GLR May-June 2024

women and women, I could never really imagine what they would be actually doing.” (This passing reference to “men and men” is the sole allusion to male homosexuality in the novel.) The informant describes one young woman stroking the other’s hair. Esther is “disappointed.” Hoping for a “revelation of spe cific evil,” she is left to wonder if “all women did with other women was lie and hug.” She recalls a college poet who lived with another woman as well as the previously mentioned inci dent in which a poet expressed alarm over the impact of her choices on her career. Esther writes: “My head ached. Why did I attract these weird old women?” Joan repeats that she likes Esther, who replies: “That’s tough, Joan. Because I don’t like you. You make me want to puke, if you want to know.” She exits the room, “leaving Joan lying, lumpy as an old horse, across my bed.” Joan’s hopeful overture followed by Esther’s rude rejec tion is hardly the end of their relationship. Esther is there to cheer Joan up when she announces she might become a psy chiatrist and will soon leave the institution. Esther recounts: “I thought I would always treasure Joan,” because they had been forced together by circumstance and “shared a world of our own.” Something that deeply troubles Esther is society’s notorious double standard that forces a woman to “have a single pure life,” while a man can have “a double life, one pure and one not.” Re belling against that hypocrisy, yet committed to the heterosex ual norm, Esther sets out in a cold manner to lose her virginity with a male acquaintance that she views as an “impersonal, priestlike official” who would deflower her as a kind of “tribal rite.” She seeks sex not out of passion but because “the corrup tion of Buddy Willard” led her to feel that her “virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck.” It’s a disaster that leads Esther to hemorrhage. She seeks assistance from the re cently discharged Joan Gilling. Esther is terrified that she’s dying, because the bleeding will not stop. A sympathetic Joan weeps for Esther and accompanies her in a taxi to the emer gency room. Only a few days after this emergency trip, Joan returns to the asylum. A few days after that, Joan is missing. Then she is found dead, a victim of suicide. At Joan’s funeral, Esther “wondered what I thought I was burying.” It seems likely that Plath needed to have Joan commit suicide toward the end of the novel because the author had to kill off Esther’s same-sex temptations. What was being buried was the lesbian part of Esther’s own bisexuality or yearning toward other women. The suicide of the novel’s major lesbian character represented a re jection of lesbianism itself and, perhaps even more signifi cantly, a rejection of the idea that a lesbian could have a healthy and satisfying life. In a homophobic era, Joan Gilling’s suicide was logical, because a “perverted” woman, unable to direct her sexuality to a socially acceptable partner, had to re ject life itself. It should be noted that the 1979 movie of The Bell Jar led to a lawsuit by a schoolmate of Plath who had in fact been in a mental hospital with her. Psychiatrist Dr. Jane V. Anderson rec ognized herself as the model for Joan Gilling. She only sued over the film, not the book, charging invasion of privacy and character defamation. Anderson was especially offended that the film, much more explicitly than the novel, portrayed Joan as

a lesbian—and showed Joan making sexual advances toward Sylvia. Anderson called the scene “sickening beyond words and profoundly objectionable.” Anderson testified that she had never had a sexual relationship with another female. She was adamant in denying lesbianism had any part in her life. Even tually the suit was settled. The fact that Anderson was “sick ened” by the suggestion that she was lesbian can be taken as indicative of how deeply ingrained homophobic attitudes were. Towrite The Bell Jar, Plath made use of both her own, often painful, experience and her very active imagination. She prob ably used some experiences and characteristics of Anderson to create Joan, but Joan was probably as much Plath herself as An derson. If Joan represented a yearning for intimacy with another woman, and Plath needed to conform to a heteronormative so ciety, then this yearning is what was killed and buried at the end of The Bell Jar , which was published just weeks before Sylvia Plath’s suicide at the age of thirty in 1963. This writer knows of no evidence that Plath ever had a les bian relationship. However, there is evidence that her attraction to lesbianism was not buried with Joan Gilling’s funeral. In 1959, during the early and apparently happy years of her mar riage to Ted Hughes, the couple acquired a cat. The cat’s name was Sappho. Of course, this name could have been chosen out of sheer admiration for the ancient Greek poet’s verse, but it seems more plausible that she was sending a different kind of message altogether. In Plath’s Ariel collection, which also helped to establish her reputation, one of the strongest and most memorable poems is titled “Lesbos.” The poem is written as one heterosexually married woman talking to her close female friend, also a het erosexually married woman. The poem begins:: “Viciousness in the kitchen!/ The potatoes hiss.” It soon states: “And I, love, am a pathological liar.” The narrator of “Lesbos” addresses the other woman as “love” before calling herself “a pathological liar.” The lie may well be in the “just friends” nature of their friendship. The narrator continues: “You say your husband is just no good to you/ His Jew-mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.” The marriage of her friend seems to have gone sexually dry. Then she adds: “Lesbos” ends: “I say I may be back/ You know what lies are for/ Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.” The poem’s title suggests an attraction, even a sexual one, between the narrator and the woman she addresses. It suggests that the heterosexual marriage of the woman being addressed is a loveless one. It ex presses a yearning to the women that they “meet” but ends on a decided note of rejection. We cannot know with any certainty what may have been going on inside Sylvia Plath’s head. What we can know, what is obvious from both the novel and her poetry, is that the female characters she created to represent herself struggled mightily with the desire to be physically close to other women. Both her autobiographical novel and one of her most powerful poems sought to bury that desire. Perhaps only the author’s tragic death by suicide could ultimately bury it. I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair We should meet in another life, we should meet in air Me andyou.

TheG & LR

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