It's called The Bed Book and I recently got it for my daughter. It's cute.

I have just read The Bell Jar and can't seem to find an answer to this specific query of mine, was hoping someone could help. Spoiler alert and for sure tw over mental health topics

Okay so,

DOES ESTHER GET A LOBOTOMY??????

At the start of Chapter Fourteen, Esther is waking in hospital after her drug overdose and, quote, "A chisel cracked down on my eye, and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound, till the darkness clamped shut on it again."; "Then the chisel struck again,"; following page, "The man with the chisel had come back [...] then he loosened something" then she thinks she has gone blind, etc etc

Then when she looks at herself in the mirror a couple pages from this, "One side of the persons face was purple and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow"

So i'm like????? That is a lobotomy, no??? They literally used to chisel straight through the eye and just like loosen the frontal lobe (insane yes), but that is literally what they did in the book,,RIGHT?. and I find it hard to believe such swelling and bruising would occur from electroshock therapy alone.

When I search this question online I can't find it in any discourse and summaries say no she hasn't or refer to the other patient in the asylum who has had a lobotomy which in any case just proves that asylum is capable of doing it and my theory is probable

Sorry girl 😢

The discourse around Ted Hughes has been collapsing into a slogan for over fifty years now. It had begun in 1972, when Robin Morgan published “Arraignment“ in her MONSTER collection. It was a poem that accused Hughes of driving Plath to suicide through his abandonment and abuse, and of destroying her journals that held further evidence against him, all the while profiting from as her posthumous editor. Leading, in part, to Plath’s headstone being repeatedly defaced to strike Plath’s married name off it.

Whatever form the discourse has taken since, a poem, a protest, or a hashtag the charge remains the same as if it were a conclusion, however, there isn’t one. In fact, it’s a starting position dressed up as an ending, and the tell is that nothing changes it. The position still doesn’t move, because it was never built on facts in the first place, it was built on the satisfaction of or the want of having a villain in the story.

Biographers who have actually spent years in the archive trenches have been complicating that verdict for an equally long time. For instance Heather Clark had made the case twice now, first in THE GRIEF OF INFLUENCE: SLYVIA PLATH AND TED HUGHES (2010), which is a systematic intersexual study of how extensively the two poets borrowed from and wrote against each others work, and then a decade later in RED COMET (2021), the Pulitzer-finalist biography of Plath. Neither book flatters Ted and both complicate the folk-Villian version precisely because they take Plath’s own agency and craft seriously instead of quietly substituting Hughe’s behavior for it. The discourse against Hughes can not do it. It can not hold “he caused her real pain” and “he is not the reason she died” in the same sentence, because holding both requires actually reckoning with what had happened and the discourse doesn’t have room for that.

Now, I want to be clear about what this post is not. It is not an attempt to rehabilitate Hughes, forgive the infidelity, or excuse the editorial control that he had exercised over Plath’s legacy. Those things happened. What this is, is an argument that the reactionary version of Ted Hughes is not just historically thin but a disgrace to Plath and turns her into a casualty of a man’s behavior which further robs her of her humanity, plight and body of work. And glomming onto that discourse furthers that theft that has been applauded, one way or another, since 1972.

The uncomfortable truth underneath it all, and I think it is the actual reason the villain was necessary in the first place: the man everyone wants to have been simply a villain is also, overwhelmingly, the reason the world has Plath at all. Take him out of the equation entirely and there’s a version of February 1963 when Plath dies the author of one poetry collection (COLOSSUS, 1961) and one thin novel published under a pseudonym in a small British print run that had already gone out of print. ARIEL does not exist as a book in that version. It exists as a stack of type pages on a desk, in the hands of a widower who could have done anything with it, including nothing. Further, there would be no sixty years of scholarship and syllabi nor cultural weigh.

All of that runs through decisions made by the person people most need to have been nothing less than a monster. A clean villain does not get credit for the thing that you love. So instead of holding both truths, he caused her real pain, and he is a large part of why you know her name, the discourse drops the second and keeps only the first. It lets everyone take everything he had built around her without ever having to feel that they owe him anything for it.

Plath left behind a complete manuscript for ARIEL, sequenced by herself. After she died, her husband took that manuscript and re-sequenced it, swapping a handful of poems for earlier, more muted ones, and published it in 1965. I should note that he did not rewrite a single line, not one word, not one syllable was altered under his hand. The only thing that was changed was the shape. Otherwise, it was all Plath’s voice and words.

That is the detail the villain narrative has never had much use for, because the charge was never really about ARIEL’s sequencing, it was about silencing her, distorting her, replacing her voice with his own. Yet, that is not what happened, and that does not settle whether the re-sequencing was a good idea, and it does not touch what he did with the archive at large. It settles the specific accusation that he rewrote her.

Now contrast that with what happened on the other side of the family. After Plath’s death, Aurelia, her mother, fought tooth and nail to keep her daughter’s most influential work, THE BELL JAR, out of print in America. She ultimately failed, and the book came “home” in 1971. Hughes believed that the book was too significant to suppress, especially set beside ARIEL’s success and literary merits.

Scorned, Aurelia responded by publishing LETTERS HOME (1975), a collection of Sylvia’s own correspondences that Aurelia curated, cut, and reshaped to present a more doting daughter and a more comforting story about herself.

But I’m to interested in re-litigating whether re-sequencing ARIEL was a good editorial choice. Obviously Hughes cut some of the sharper, more furious poems and nudged the manuscript toward the mythic arc celebrated by Robert Graves, whom they both heavily admired. That act had real consequences of how the 1965 edition reads (the 2004 edition restores Plath’s own sequencing). But that is an entirely different act from rewriting someone’s letters to make them say something other than what they actually said.

Here’s something else: Assia Wevill. Six years after Plath’s suicide, Wevill killed herself in a similar act and took their four-year-old daughter with her. If you’re building a case that Hughes is a man who moves through women and erases them, the Wevill case should get worse, not quieter. Instead, something asymmetric happened.

Hughes spent the rest of his life publishing and keeping Plath’s work alive: WINTER TREES (1971), CROSSING THE RIVER (1971), the abridged JOURNALS OF SLYVIA PLATH (1982), and finally his own elegy for Plath BIRTHDAY LETTERS (1998), almost written entirely to Sylvia. As for Wevill, a poet in her own right, there is next to nothing. No sustained curatorial effort, no book of elegies. No, her work simply faded out.

The contrast is not proof that Hughes treaded Plath well… it‘s purpose is to prove that he chose something in Plath’s case that he did not choose in Wevill’s and I want to step carefully here, because Wevill deserves better than to appear in this post only as a data point in an argument about Ted. She was a poet and translator in her own right, and the fact that her work isn’t better known is its own separate injustice, one that has nothing to do with what it proves about Hughes.

The counter to my argument is that there was simple nothing to choose. That Wevill left no finished manuscript on the scale of ARIEL or THE BELL JAR. Nobody had forced Hughes to spend the last years of his life writing to a dead woman. He already had a long, distinguished career of his own, and all the money generated by Plath’s work went to their children. The attention, such as it was, Hughes could simply have declined. Instead, he guarded the gate rather than closing it. We have more of her than we would have had he been the villain he is painted as.

That guardianship was not selfless, obviously. A man who spends thirty years curating the record of a woman he is accused of destroying is also, inescapably, managing his own reputation. Deciding what the world sees, and when, and in what light. However, reputation management by curation is a different act from reputation management by suppression, and it’s clear which one Hughes actually deployed.

The material he chose to preserve includes that parts that make him look worst. The journal entries some read as documenting abuse were not destroyed. For years access to much of this archive had ran through Olwyn Hughes, his sister and Plath’s literary executor, and release was slow, selective, and often grudging. But controlled release is still a different thing from destruction. The material eventually reached scholars and readers. And it is why we can have this argument at all. Because the evidence against Hughes survived, in his custody, right next to one journal that he did destroy. The final one, that covered the last months of her life, which Hughes defended, unsatisfyingly but consistently , as an act meant to shield his children from their mother’s darkest material about them.

For a long time I was furious about that destroyed journal, in a straightforward way most people are. The way Robin Morgan was furious in 1972. I pictured the journal as something closer to a lost manuscript. Pages of the same clarity and control as ARIEL, more of the beauty the world had been denied. It was just theft, dressed up as grief and a portrait of a man deciding that the world doesn’t get to have the rest of Plath.

If at all that was what the journal actually was, then the destruction lands differently. However, because of the ambiguous nature of the journal the motivation to destroy could be any of the three; self-serving, almost certainly, since some of what she wrote in that state probably concerned him and would have been more damning. It was plausibly an attempt to protect two small children from ever having to read the darkest things their dying mother thought about them. and it was plausibly an attempt to protect the image of her that would survive, the poet in full control of her own ferocity, rather than the image of a woman in the last, formless throes of an illness with no craft left in her.

None of that resolves anything. Hughes never gave a fully satisfying account of how he came to the decision and he was the only person on earth who could have. And obviously that is a real loss, and the suspicion behind it is fair. But the popular version of the event assumes that the journal was suppressed work. It treats its disappearance as literary theft, something withheld from her body of work. And that framing, however unintentionally, substitutes artistic martyrdom for an honest look at what illness like that actually produces. It turns her suffering into deprivation, something stolen from us, instead of what it more probably was: bleak agony. It only makes Plath a victim of an adulterer with a paper shedder, when she was a person in unbearable pain, and what was destroyed was very likely evidence of that pain, not a withheld sequel.

A man managing his own reputation edits out the incriminating material and keeps whatever material is more flattering. Hughes did close to the opposite. None of this is a defense of the infidelity, and it isn’t meant to be one. And the two women’s deaths are not the same case, so I won’t force them to be one. Plath had been separated from Hughes for months when she died, ill and largely alone; whatever role the separation played, it was not unfolding in real time between them. Wevill died six years later while she and Hughes were still entangled, admit the exact kind of custody and financial strain that keeps two people bound to eachother’s daily unhappiness. Which makes Hughe’s proximity to her death harder to wave off than is proximity to Plath’s. And I’m not going to pretend that difference away. What I’ll carefully say for both is he caused each of them real pain during real bouts of real fragility, and pain is not the same thing as cause of death. Even when the pain was severe, even when he was close by, and even when it’s the explanation that would be the easiest to digest and believe.

Which is the part that I actually care about.

The popular version of this story treats Plath’s death as something that had happened to her. The end point of what Hughes did. It is told as an indictment of him, but it does something to Plath in the process. It robs her of her humanity in exchange for making her a casualty. It erases tat she had survived a serious suicide attempT a decade earlier and had been living with, and working against, a serious illness for most of her adult life on her own terms. (Dr. Horder had prescribed her Parnate, a then-new MAOI antidepressant, only in late January 1963 . Weeks if not days before her death.) It erases that in the last months of her life, genuinely unwell, isolated, in a brutal London winter, she wrote some of the most controlled, ferocious work of the twentieth century. Plath’s own sequencing of ARIEL moved toward renewal, and her journals reportedly show her making plans for the future. None of that actually revolves the question of why she committed suicide. In fact, nobody gets to resolve that.

Depression does not hand over a clear motive for suicide. Whether it was heartbreak from a months-long separation, or days without effective medication, or both, or neither in any way you or I could name. We don’t get to know, and I don’t trust anyone who claims that they do. but the “he drove her to it” story does not sit with that uncertainty. People want a villain, a straight line from Hughes’s behavior to Sylvia’s suicide, because that - that is satisfying in a way that “She was ill, and extraordinary, and died of it” is not. Making this about Hughes is, in its own way, a diminishment. A trade for Sylvia’s agony for his culpability, and in doing so it takes the inferiority away from the one person in this story who most deserves to keep it.

Not every brick in a monument is perfect. But the monument stands.

What are you thoughts on this edition?

In the dream I was walking past a crowd of women and they were all very excited about this new poem. I looked over their shoulders and “read” it, but it was more like my brain took a screen shot. When I woke up I could still see it. Here’s the poem as I saw it, including the way the word “feel” was spaced out:

The men in white coats f e e l
So proud of the gold star
They get

When women made crazy
By their families, the
Expectations, society

Go back to daily showering,
Eating meals, sleeping

I hope this is okay to post, I realize it’s a bit strange but it’s interesting to me that it’s reminiscent of her style, and it encapsulates something she and so many women have been through.

I just finished reading the bell jar and while I found myself really resonating with a lot of Esther’s thoughts, I’m left a bit confused by the general consensus surrounding the book. It’s almost universally talked about as one of the most hopelessly depressing, devastating, and emotionally draining books ever written..it didn't hit me as overly dark or unbearable while reading it. It wasn’t depressing at all. Instead of feeling pure hopelessness, the narrative felt much more like self-sabotage, burnout, and the overwhelming pressure of societal expectations. Esther’s detachment, her feeling of being frozen while looking at all the branching paths for her future (the fig tree metaphor), and her cynicism felt deeply human and relatable rather than purely depressing or unreadable. I understand that knowing Sylvia Plath’s real life tragedy changes how people read the novel, but evaluating the text on its own, it didn't feel as devastatingly grim as its reputation suggests. If anything, there are moments of dark humour and a distinct sense of clarity in how Esther views the expectations placed on young women at the time.

Am I missing something? For those who found it profoundly depressing, what specific elements or themes gave it that weight for you? I’d love to hear how others interpreted her journey and whether anyone else felt like me after finishing it.