The Joys of a Hot Bath

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath writes about the pleasures of a hot bath from the perspective of the novel’s narrator, Esther Greenwood.

Plath writes:

“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say : “I’ll go take a hot bath.”

I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck.

I remember the ceiling over every bathtub I’ve stretched out in. I remember the texture of the ceilings and the cracks and the colors and the damp spots and the light fixtures. I remember the tubs, too:  the antique griffin-legged tubs, and the modern coffin-shaped tubs, and the fancy pink marble tubs overlooking indoor lily ponds, and I remember the shape and sizes of the water taps and the different sort of soap holders.

I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

I said to myself:  “Doreen is dissolving. Lenny Shepherd is dissolving. Frankie is dissolving. New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don’t know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure.”

The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft white hotel bath towels I felt pure and sweet as a baby.”

- From: The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

I couldn’t agree more.  In fact, during this hectic season when the holidays press and the end of the year work worries loom large, schedule some quality time with your bathtub, like Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood does. 

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar remains one of my favorite novels – to read and to teach.  Published in 1963, just months before Plath’s suicide, the work is an autobiographically-based, witty account of female angst, depression and self-discovery.  Narrator Esther Greenwood is talented and smart, but feels pigeon-holed within the era’s gender roles and expectations.  Encouraged to succeed in college, yet given covert messages about the appropriateness of female ambition, Esther, understandably feels starved as she gazes upon the feast of her future potentiality.  Her dilemma?  If she chooses to have a career, it seems it will be at the expense of some future husband and/or children.  If she chooses to plan to be a wife and/or mother, she ultimately forfeits important career opportunities. 

This book always generates bountiful classroom discussion.  My students tell me that, in their eyes, things haven’t really changed!  Women are still “expected” to plan their careers around future children, families and husbands.  Men are still “expected” to shoulder the majority of the financial responsibilities.  Worse?  Women have a limited time frame to have children and that knowledge is like a time bomb that ticks ticks ticks.  Never mind that the young women haven’t even met someone they’d consider making a life with.  Never mind that they haven’t decided whether or not to have children – the awful social pressure is still there . . . and, like Esther, still threatens to smother their other career-based callings to affect humanity.

Perhaps this is one reason that women still make up only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and still account for only 16 percent of our elected political representatives.  Because of ancient gender expectations that women must be more responsible for the doings of all things connected to the home, even if they have a career, it is still harder for women than it is for men to pursue certain career paths – those that offer a lot of responsibility, not to mention a lot more money.

What are your thoughts?  Do women still feel this unspoken dilemma?  Do men?