In The Bell Jar, most of the Ladies' Day guest interns develop ptomaine poisoning after a luncheon - the culprit being the crabmeat. It is quite a memorable scene and so is the recovery. Whilst convalescing, the girls receive a copy of The Thirty Best Short Stories Stories of the Year to read and one story in particular holds Esther Greenwood's attention.
This scene is closely related to actual events that happened in June 1953 while Plath was at Mademoiselle. The guest editors - in real life - came down with ptomaine poisoning on Tuesday June 16, 1953. The story Plath read, contained in the The Best American Short Stories 1953: And the Yearbook of the American Short Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), was "The Fugue of the Fig Tree" by Stanley Sultan.
Did you know that Plath was later on faculty at Smith College with Stanley Sultan (academic year 1958-1959)? To my surprise (somewhat) and disappointment (somewhat), her journal entries about him neither mention the story nor her admiration of it. But, and not to open a can of worms (because those were picked off of Plath like sticky pearls), who knows what Plath may have written in her journal when she was writing The Bell Jar in the spring of 1961.
This scene is closely related to actual events that happened in June 1953 while Plath was at Mademoiselle. The guest editors - in real life - came down with ptomaine poisoning on Tuesday June 16, 1953. The story Plath read, contained in the The Best American Short Stories 1953: And the Yearbook of the American Short Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), was "The Fugue of the Fig Tree" by Stanley Sultan.
Did you know that Plath was later on faculty at Smith College with Stanley Sultan (academic year 1958-1959)? To my surprise (somewhat) and disappointment (somewhat), her journal entries about him neither mention the story nor her admiration of it. But, and not to open a can of worms (because those were picked off of Plath like sticky pearls), who knows what Plath may have written in her journal when she was writing The Bell Jar in the spring of 1961.