GLR May-June 2024

arrives at the “asylum” soon after Esther. Joan is a kind of dou ble to Esther: both are intelligent and mentally ill, and they dated Buddy Willard. The doppelganger effect is underscored when Esther tells us that Joan’s room “was a mirror image of my own.” One day, Esther knocks on the door of a patient named DeeDee, intending to borrow sheet music from her. Esther hears no answer and believes DeeDee will not mind having someone just pick up music, so Esther opens the door and steps into the

tory comments about their mutual heterosexual love interest, this is Esther’s response: “I looked at Joan. In spite of the creepy feeling, and in spite of my old ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feel ings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.” This was 1950s Amer ica, after all, when gay people of both genders were seen as alien creatures who might as well have been Martians. Only two paragraphs after the observa

room. Esther recalls: “I saw a shape rise from the bed. Then someone gave a low gig gle. The shape adjusted its hair, and two pale pebble eyes [we know from earlier descrip tions that these are Joan Gilling’s eyes] re garded me through the gloom. DeeDee lay back on the pillows, bare-legged under her green wool dressing-gown, and watched me with a little mocking smile.” Esther starts to

tions just quoted, Esther recalls telling her female psychiatrist: “I don’t see what women see in other women. What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?” Dr. Nolan volunteers: “Tender ness.” Esther confesses: “That shut me up.” Visiting Esther, Joan confides: “I like you. I like you better than Buddy.” Esther

The feminist adora ti onof Sylvia Plath ignores that The Bell Jar is rife with lesbo phobia. My claim is that this linked to her secret a tt rac ti on to women.

explain her having come into the room and DeeDee immedi ately knows she wanted the music sheets. “‘Hello, Esther,’ Joan said then, and her cornhusk voice made me want to puke. ‘Wait for me, Esther, I’ll come play the bottom part with you.’ Now Joan said stoutly, ‘I never really liked Buddy Willard. He thought he knew everything. He thought he knew everything about women.’” It would be easy to see Esther’s desire to “puke” as a case of lesbophobic revulsion. But that revulsion is tied to a kind of enthrallment. Right after that, when Joan makes these deroga

immediately reflects on a “minor scandal at our college dormi tory.” Continuing: “A fat, matronly-breasted senior, homely as a grandmother and a pious Religion major, and a tall, gawky freshman with a history of being deserted at an early hour in all sorts of ingenious ways by her blind dates, started seeing too much of each other. They were always together, and once some body had come upon them embracing, the story went, in the fat girl’s room.” “But what were they doing ?” Esther asked her informant. To the reader: “Whenever I thought about men and men, and

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