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I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir. [Following a successful shock treatment:] All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. “We’ll take up where we left off, Esther,” she [my mother] had said, with her sweet, martyr’s smile. “We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.” A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. Valerie’s last, cheerful cry had been “So long! Be seeing you.” “Not if I know it,” I thought. But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
- From The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
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