The Bell Jar is een grotendeels autobiografisch geïnspireerde roman van Sylvia Plath. Volgende passage, waarin het hoofdpersonage voor het eerst een kind ziet geboren worden, wou ik u niet onthouden:
The woman’s stomach stuck up so high I couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in the high stirrups, and all the time the baby was being born she never stopped making this inhuman whooing noise.
Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she’d had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep.
I thought it sounded just like the kind of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.
Plath kreeg zelf twee kinderen, en benam zich van het leven in 1963, amper 30 jaar oud. Ik begin vreselijk benieuwd te worden naar haar dagboeken (waarvan Ted Hughes, haar man, er twee heeft verzegeld tot de 50e verjaardag van haar dood).