A double Sylvia Plath did you know...

Did you know that in The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood & her fellow guest editors do not work at/for Ladies’ Day? The name of the magazine where they did work was never actually named. The most we are told is that, "We had all won a fashion magazine contest...and as prizes they gave us jobs in New York for a month" (1971, 3). And, in the text of the novel, whenever Ladies’ Day is named, it is actually quite clear that the guest editors are visitors there, or that they are visiting a separate location.

The first mention of Ladies' Day comes in Chapter Three. From the way Greenwood describes it, Ladies' Day is "the big women's magazine that features lush double-page spreads of Technicolor meals..." (27-28). Then, on page 30, Greenwood says, "None of our magazine editors or the Ladies' Day staff members..." which further illustrates the point. Lastly, when recovering from ptomaine poisoning, "Those dodos on Ladies Day" sent the interns get-well cards and copies of The Thirty Best Short Stories of the Year (52). This might be generally known, but in my itinerant interneting - and in some published sources - I have seen it stated that Esther works for Ladies' Day, and it just is not so.

Plath herself confirmed that Ladies’ Day was not where the heroine of her story worked. In a letter concerning libel issues that Plath sent to her editor (James Michie) at Heinemann on 14 November 1961--which is now held as part of the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College--Plath states this quite clearly. Unfortunately it is not possible to quote from the letter, but if you are interested in reading it, the good people in the Mortimer Rare Book Room can make a photocopy for you.

The autobiographical source for this ptomaine poisoning scene took place on 17 June 1953 when Plath and her guest editors visited the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, which was then located at 383 Madison Avenue. (Here is a link to an page from an oldish advert for BBDO.) The building now is a modern office tower, as can be seen below...

And so clearly, Plath fooled around with the actual elements of this incident in her novel, transforming (masking) what took place at BBDO by setting the scene at the offices of a magazine.

Did you know that the June 1953 ptomaine poisoning was not Plath's first experience with the ailment? For her novel, there is no evidence Plath was drawing on an additional, previous experience in the ptomaine scene; however, on July 3, 1946, while she was at summer camp, a quarter of the camp, including five people in Plath's Cove unit, became ill after eating bad fish. The counselors had to spent their time tending to all the children who were fed soup to settle their stomachs. Read more about Plath's time at Camp Helen Storrow in 1945-1946 in my paper "A Perfectly Beautiful Time: Sylvia Plath at Camp Helen Storrow."

All page number references to The Bell Jar in this post come from the 1971, Harper & Row edition.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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