Plath's novel was published in the United Kingdom on January 14, 1963. Plath -- the mother of two young children -- committed suicide about a month later, on February 11, 1963.
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| Sylvia Plath in 1963, a short time before she committed suicide |
Although The Bell Jar was published in the UK in 1963, it was not published in the USA until 1971.
Bergstein's first novel, Advancing Paul Newman, was published in 1973, so Bergstein probably finished writing the manuscript during 1972. I speculate that soon after Bergstein finished her manuscript, she read The Bell Jar and was significantly influenced by it as she thought about writing her own next novel.
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I have no direct evidence that Bergstein ever read The Bell Jar. My speculation is based on only a few, scattered bits of evidence and on my deductive reasoning.
I might be compared to a paleontologist constructing an entire dinosaur's appearance from just a few teeth and bones.
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| My collection of evidence |
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| All my evidence |
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| My construction from my evidence |
Bergstein and Plath both were writers who were married to talented poets.
* Bergstein is married to Michael Goldman, a poet who enjoyed a career of teaching English at Princeton University. (I do not know when they married, when he began to teach at Princeton or whether they have children.)
* Plath was married to Ted Hughes, a poet. In the early 1960s he was employed as a writer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. In later years he made his living by writing and publishing poetry. In 1984 he became the UK's poet laureate, which was a paid position. He inherited Plath's copyright to The Bell Jar -- more than three million copies of which have been sold.
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| Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and their child |
Compare the following passages from the beginnings of The Bell Jar and of Dirty Dancing.
It was a queer, sultry summer -- the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs -- and I didn't know what I was doing in New York City.... and ...
That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me "Baby", and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot. ... That was the summer we went to Kellerman's.The Rosenbergs in the Plath's passage were a couple of Jewish-Americans who had been convicted for espionage and were executed on June 11, 1953.
Both passages, with similar structures and cadences, set the stories in the summertime, shortly before sensational political killings. The killings were famous enough that people reading The Bell Jar in 1963 immediately placed the novel's story in the year 1953, just as people watching Dirty Dancing in 1987 immediately placed the movie's story in the year 1963.
The Plath passage is spoken at 1:00 in the following trailer for a movie adaption of The Bell Jar.
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The Bell Jar is about a young woman, Esther Greenwood, who wants to become a writer. In the summer of 1953 she has just finished her junior year at Smith College, a woman's college in Massachusetts. Smith College is about about 20 miles from Mount Holyoke College, which Baby Houseman would begin to attend after her eventful summer of 1963.
Esther has a boyfriend, Buddy Willard, who is a pre-med student at Yale University (just like Robby Gould) and who has a sexual affair with a waitress. Esther gets revenge on Buddy by giving her own virginity to a Harvard mathematics professor named Irwin.
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After Bergstein' novel Advancing Paul Newman was published in 1973, a movie director named Claudia Weill who liked the novel asked Bergstein to write a screenplay. For several years, Bergstein turned down Weill's requests, saying she was too busy writing her second novel. Eventually in about 1977, however, Bergstein relented and agreed to write a screenplay. In an earlier post, I quoted from a magazine article that had reported about the Bergstein-Weill collaboration.
... [in 1973], Claudia Weill, who was making documentaries, read a political novel called Advancing Paul Newman, which was about two girls in the Sixties. Weill contacted the author, Eleanor Bergstein, and asked if she would like to write a screenplay .... Bergstein, who had started her second novel, wasn't interested.Although the above passage mentions that Bergstein "had finished a draft of her [second] novel", that novel never has been published.
"Eleanor is a knockout writer," says Weill .... I bugged Eleanor for years." ....
Weill called Bergstein [in about 1977] and told her about a project that she thought would fulfill her [Bergstein's] conditions. There would be a one-in-three chance of production, a $200,000 grant if produced, the work would be shown on educational television, and there might be a limited theatrical release. .... Bergstein had finished a draft of her [second] novel ....
Bergstein and Weill sat down to discuss what they could do with $200,000 in terms of setups and locations. Then Bergstein and her husband, Michael Goldman (an author and professor of Shakespeare, modern drama and poetry at Princeton), leased a house in Vermont, and she went to work.
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I speculate that Bergstein's never-published novel was about a love affair between two mathematics professors at a university. After working on this novel for several years, Bergstein realized that this novel never would interest any publishers, and so she gave up.
However (I speculate), Bergstein did use some elements of her abandoned novel in the screenplay she wrote for Weill. Eventually the screenplay became the movie It's My Turn, which was released in 1980.
This movie's main female character, Kate Gunzinger, is a mathematics professor at a university. The movie's main male character is Ben Lewin, a retired professional baseball player, but I speculate that the novel's main character was likewise a mathematics professor.
Kate is an unusual woman trying to make a career in the male-dominated academic field of mathematics. She apparently fears that women are naturally inferior in advanced mathematics. The following scene shows Kate apparently being corrected and surpassed by one of her male students.
In the above-quoted article about he Bergstein-Weill collaboration, Bergstein her interest in mathematicians who succeeded in making important advances in mathematics.
I thought about mathematicians and how most of them, from Einstein on down, do their best work and have their major breakthroughs in their early twenties, or certainly before the age of thirty. They can go on to do good work, but it is usually based on that original insight."The movie character Kate aspires not merely to teach mathematics to university students, but rather to make a major breakthrough in mathematics in competition with her fellow professional mathematicians. Despite such a lofty ambition, however, she fears that she was hired by the university because she is a female token whose mere presence can help the university satisfy the affirmative-action requirements imposed by the government.
In Bergstein's abandoned novel (I speculate), the mathematics professor Kate had a competitive relationship with a male mathematics professor, and this relationship developed into a love affair. In the movie, Kate has a competitive relationship with a retired professional baseball player, and this relationship develops into a love affair.
An important part of Bergstein's story about a female-male competitive relationship is that the females suffer various disadvantages. Women spend much of their time and energy raising children, maintaining the family households and providing emotional support to their husbands. It's no wonder that men succeed professionally far more than women do.
It's not fair!
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Why did Bergstein waste years of her life writing a dopey novel about a love affair between a couple of mathematics professors? I speculate that she did so for the following reasons:
In her own life, Bergstein was an aspiring writer married to a talented poet, and she resented that his writing accomplishments eventually would excel hers by far.So, that is my speculation about the novel that Bergstein abandoned right before she wrote the screenplay for It's My Turn.
Bergstein compared 1) her own resentful relationship with her own poet husband Goldman and 2) Plath's tragic relationship with her poet husband Hughes. Plath's writing career was impeded by her having to raise two children and serve her husband, while Hughes was rather free to spend his time and energy on his writing.
In The Bell Jar, Esther is infatuated briefly with a Harvard mathematics professor so much that she surrenders her virginity to him. She does not save her virginity for her long-time boyfriend, the pre-med student at Yale.
Instead of writing her novel about a couple of competing poets, she was inspired by The Bell Jar to write instead about a couple of mathematicians.
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An important and repeated theme in Bergstein's body of works is that women are disadvantaged in competing with men because women get stuck raising children, maintaining the family households and providing emotional support to their husbands. That's a big reason why the right to abort pregnancies is so important to Bergstein.
Because Bergstein felt strongly about those issues, she would have been affected emotionally by the Bell Jar character Esther's fear of becoming pregnant. The novel's Chapter 6, which focuses on Esther's apprehensions about sex and childbirth, is summarized by the SparkNotes website as follows:
Esther continues to remember the progression of her relationship with Buddy. She went to visit him at Yale Medical School, and since she had been asking to see interesting sights at the hospital, he showed her cadavers and fetuses in jars, which she viewed calmly.Here Esther experiences a lot of resentment about the advantages that males enjoy over women, who have to remain virgins until marriage, have to sexually submit their own beautiful female bodies to physically repulsive male bodies, and have to give birth afterwards. It's not fair!
They attended a lecture on diseases, and then went to see a baby being born. Buddy and his friend Will joked that Esther should not watch the birth, or she would never want to have a baby. Buddy told her that the woman had been given a drug, and would not remember her pain. Esther thought the drug sounded exactly like something invented by a man. She hated the idea that the drug tricks the woman into forgetting her pain. The woman had to be cut in order to free the baby, and the sight of the blood and the birth upset Esther, although she said nothing to Buddy.
After the birth, they went to Buddy’s room, where Buddy asked Esther if she had ever seen a naked man. She said no, and he asked if she would like to see him naked. She agreed, and he took off his pants. The sight of him naked made her think of “turkey neck and turkey gizzards,” and she felt depressed.
She refused to let him see her naked, and then asked him if he had ever slept with a woman, expecting him to say that he was saving himself for marriage. He confessed to sleeping with a waitress named Gladys at a summer job in Cape Cod. He claimed she seduced him, and admitted that they slept together for ten weeks.
Esther was not bothered by the idea that Buddy slept with someone, but was angry that he hypocritically presented himself as virginal and innocent. Esther asked students at her college what they would think if a boy they had been dating confessed to sleeping with someone, and they said a woman could not be angry unless she were pinned or engaged.
When she asked Buddy what his mother thought of the affair, Buddy said he told his mother, “Gladys was free, white, and twenty-one.”
Esther decided to break up with Buddy ....
Later, in the novel's Chapter 18, Esther decides to even the field somewhat in her own personal battle between the sexes.
Esther had told Dr. Nolan [a woman] that she wants the kind of freedom that men have, but she feels that the threat of pregnancy hangs over her. Esther told Dr. Nolan about the pamphlet on chastity her mother sent her, and Dr. Nolan laughed, called it propaganda, and gave her the name of a doctor who would help her.======
Esther goes to the doctor to get fitted for a diaphragm. In the waiting room, she observes the women with babies and wonders at her own lack of maternal instinct. The doctor is cheerfully unobtrusive, and as he fits her Esther thinks delightedly that she is gaining freedom from fear and freedom from marrying the wrong person. Her birth control acquired, Esther wants to find the right man with whom to lose her virginity. ....
Esther continues to sort out her feelings about men, recognizing the truth of what Dr. Nolan says: many women lack tenderness in their relationships with men. Esther continues to feel she needs to lose her virginity in order to mark her rejection of the conventional expectation that she will remain “pure” for her husband.
For various reasons, The Bell Jar was a novel that surely would have interested Bergstein. It's likely that she read the novel soon after it was published in the USA in 1971. The novel was written by an aspiring female writer, like Bergstein herself, who was married to a talented poet. Bergstein's reading of The Bell Jar would have influenced her as she was writing her second novel during the mid-1970s.
Bergstein's second novel never has been published, but we can speculate that important elements of that unpublished novel were included in the subsequent screenplay that she wrote for the movie It's My Turn, which was released in 1980.
I cannot prove that Bergstein ever read The Bell Jar, but a few of that novel's details resonate with Dirty Dancing.
* The passages setting each story in the summer, before a sensational political killing.More generally, Plath and Bergstein share a strong resentment toward the disadvantages that a female writer suffers in a relationship with a writer husband -- more particularly toward a husband who is a talented poet.
* The main female characters attend all-women colleges in Massachusetts.
* The pre-med students -- Buddy and Robbie -- attending Yale university and enjoying pre-marital sex.
* In the novel, the pre-med student has sex with a waitress during a summer. In the movie, he is a summertime waiter.
Being a poet is a rarified occupation in which only a very few people can earn respect, fame and a decent income. In that regard, poets are similar to mathematicians.
In theory, women should be able to compete well against men in the fields of poetry and mathematics, but in fact, men rise overwhelmingly to the very tops of those two professions. Women's resentment about their sexual disadvantages in competing against men professionally is a major theme in the works of both Plath and Bergstein.
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One of Plath's poems, titled The Death of Myth-Making, expresses her resentment that a man (a steed) enjoys various advantages over a woman (a nag) enjoys in the occupation of writing poems (myth-making).
Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag,I interpret Plath's poem as follows.
To grind our knives and scissors:
Lantern-jaw Reason, squat Common Sense.
One courting doctors of all sorts,
One, housewives and shopkeepers.
The trees are lopped, the poodles trim,
The laborer's nails pared level
Since those two civil servants set
Their whetstone to the blunted edge
And minced the muddling devil
Whose owl-eyes are in the scraggly wood
Scared mothers to miscarry,
Drove the dogs to cringe and whine,
And turned the farmboy's temper wolfish,
The housewife's desultory.
The accomplishment (virtue) achieved by the male (stallion) poet surpasses the accomplishment (virtue) accomplished by the female (nag) poet.That is how the poet Sylvia Platt felt about competing against her poet husband Ted Hughes. She never would keep pace with him, much less surpass him. He as a poet would always accomplish much more than she.
The male poet sharpens large knives, whereas the female poet sharpens small scissors.
A lantern-jaw man write poems full of Reason, whereas a squat woman writes poems full of mere Common Sense.
The male poet influences doctors and other intellectuals, whereas a female poet influences mere housewives and shopkeepers.
A man cuts down trees, whereas a woman merely trims poodles' hair.
The male poet uses his big, sharpened knife and the female poet uses her small sharpened scissors to attack life's evil (the muddling devil). The female poet is further weakened, however, by her anxious pregnancies. A female poet is timid, like a fearful dog.
In contrast, a male facing danger is like a wolf. When a female faces danger, she becomes desultory -- becomes halfhearted, passive, unfocused, erratic.
I do not know whether Eleanor Bergstein ever tried to write poetry, but she surely felt that she never would match her poet husband, Michael Goldman. Even writing prose, she perhaps felt she could not match him.
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I will continue this article in Part 2.
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