The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar Summary | Chapter 1 Summary

It's the summer the Rosenbergs were electrocuted and the narrator of this story is in New York City. She can't get the Rosenbergs out of her mind and thinks a lot about what it must be like to be electrocuted. Worse, the narrator doesn't like New York. She is from New England and this is her first time in the big city. She and 11 other girls have won a fashion magazine contest. They wrote essays, stories, poems and fashion blurbs to compete for jobs in New York, for a month with all expenses paid and many free bonuses like hair styling at expensive salons. They are meeting successful people in their own fields.

The narrator realizes that there's something wrong with her. She can't stop thinking about the Rosenbergs even when she tries and nothing interests her: not the expensive clothes she has been able to buy with the money from the scholarship or her many successes at college this past year. There are parties and what should be the excitement of being in the city, but none of it stirs her. "I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo," she writes, some years after the fact. She says that she still has the makeup kits and the other free gifts, which she didn't use at the time but which she takes out and occasionally uses now.

The girls are staying at a women-only hotel, the Amazon; the other girls come from wealthy families and are students at expensive secretarial schools. They make the narrator sick, but she admits that it's because she is jealous of them.

Her best friend is Doreen, who is like no one she has ever known before. She is from a Southern girls' college and is cynical about everything, particularly the other girls and the narrator's commitment to her job. The narrator is working for an editor named Jay Cee, purportedly the best editor of an intellectual fashion magazine in the country. Jay Cee has taken an interest in her and is trying to help her make her month in New York a valuable learning experience.

All the girls are going to a party and, as usual, the narrator and Doreen separate themselves from the others and take a cab together. While the cab is stopped in traffic, they are picked up on the way by two men: a disk jockey named Lenny Shepherd and his friend, Frankie. Lenny takes to Doreen immediately, leaving the narrator with Frankie, whom she very much dislikes. They go to a bar and order drinks. The narrator, who has given the men a false name, Elly Higginbottom, is not adept at ordering drinks but orders a vodka straight up. She finds that she likes the way it makes her feel. Frankie departs and Lenny invites them to his place.