The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar

My favorite part of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

"Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York."



I bought my copy (first American edition!) in a used book store in San Francisco, back in my slightly-publicized hunt for an authentically used copy of The Dharma Bums. I bought that copy of The Bell Jar not necessarily for the fact that it is a first edition, but because it had DAWN MERCER written in giant lettering on the first page, but then, slipped between the pages, a newspaper clipping announcing that DAWN MERCER and her boyfriend had finally broken up. I'm assuming DAWN MERCER'S boyfriend had some better ideas for her beloved antiquated book collection and they ended up at goodwill with a little calling card. Dawn, what did you DO to him?!

The Bell Jar was a sad, sad read, but when she floats her entire wardrobe off the top of the building, it's such this beautiful, freeing, lunatic moment.

If Jeremy Davies' character in Million Dollar Hotel, Tom-Tom, jumped off a building in his triumphant lunacy moment to a soundtrack of U2, then Esther Greenwood threw her clothes to some scratchy, dark, bass clarinet number with a tired, lilty soulful voice breathing a descant and I might have felt something like hope as I read or watched. But there was none.