are oh my god it's the same same woman who wrote ariel there's poems they're chuffed with her and yeah and late 60s she becomes this literary legend this kind of icon Of course, easier to do that when the author is no longer around.

45:23Dominic Sandbrook: You can project all kinds of things onto her. And of course, this is also the moment where the feminist movement is really kind of getting going. So she becomes a kind of folk heroine for a generation of, I think, young women who are maybe the first women in their family to go to university. They feel possibly they are struggling to find their way in the world in the 70s or something. They're so conscious of the burden that society puts on them. And they look at Sylvia Plath and they say, yeah, she speaks for me. She gets it. This is brilliant. She gets it, exactly. So that's when it comes out in the US, isn't it?

45:58Dominic Sandbrook: 71, finally published in the US. People have been smuggling copies into the US because it had yet to be published. It was like a black market of Plath books. And her mum was very anti it being published, actually, in the US because she thought it was ungrateful to the people that Plath was writing about. well you can see how if they recognize themselves that closely it's a bit close to home yeah it could be a bit close to him anyway tabby we should absolutely take a break i know talking far too long as is i want uh we shall talk about the book itself we get into the book about the world it depicts um after the break and we'll also of course come to the death and afterlife of sylvia plath so we will see you then

46:39We are getting a statement from number 10 On that flight With 350 passengers The great game

46:49Dominic Sandbrook: Strategic struggle between Britain and Russia We assess our Prime Minister With high confidence it was Russian Holding the Russians accountable is World War 3 He took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. The man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

47:20Dominic Sandbrook: We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A frago that says to kill the president of Russia. Yes. New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off? You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff. Duffy. An audio drama journey like no other. Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons. Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two times friendly key. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe.

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48:05Dominic Sandbrook: Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

48:22Dominic Sandbrook: Welcome back, everybody, to the book club. Now, would you like to join a community of brilliant people frustrated by the expectations of modern society like me and tabby i bet you would well we have such a thing it's the people who read our newsletter book club notes so this newsletter comes out every saturday i know people are probably sick of us talking about this but we want as many people to read it as possible because we know there are we know because we see the data we know there are loads of people who are listening to this show and not subscribing to the newsletter it is free there's no you lose nothing subscribe to the newsletter genuinely it's really good yeah you get stuff from us you get lots of talking points about the book deep dives deep dives into the book there's also the the brilliant thing about this newsletter which has really taken off is that there are so many comments from listeners and readers people saying if you thought about this i think that that there's some such and such about a book if you like that you should read this all of this kind of thing i mean like when we did rebecca or lolita we got so many comments and it was great so you're dissolving into american capitalism dominic i know but there's no capitalism because it's free this is the bad thing it's not even like a hard sell because there's no sell it's so free it's like you won't pay anything for it it's insane you literally won't pay anything for it you sign up at the book club hq.com so people sometimes say he rushed he rushed the description i didn't hear what it was you have no excuse this time it's the book club hq.com genuinely it's not a hard sell because it's free right yeah back to the bell jar tabby talk to me about the bell jar okay so i was just a quick word on the style of the novel because i think it's one of the best things about it it's conversational and personal but it's always ironic and cynical nothing is left unqualified it's too sharp for any bloated sentimentality so even the most iconic potent image of the book which is the fig tree that we opened with esther herself later satirizes that she says that the image might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach you know which is so funny and it borrows the outline of a buildings roman so this is a coming of age novel provincial girl big city goes to big city disillusionment and return but then it rejects it using the fig tree itself because rather than the typical journey of confusion towards self-knowing and individuation esther is trapped in this perpetual cycle of disassociation and confusion and she rejects the idea of a single identity a single moment of knowing of self-understanding right because in a coming of age novel you move through different stages and you become yourself little women for instance yeah exactly little women yeah you overcome challenges and you you reach an end point and you know yourself at the end yes exactly this is not the case with this book so actually this book ends with a moment of almost uncertainty as how she's walking into the meeting well we'll we'll discuss this at the end because i think it's so strong okay yeah i don't want to jump ahead so if we just talk about the main characters so this is sylvia plass avatar who is esther greenwood in the film you're very excited about this film tabby because billy eilish is yeah you're a big billy eilish fan i'm not a massive billy eilish fan truth be told but i think i do think it makes sense as a casting decision But, you know, Billie Eilish very much plays into the inner angst version of things.

51:45She kind of looks like how I imagine Esther.

51:46Dominic Sandbrook: Has she ever done any acting before, though? Not as far as I'm aware. Big test. Big test. If you set the bar quite high by appearing on the book club, that's your big test. So can Billie Eilish live up to your example? And that's what the world will be waiting for and wondering. So, Esther. I think for me the brilliant thing about Esther is you've already hit the nail on the head. She's not one thing. She's complicated. She is different things to different people. Unlikable sometimes, which I think is good. As you say, she can be sentimental. She can be cynical. She can be a typical teenager at times or a typical young woman.

52:25Dominic Sandbrook: But then there's also moments where she resists that and she kicks against it, as we all do. uh she's you mentioned silver plath and her extraordinary sandwiches um one of the things that's that's really funny about esther particularly in the first part of the book is when she's talking about food oddly intense relationship with food yeah there's uh she eats a whole lobster doesn't she at her lunch for a magazine a decorous lady's lunch yeah she's there's like crab meat avocado i mean of course some of this ends very badly um when they all get Well, I love this. So they all get this food poisoning, don't they?

52:59Dominic Sandbrook: And this is a really, really well-written, almost slightly sort of dreamlike chapter. Yeah, it is. Where they all get this, they've been eating crab meat salad, the interns. And it's funny and it's clever because, you know, this is a consumerist fantasy. This is a 1950s magazine fantasy of being an intern for a magazine. Everybody's very glossy. Everybody's well turned out. It's in New York. It's brilliant. You're eating this fancy food. And then you spend the evening, all the girls who are such sort of sex objects and stuff and so glamorous and desirable. Beautifully turned out. Yeah. They basically all spend the evening being sick.

53:37Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. Esther says she feels purged afterwards and purged and holy. Perhaps an indication there of some of her anxieties, I guess, and some of her issues. Because this is sort of self-loathing about having gone in for this world, I think. and actually when she does come home and when she succumbs to her depression when her depression overtakes her she doesn't want to eat does she so which is a kind of sign that things are wrong um and esther the the thing about her is everybody thinks she's brilliant so she's been obviously very smart at school she has a boyfriend you know she has friends she's everything she's meant to be as a girl at her stage of life and therefore the expectation is you have everything required of you to be content and there's nothing worse than to be expected to be happy yeah inexplicably not and part of it is a an unhappiness that she carries within her because of the death of her father i mean that definitely comes through doesn't it and that reflects sylvia plat's own life when we talked about the poem daddy part of it is that that it's in her yeah part of it is also a very you said relatable a very relatable thing which is that she has reached you know she's reached this point where she's university age and whatnot but she doesn't know what she wants to do yeah she doesn't know which path to choose in life you know she she wants to always be allowed to be herself and do what she wants to do but she's also desperate to fit in and meet expectations she also fears that she'll lose control and just be propelled she'll lose her free will she'll just be propelled into a particular course that she doesn't really want she'll be forced to take a fig so she says i wasn't steering anything not even myself i just bumped um so you know this brings us back to the opening reading she says you know with so many futures open to me if i choose one i will lose all the rest forevermore yeah close up all the others which is a frightening thing for a bright, intelligent, ambitious young woman.

55:39And because of this, because of her inability to choose and decide what or who she wants to be, she spends a lot of the novel kind of trying on different identities, playing with her identity, forging alternative realities. So there's a point in the novel where she pretends to be called Ellie Higginbottom of Chicago. And then she's always imagining what it would be like to be the other girls doing the magazine internship with her. So Doreen, Betsy. And she always tells people one thing because she wants to give a certain impression, but she knows full well in the back of her mind, she says it quite openly.

56:18I know I'll never do that. So for instance, she keeps telling everyone because she thinks it sounds impressive that she wants to learn German, but she knows she never will, or she sits down to write a book at one point. There's actually a private joke here from Sylvia Plath because Esther says, my heron would be myself only in disguise, a six-lettered name, as Esther is to Plath. But she never manages to write a word. And I'm sure lots of people do that at that age. You know, you say, well, I mean, obviously I'm going to achieve this. And obviously, you know, I'm going to, you know, learn Greek or whatever it is.

56:50And actually, maybe, you know, because even though you're at that time of life where you feel that everything is possible, you still know deep down it's impossible.

56:58Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, I think there's a sense isn't there when you're that age that, the world is open to you but you are overwhelmed by the possible choice Paralyzed You're absolutely, I mean you're dead right you worry that you choose one thing and it closes off all the other options so you are frozen but also a sense that an anxiety that things are slipping away from you that everybody else has chosen and you haven't and the world is moving on and you're going to be left behind and you've got nowhere to go I think a wonderful passage actually is where this woman JC see she's my magazine editor i think yeah she asks uh esther what do you want to do and esther says i don't really know i felt deep shock hearing myself say that because the minute i said it i knew it was true and she says there's a lovely line she says it feels like the knowledge that she doesn't know what to do feels like there's been a bloke hanging around your door all this time and you sort of knew deep down he was your real father but you didn't want to admit it again Again, the stuff about the father, about who your father is.

58:01But, you know, so kind of dislocated does she feel, so untethered that she actually, she's actually physically transformed. Like at one point, a very heartbreaking moment after she's attempted to commit suicide, she's given a mirror and she holds it up. And the way that it's written, it's written as though she's describing a stranger. She has no idea that it's her. She doesn't recognize herself. You know, her head's been shaved. she you know she says one side of the person's face was purple and bulged out in a shapeless way the person's mouth was pale brown with a rose-colored saw at either corner you know yeah tragically alienated from herself and all of this begins when she finds herself untethered in new york after as we had described all these years of hard work knowing where she stood knowing how she knowing how she fitted in knowing what she had to achieve good grades basically and then discovering that all of that is totally irrelevant and pointless in the real world yeah exactly so

59:00Dominic Sandbrook: she's basically she's done fantastically well and um she See you next time. She just is frozen and crushed almost by the realisation that nothing that she has done now really matters. That it was all, you know, it was all, it wasn't empty. That's not right. But it's, it hasn't set her up neatly for this sort of easy career. So there's a moment when the interns are all told, please pose for a picture with a prop. Yeah. And the prop will reflect your future aspirations. But isn't that so reductive, you know? sum up your whole future with one object you know some people did you not know people at university and stuff who knew what they wanted to do who were like completely single-minded some but a lot of people changed that's the thing and i think esther knows that yeah but i mean i didn't know really what i wanted to do so i would have probably i mean god i'm mad i mean how depressing if there was some photo of me all those years training to be a ballet dancer for naught

1:00:05I know it's such it's like it's a timeless tale Dominic and I feel for you what would you be posing with Tevi I don't know like a mallet a mallet what were you hoping to be someone to tore down their fellow presenters and used to come yeah right thanks yeah stiletto

1:00:26Dominic Sandbrook: but anyway she says uh the only thing I was ever 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 with Wall Street in a business suit. In days of glory, shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantle with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone. It's very good writing. At this point, you claim that this is very relatable and this is how you... Well, I think it's relatable. So did you regard yourself? You regarded yourself as a champion racehorse? no definitely not because i i wasn't particularly a high achieving when i was in the educational system but i definitely remember i definitely remember you know you've been in institutions for so long you know like what you need to do to meet the quota yeah um and then i remember coming out and it was also kind of covid and being like at home a lot with totally clueless as to what i really wanted to do and trying to be realistic about the fact that what i really liked doing was like reading books and writing essays and stuff like that and that that was going to serve me not one iota in the real world you were wrong you were wrong to me i i actually was wrong yeah i actually was wrong but i mean what what i went through there's nothing on what i was nothing with what in comparison to what esther's faced with because she's in 1950s america which is a very fixed patriarchy where women have expectations of them they have roles that they're meant to step into.

1:01:53You know, it doesn't matter if they've had fantastic educations and degrees and they're really bright. They've got to be housewives, domestic, you know, and these are always big themes in Plast Poetry, you know, the struggle between these two sides of life, the traditional and the more subversive.

1:02:12Dominic Sandbrook: If I can jump in for a second about the historical context in case listeners are interested in me, if you're not interested, you know, do something else in the next moment. But actually, the reason that this is the case is because the two world wars had been so dislocating for you know gender relations in america that after men return i mean this is the truth this is the case in other western countries as well when men returned 1945 and this is sort of getting back to normal i think there's a general sense you know right let's get you know things have been very chaotic and women have been unmanned and all of this kind of thing yeah so let's really get back to a conservative settled fixed family unit nuclear family kind of world and so actually in some ways the 1950s are more conformist than the decades that went before them it's like your reactionary right aren't you yeah exactly i mean for instance i found i was looking through um the ads from the periods i mean you spoke about mad men and for instance like a classic was this tomato ketchup bottle and the tagline is you mean a woman can open it without a knife blade a bottle opener or even a husband and that's like that's classic with a very skinny-waisted woman kind of smiling at the camera like yeah exactly so there's the very famous passage isn't there and there's somebody about to get married tabby this must this must warn you this must warn you the blue jobs and the pink jobs yeah because I mean Esther dreads domestic drudgery and so she meets this young man and she imagines what it would mean to marry him that's how you're probably not looking into a looking ghost it would mean getting up at 7 and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightground and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed and then when he came home after a lively fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.

1:04:12Dominic Sandbrook: Oh my word. Well, thank goodness. Quite a bleak prospect, isn't it? Thank goodness you're the breadwinner in your household. Exactly. It's like, goodness, I'm marrying an aspiring writer. And that, to me, actually, when I read that passage, instantaneously, I was like, that is my vision of 1950s America. You know, you've never seen Pleasantville, but in the first half of the movie, before it goes from black and white into colour, that is the mother's daily routine. I mean, that's Samantha's daily routine in Bewitched. Right. And she has this fear with this, by Buddy Willard who's going to be a doctor and she thinks it will be a dreary and wasted life for a girl with 15 years of straight A's and she looks at Buddy Willard's mother doesn't she and she says basically what she does is cook and clean and wash from morning till night and I do not want that Yeah and his mother had a promising career as a teacher and then now look at her and she's basically a full time housewife and she's become very very conservative she's very disapproving of women following other paths so because of all this esther's very feels it feels imprisoned you know yeah she fears losing herself and yet as we said she's still a teenager seeking to fit in preoccupied with fitting in and so one of her main a big obsession of hers in the novel is losing her virginity because she feels burdened by it she sees sex all around her she doesn't want to be left out but she's terrified of falling pregnant because she thinks the motherhood will diminish her and rob her of her aspirations.

1:05:43And yet she wants to fit in. And so she says, I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister knowing way that after I had children, I would feel differently. I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So again, she gives up her true dream in order to become a mother.

1:05:59Dominic Sandbrook: She worries that it will be just an image. She says, I worry that if I had kids and I married, I would be going around numb as a slave in some private totalitarian. state. She loves the fascistic language. Yeah, she does. But I mean, she's writing the 1950s, the fascistic language, the sort of, also the totalitarian, you know, this is the age of McCarthyism, as we said, so it's in the air, exactly. She's cross about, I mean, she's very clear-eyed, clear-sighted about the hypocrisy of, you know, what's fine for a man is not fine for a woman. So Buddy's mother expects that Esther will stay pure before her marriage, but Buddy, because he's a young man can sow his wild oats or that sort of thing also she's very clear-sighted about the different opportunities for men and women so a wonderful line a man is an arrow into the future and a woman is the place that the arrow shoots off from i mean that goes back to the thing we were saying about how for so many writers of this period the post-war period you know their lives are facilitated by their wife in the background doing all the work for them so that they can sit around typing it's happy it's like a vision of your life i know i wish i wish i could say i could relate but actually i feel like i feel like i feel like i get the the the like proper nice treatment you reckon like yeah my fiance is very domestic so i'm quite lucky in that way well tabby's having a wonderful time like you know talking to her favorite person on yeah on on the podcast behind in the background yeah yeah no one else can see this but i know it's happening yeah there's a bloke there's a really depressed looking bloke like doing all the washing off and dealing with the maggots in the background he gets such a hard time he gets a hard time oh yeah he's like well the maggots that he brought into the picture i'm just saying he gets such a hard time on air other live shows but actually yeah he's the genius behind the scenes so just on esther one last point about esther tabby do you see her as a feminist is she a standard bearer for feminism i'm not sure she really is she doesn't have any real sense of that does she no i think again that would be flattening it would be um a bit reductive because she's not in any way apparent because again she's multi-dimensional she's not just one thing there's a lot about her that's unlikable she sees herself slightly above all the other girls who she homogenizes you know in quite a sexist way possibly she sort of fetishizes her difference she's proud of the fact that she's disgusted by and sees through the things that they seem to idolise.

1:08:29She and the bell jar have actually come under fire for moments of quite racist language and stereotypes. For instance, there's a moment when Esther is horrible and so rude to this man that's serving them in her first asylum that she's had. She's very unkind to this character, Joan, who joins Esther in her final mental institution and joan kind of makes the possibly lesbianic move on her and esther's just

1:08:58Dominic Sandbrook: like i don't like you she's catty yeah but that but the thing is it's mad to criticize either esther or the book for that i think because basically esther is a complicated real in inverted commas real person who's not a saint her characterization is so much richer for it you know that because what Sylvia Plath isn't allowing us to do is angelicize mental illness and depression or show it as something romantic and painless and like beautiful you know like Lizzie Siddle or something in the pre-Raphaelite paintings Pale and One and Tragic she's showing it's you know rooted in a real human being who's flawed and it's physically in many ways repulsive and unglamorous yeah and And I think that's important.

1:09:46Dominic Sandbrook: I agree with you completely. I would say it doesn't glamorise depression. It doesn't glamorise being institutionalised or any of these kinds of things. It makes it horrific, like when she looks at herself in the mirror, and is all the better for it, actually. I mean, Esther doesn't want to be depressed. No, she's desperate to be free. And actually, it would be doing so many people that have suffered similar things such a disservice if she did, because it would glamorise what is a truly horrible, grotesque, destructive experience. Well, the sense of hopelessness, the sense of despair, the sense of being enclosed.

1:10:20Dominic Sandbrook: And that takes us obviously to the image of the bell jar, doesn't it? To the central image. Yeah. Yeah. So the bell jar, there are lots of images of imprisonment in the book. So actually there was one, I was rereading it this morning. The bit when Neosha's told she hasn't got on the writing course, which is the bit that really pushes her down, down, down, kind of, underwater as it were. She says then when she finds out she doesn't get the writing course that the car roof closed over my head like the roof of a prison van. And she looks at the houses, the white clapboard houses where the interstices of well-groomed green, one bar after another in a large but escape-proof cage in the sense of being hemmed in.

1:11:01Dominic Sandbrook: But the thing that really captures this is obviously the image of the jar. So it's transparent. Everyone can see you. Everyone's looking at you. you know the glass jar that descends over you it blocks out the air it's like a vacuum so you're stifled yeah you can't breathe exactly you can see the world out too but you can't engage in it you're cut off yeah which is obviously how lots of people feel when they're depressed they can't communicate and um but also it's this sort of sense of everything is distorted and you cannot escape it's you're you're under the bell jar wherever you go whatever you do so it's almost dreamlike I suppose to some extent isn't it yeah a dreadful waking dream so she says to the person in the bell jar blank and stopped as a dead baby the world itself is a bad dream wherever I sat on the deck of the ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok I would be sitting under the same glass belger stewing in my own sour air and I think some of the most affecting parts of this book are those middle sections when she is truly under the jar.

1:12:07And because we're always inside her head, we live it alongside her. And it's important to say that it's not dramatic. You don't get much of a sense of kind of emotional escalation. It's awfully apathetic. She is awfully apathetic and numb. And that's what's so dreadful is it's not the deep purples or the deep blues of like agony or loss or grief or sadness it's the continuous gray of depression it's something different she says i saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright white boxes and separating one box from another was sleep like a black shade only for me the long perspective of shades that set off one blocks from the next had suddenly snapped up and i could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white broad

1:12:54Dominic Sandbrook: infinitely desolate avenue yeah it's um it's very well done that image i think and that sort of sense of the days she keeps a tally of them doesn't she um because she basically stops washing her hair she stops washing her clothes she stops eating and sleeping and she's sort of i haven't washed my hair for three weeks i haven't slept for seven nights 14 nights i haven't slept for 21 nights because what's the point yeah exactly but well in terms of the help that she gets her mother doesn't really understand her and doesn't quite approve of her does she i mean her mother is just bewildered by it um the first doctor dr gordon i mean he gives her the first course of electro convulsive therapy and this is a um terrible turning point a terrible turning point so she shuts her eyes she says there's a brief silence like an indrawn breath and something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world we it shrilled through an air crackling with blue light and with each flash a great jolt drugged me until I thought my bones would break and the saps fly out of me like a split plant and then it's like it's a punishment it's a torture I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done which is so sad because she's done nothing you know it's making me feel like her illness is something she's feel guilty for it's tragic on the electroconvulsive therapy um people who knew silver plath said you know that's she felt that that had been one of the great traumatic moments of her life that first course of ect ted hughes you know when he was talking about the bell jar said that's what really lay behind it that experience yeah which left a scar that never really healed yeah and you can sense that in that passage can't you it's horribly visceral god but this experience and i suppose the culmination of her um of her sense of dislocation her depression culminates in esther contemplating various means of killing herself she finds that she's unable to hurt herself physically so like sylvia plath she crawls into a hole in her mother's basement and overdoses on sleeping pills and it's the way that the scene plays out that i was struck by because it's calm it's a matter of fact everything she does in the build up to it is meticulously performed she puts things back exactly where she took them from so while she's about to enact a shocking act of self-destruction the language that plath uses is mundane unchanged so it's as though life is droning on no matter what esther does no matter that she's about to leave that's the chilling thing it's the flatness the hollowness of the writing there yeah very flat um unsentimental almost unemotional way that she writes about it that's what makes it so powerful i think as a scene yeah but then she finds the darkness of the cellar that she calls into comforting uh like velvet so it's almost as though she's about to find relief she's about to go to bed then she wakes up in hospital to darkness because she thinks she's blind but she's got bandages wrapped around her head so it's as though she's gone from darkness back into darkness the bell jar is still above her there's no you know moment of enlightenment relief great healing and then this leads us into the final section of the book which mainly takes place in mental institutions exactly so psychiatric hospitals um so this you know it's full of you'd have to i mean you can sense this is written by somebody who's been in this world the world of the wards, of the treatments, of the nurses and so on.

1:16:33Dominic Sandbrook: You know, this is a high point of institutionalization in America. A couple of decades later, it would be reversed. People, they would try not to have people in institutions. But in the 50s and 60s, these places are kind of creaking under the weight of people who are being institutionalized. And yet in society, it was not embraced, was it? you were kind of ostracized if it was revealed that you'd been in a mental institution or something like that. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Dr. Nolan says to her at one point, people will shy away from you. They will treat you gingerly or even avoid you like a leper with a warning bell.

1:17:11Dominic Sandbrook: And she says she knows that her mother is ashamed, is so ashamed. A daughter in an asylum. I had done that to her. So she feels guilty, which is of course awful. But it's often how people do feel in that position. So she has the new doctor, Dr. Nolan, who is much kinder. And actually, this is interesting. Dr. Nolan says you won't ever have to have that again, that kind of treatment. But then actually, Dr. Nolan does give her the treatment again, which Esther is very, at first, horrified by, feels betrayed, feels she's been lied to. This institution that she's at is actually very comfortable. She likes the routines.

1:17:50She likes the food. So she's lulled into, you know, she's on the road to recovery i guess and then as you say she feels so betrayed when this is raised

1:17:58Dominic Sandbrook: to her again as a treatment but this so the book is not totally damning about the treatment no because actually the treatment in the second place the treatment by dr nolan is clearly done with a sense of care and compassion yeah in a way that the previous treatment wasn't don't you think and actually silver path this is not a book that is basically there are there's a whole load of books like one flow of the cougar's nest or something yeah Which are attacking mental health institutions, yeah. Exactly. This is not one of them, I wouldn't have said. Actually, the portrait is more nuanced. No, it's a nice hospital that she's at.

1:18:31The patients are allowed certain freedoms. As you say, Dr. Nolan is a really benevolent character. She actively helps Esther to recover and to understand her condition because she is a woman and she understands it from a woman's perspective. A real turning point in Esther's recovery is when Dr. Nolan prescribes her contraception, which was very unusual at the time still, because she realizes that Esther is terrified of motherhood, but wants to lose her virginity and fit in. And Dr. Nolan is based on Ruth Boucher, who was Plath's therapist who helped her. And Nolan does help Esther regain clarity.

1:19:06She does help Esther to escape the bell jar a little. and re-enter the world as Esther does she goes back to school, like to college she loses her virginity but it's actually not a straightforward ending by any means it's brilliantly unsatisfactory it's ambiguous, it's sort of unfinished because yes the bell jar has been raised but it still hangs suspended and a few feet above my head she says with the question left hanging with it, how did I know that someday at college in Europe somewhere anywhere where the bell jar with its stifling distortions wouldn't descend again. And that's a painfully apt portrait, I think, of depression because it is that black dog that always comes out.

1:19:50It can never truly be mastered or got rid of, but yeah, it can be survived and people can thrive afterwards. But it's not, it would be so belittling to say, oh, there are just these happy endings. And like any other illness, you can just turn a new leaf and you're absolutely fine for the rest of your life.

1:20:06Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, agreed. And for instance, there's this terrible, an unpleasant reminder, I suppose, of that is that Joan, this girl that Esther is at this institution with, we find out later that she has actually taken her own life. So it's the nasty warning of what could be. It's not totally dark, is it? Because she does survive. She has a second birth. She still is. She still exists. She says, I am, I am, I am. There's the threat of the Belger, but there's also the possibility of a long, bright life. Yeah, do you know, this is, I mean, this is so interesting, isn't it? Because actually, the book ends on an ambiguous note, but one that I think leads us to be more optimistic than not.

1:20:48Yes, I thought it was optimistic, really.

1:20:51Dominic Sandbrook: I think you're dead right that a couple of pages earlier, she says the bell jar could descend again at any moment. So we don't, we're not, you know, it's not like happily ever after. But it ends with Dr. Nolan coming to her and touching her on the shoulder. it's a lovely little sort of moments of compassion and fellowship and then basically leading her in to see all the people in this sort of meeting who are going to the doctors are basically going to discuss about you know is she is she ready to go is she ready to be sort of let out as it were um is she going to and she describes it as being reborn she says it ought to be a ritual for being born twice yeah and if you'd read this not knowing about the author you would say do you know what it was actually a reasonably happy ending yeah i think you would you know maybe they've put her on the road to recovery you know there'll be ups and downs but you know it could have been a lot worse of course we read this knowing that just a month after the book was published sylvia plath did take her own life yeah and it's impossible now to read it without i mean it would be you must wish you could read it without that knowledge don't you yeah i think that's true but that knowledge really overshadows the ending of the book, I think, in a way that turns us into this sort of a tragic story rather than one with elements of hope, which actually takes us to what happened to Sylvia Plath, Tabby.

1:22:17Yeah. So the end, the last portion of her life.

1:22:22Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. After completing the bell jar in 1961, she and Ted Hoos moved to Devon. And before leaving London, they let out their flat to the Canadian poet David Wevel, and his wife, Asia. The couple's become friends. Then Sylvia Plath discovers that Ted Hughes is having an affair with Asia and she is devastated. I mean, she is so devastated as you would be. And then in June 1962, she drives her car off the side of a road after hearing the news. And it's debated now whether or not this was a suicide attempt or rather maybe just like a destructive urge a destructive release so she and ted initially tried to repair the relationship but they ended up separating for good in october 1962 there were kind of there was semi there was talk of maybe resurrecting things um for the last portion of her life but never came to anything she missed him though but that said his departure does inspire the most productive period of her life this is when she composes most of the poems that make up the legendary um collection which i love ariel so you know from that terrible despair came a beautiful thing she returned to london in december 1962 actually full of optimism and she's living alone with her two children and the circumstances are just it couldn't really be worse this is one of the coldest winters ever known in the it's the big freeze winter of 62 to 63 yeah pipes freezing everything is like everything britain's literature to stand still yeah her water wasn't running she had a bathtub full of dirty water her children keep getting sick by the way they're nine months and two years old and she's alone with them also trying to work she keeps getting ill as a single mother i mean that is a that is an overwhelming that's that that would be terrible how could anyone keep their head above of the parapet with all of that going on and she has no telephones she's very isolated she is really missing ted hughes and so her depression and insomnia unsurprisingly return in force she described it as owls talons clenching my heart she told her her doctor that this had been going for about six to seven months and he prescribed her these pills which ted hughes later said he thought escalated her mental deterioration because they were untested on her this is unconfirmed her doctor tried to have her admitted to a hospital she was frightened of this because of her earlier experiences um so instead he decided to send a nurse to help her with the children um she's only 30 at this time yeah and the nurse is due to arrive one morning the 11th of february 1963 tries to get into the flat can't get into the flat and basically just gets into the flat finally and they discover that um sylvia plath has taken her own life and she's died of carbon monoxide poisoning and in very you know characteristic fashion she'd prepared for this meticulously she had sealed off the kitchen from the rest of their house the rest of the flat with tape and whatnot and cloth said that the children would be unharmed would be unharmed and she'd left food out for the children and whatnot she'd opened the windows in their bedroom she'd left them a little note saying call the doctor she won't call the doctor please and i I don't know why there's something about that, like decorous use of pleas even at the very end.

1:25:43Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, it's really, really sad. Her friend Gillian Becker wrote in her biography of Plath that a police officer who worked for the coroner's office said there was no question whatsoever that she had, this was not a cry for help, this was a... She'd meant to die. Yeah, she knew exactly what she was doing and she was determined to go through with it. the gravestone in which both her name and the name and Ted Hughes's surname are inscribed which is very controversial the gravestone has an inscription chosen by Ted Hughes even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted and I mean the gravestone itself is like there being the focus of kind of vandalism and you know people trying to scratch his the word Hughes off the tombstone and there was a huge cottage industry basically of people either saying ted hughes is a monster and it's all his fault she wouldn't have died if it hadn't been for him kind of thing or people including it has to be said their daughter yeah frida yeah frida who say he has been turned into a stage villain by the i mean ted hughes himself effectively said by the sylvia plath industry has cast me as this villain and there's nothing i can ever do that will say that will make them look on me differently or to see that it was more complicated whatever to be completely honest it's one of those things that i look at and i think i could probably spend 10 years reading about this and i still would be none the wiser because as we said before i don't believe that you can ever really know what happens in somebody else's no relationship and you know being judgmental about it so long after the fact doesn't really seem to me a terribly productive thing to do.

1:27:28Yeah. And also, you know, he's been widely criticized as the executor of her estate because he destroyed some of her journals. He said to protect his children. He also reordered Ariel. It was left by her bedside table. And she wanted it to start with the word love and end with the word hope. And he put a slightly darker spin on it. Whatever it may be. I think you're right. I've read so much about this. You can read and read and read. It's difficult to make a judgment. There's so much that's unknown. But also, I think we're missing the point as well. Of course, she was a remarkable person with an interesting life, but it's her writing that really lives on.

1:28:04And thanks to the bell jar and Ariel, she has been turned into this literary legend. She means a lot to many people. She's a feminist martyr, someone that examined and criticized gender expectations. She's been viewed as an artist who was driven to take her own life by an oppressive husband in a pre-feminist world. she's seen as a tragic heroine this troubled genius i think there's probably truth in all of those portraits but i also feel like that's probably a little bit reductive i i get i feel like her death the circumstances of her death her marriage have been sensed sensationalized to the point that i think they've come to overshadow the kind of gregariousness of her character her wit how remarkably intelligent she was.

1:28:52And above all, she is someone that spoke openly and honestly and wittily about depression. But above all, I think, she was an excellent, brilliant writer who was extremely hardworking and a superb poet. And that's, I mean, we're doing this episode to talk about her work, really, more than her.

1:29:12Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, agreed. Agreed completely. And I will say, on the book, I actually found the book really enjoyable. It is not, I did not find it a miserable, I didn't actually find it miserable and angst-ridden, and I didn't find it hard work. I was, as I said, I was reading on holiday, and I looked forward to when I would get back into it, because it was, as you say, it was written with a kind of dry humour often, and a beautiful use of language. It's not indulgent, quite neat kind of controlled portraits of people. It's neat. Yeah, but I thought I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. So Tabby, what are we marking this?

1:29:52Dominic Sandbrook: What's our scale? So I think we'd be doing ourselves and Sylvia Plath a disservice if we didn't rate it in her beloved deluxe peanut butter sandwiches spiced with onion. Oh my word, that's the worst thing you've said. Peanut butter bacon sandwiches spiced with onion. Yeah, and mayonnaise. And mayonnaise. So I am going to give it eight. Nice. Now, I'm taking two marks off. People say, why didn't you give it ten? I'm not giving it ten because I have no problem with the book at all. I mean, there's nothing I would criticize. It didn't actually haunt me. It didn't linger in my head as much as I thought it perhaps would.

1:30:39Dominic Sandbrook: I think that's partly because the style is quite laconic. Yeah. And it's not because precisely because it's not self-indulgent, actually, because it's quite controlled. And I perhaps didn't feel a sense of the rage, the sheer anguish that I might have done. however that i mean i'm not it would be bonkers for me to criticize the book for that because obviously it's a classic for a reason it means a lot to a lot of people and i think it is actually do you know what tabby it's exactly the kind of book that i would never have read if i hadn't done this show and i'm really glad that i did so yeah you owe me so much yeah i recommend it i recommend it to the listeners what about you i think i'm going to give it nine because i think it's always important to reward books on the basis of just how much you enjoyed reading them and as you say it's not all doom and gloom and i really enjoyed reading it like i found it a lovely easy not lovely maybe but suddenly that an easy read you wanted to pick it up and get back into it you know but i'm just going to dock one mark maybe because as you say because it is so tight and sharply written and controlled uh you almost would have needed kind of one moment of emotional explosion uh or something to contrast that um but it's really really great book really enjoyable really very well written so there we go okay well um so what do we have coming up a reminder as if i didn't hector the listeners enough that they should sign up for that newsletter at book club hq.com book club notes sign up at book club hq.com hugely exciting this was a shambles the way we actually do it i know calls to action as they are technically known ctas um So what do we have coming up?

1:32:20We have White Knights by Theodore Dostoevsky. The Shining by Stephen King. Master and Commander by Patrick O 'Brien. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. And Money by Martin Amis.

1:32:32Dominic Sandbrook: So some brilliant, brilliant books there. Big line up. Right. Thank you very much, Tabby. I'm off to eat a deluxe peanut butter sandwich, spiced with onion and bacon. See you next time. I feared you would say that. I'm hoping you weren't going to go there, but you did. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye.