The Bell Jar Manuscripts, Two January 1962 Poems, "Elm," and Ariel

Although no handwritten version of The Bell Jar survives—and there may never have been one—the existence of early drafts corrected by Plath, together with two copies of the final manuscript, have been known about ever since Smith College purchased them in 1981. The drafts have attracted particular attention, not so much in their own right but in relationship to the poems written on the reverse side, as Plath recycled the pink Smith memo paper which she had largely smuggled out of Smith College during her teaching year there. The recycling may simply have been an act of convenience and economy, but critics such as Susan Van Dyne and Jacqueline Rose have made a strong case for seeing this re-use as a deliberate act of inscription.¹ At times, there does seem to be a significant relationship between what is on one side of the paper and what is on the other. If such a relationship is accidental, it is uncanny. At other times, however, the results may seem coincidental.

Not so well examined is the number of typed versions known to exist: there is evidence, I believe, of the existence of a version that comes between the pink memo version and the final manuscript. This version was two hundred and eighty-nine pages long, typed on white typing paper, and survives in the form of large sections of the final manuscript. Substantial sections of it have disappeared, however, while the reverse sides of other parts were re-used by Plath for poems written in January 1962 and then discarded. The existence of this mediate version is partially acknowledged in the cataloguing at Smith, but its actual scale and significance have, as far as I can tell, never before been fully appreciated. For both The Bell Jar pages and the poems written on the reverse reveal much that is of interest about the evolution of Plath’s writing, its interaction with contemporary newspaper discourse, and the voice and imagery that we meet in the Ariel poems of autumn 1962.

Two typed drafts (A and B) of The Bell Jar on pink Smith memo paper are kept in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, with the second draft (Draft B in the Smith Collection) clearly labeled as such by Plath. Many of Smith’s Ariel poems are on the reverse of pages from both drafts. Draft A is incomplete and revolves around a main character called Frieda. It starts in Chapter 3 with the food poisoning episode and ends in Chapter 9 with the encounter with Marco, the woman hater. It is a typed manuscript much revised by Plath in black ink; these alterations have been incorporated in Draft B. There are as well some gaps in the sequence of Draft B, notably the events described on pages 193–212 in the final manuscript. Also missing from this draft are the final fifty or sixty pages of the novel, which describe Esther’s stay in the hospital, her electric shock treatment there, the loss of her virginity, and her release from the hospital. In this version generally—but not consistently—the name “Frieda” is crossed out and replaced with “Victoria.” (Both versions use the surname Lucas.) Plath has replaced the earlier title “Diary of a Suicide” with the new one, The Bell Jar. Sentences appear in this version which have been cut from the published version. One example is a passage in which Victoria describes her ability to renew herself by taking a bath, a ritual which assumes a baptismal significance. Another, from Draft B, contains a comparison, cut from the published version, in which the speaker comments, “I remember in some play the gypsy’s daughter who is a whore is supposed to turn into a virgin on each new moon. . . .”²

Within a folder containing photocopies of these recycled drafts at Smith is a single sheet labeled “Draft C,” signaling the existence of a third draft: half a page of what seems to be chapter 9, page 106, of the final manuscript. This passage was abandoned and rewritten...