This blog post is drawn from my most recent read, and that is of the 90th Anniversary edition, pictured left, and published last year. It is the first time that I have read a modern (post-1990s) edition in well more than a decade. Why? Because before then, Faber had used the same typesetting of the novel that Heinemann used and thus it would have been the exact text that Plath herself saw when she received her copy of her novel in December 1962.
I spotted two typographical errors in the novel and I had the feeling that there were more. However when I was reading it I did not take the time to make notes either in the book or on a sheet of paper. Which frustrates me I did want to look them up. The first typo is on page 5. The original reads, "but Doreen wore these full-length nylon and lace jobs you could half see through, and dressing-gowns the colour of skin," but the typo make it read "colour of sin". Sin, I am sure, has a color; but I suspect it is quite a different color than of Doreen's skin. I dug back a bit in my Bell Jar collection and found that this typo first appeared in the 1990s, in this edition. Strangely, it is "colour of skin" in the 1999 edition. I bought that one in Australia in 2000 and it is possible that even though it is a Faber book, it may have used a different text? I do not know; that is above my pay grade.
The second typographical error is newer. And I was sad to see it as it is one of my favorite lines in the novel. When Esther is suffering from ptomaine poisoning, she passed out in the bathroom. When she wakes, she is taken by the hotel nurse to her room and told, in the original, "The doctor's given you a ninjection" in the original edition. However, on page 43 of the 90th Anniversary edition, the grammar of the nurse is cleaned up to "an injection." I do disagree with this editorial futzery because Plath's intention, I think, with the nurse, is to have her speaking in the dialect of perhaps a lower-eductated New York immigrant. She developed a looser vernacular in some of her Boston stories such as "The Fifteen Dollar Eagle", "The Daughters of Blossom Street", and "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams". This breakthrough really freed Plath when she came to write The Bell Jar. It was more recent, as I said. It also appears in the simultaneously issued Liberty Edition. However, it is "correct" in the editions published in 2015 (Faber Members) and 2013 (black and gold hardback).
Update 12:01 pm, 25 June 2020: I have just learned that both of the things discussed in this blog post---the "colour of sin" and "an injection"---are updates to the text sanctioned by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. So my calling them typographical errors can be considered inaccurate.---pks
All links accessed 16 June 2020.
Fortunately, I have the Heinemann edition which, as you state, is the only text Sylvia approved. If there are 'errors' within that were missed when she proofread it, that is a human touch for which I am grateful. As is the case with the changes to the early Faber editions, approved, or made by her executors, further revisions are unwelcome.
ReplyDeleteWhen she was writing the poetry that would be published posthumously, Sylvia said in an interview that she did not look back at The Colossus because she had moved forward. I doubt, had Sylvia lived, she would have gone back to revise The Bell Jar. It would be a minor early work and there would be later novels Sylvia would rather had our attention.