I Am I Am I Am Cake
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I’m not the person to write about Sylvia Plath. Her work, it deserves a scholar’s life study. I just make cakes. I read myself to sleep every night and ponder the meanings while standing at my baking bench the next day.
But I am a woman, I am a person who has struggled with mental illness, I am human. And I have never read a book so deeply relatable as The Bell Jar.
Do I need to say things like The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s only novel? That it was published, under a pseudonym, shortly before Sylvia Plath ended her own life in February 1963? That the novel, largely autobiographical, centers around Esther Greenwood, a college-aged woman who has everything and finds none of it is enough? That it’s one of the most famous depictions of mental illness, and portrays it in a way that is so painful, so lucid, and so, so true? Can I have required reading for this essay? First on the list, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
Here, let’s begin with arguably the most famous passage from the novel. The main thing you need to know is that Esther reads a story about a fig tree, and then she goes out on a date with a simultaneous interpreter named Constantin.
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is largely autobiographical, and knowing the story of Plath’s life, knowing the story doesn’t end where she left it in The Bell Jar but with something much more tragic and real, those are part of the story, too.
It’s a little easy to discount this whole passage, because immediately after, Esther discounts it herself: she goes out to dinner with her date and finds her worries of withering figs and lost opportunities dripping away, feeling her despair “might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
I think about the thoughts we have while “not ourselves.” Hungry, tired. Hormonal, adolescent, menopausal. How easily we brush them away. Later in the novel, Esther finds herself hemorrhaging, and the male doctors refuse to leave their Sunday country club activities, the fourth “hung up the moment Joan mentioned it was about a period.” Brushed away. Feminine issues that affect an entire half of our population. The person I am seven out of every twenty-eight days.
In the book, that panicky overwhelmed indecision does not permanently disappear with a single hearty meal. It creeps back up to consume Esther’s life. One can only guess something similar occurred within Sylvia Plath’s own life, too. And the results in both are heartbreaking and painful and irreversible. I wonder what life would be like if we gave those “out-of-character” feelings more credit.
When I set about making a cake in tribute to Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar, I also wanted to highlight the beautiful conflict that appears to have existed in Plath herself. She wrote poems full of desperation and hunger and beauty, but she also got excited about learning how to sew clothing for her children. She loved to bake and her favorite cake recipe was one that contained a whole can of tomato soup. Sometimes being a woman feels like we have to choose between feminism and domesticity, but she could have aspirations and achieve great things and make beauty, and still find the time to write out a cake recipe in a letter to her sister-in-law.
I would live a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski slopes and in bed in bed in bed.
— Sylvia Plath
The I Am I Am I Am Cake began with the “heavenly sponge cake” recipe typed by Plath, with a little sketch of the tube pan required to bake it, in a letter to Olwyn Hughes (one day I will go to England to see the letter in the British Library).
I top the cake with cream, lightly whipped and scented with fig leaves. Like you’re sitting under the fig tree, too, the sun filtering through the leaves and bringing out that heady, intoxicating scent of coconut and almond and sticky enveloping richness, pondering what each branch represents.
Sylvia Plath’s birthday is October 27. Here in California, at that time of year, fig season has just come to an end. The figs have dropped and withered. But I plan ahead. I gather those figs, I chop them and combine them into a jam, preserving all of those pieces of a life unlived. I save them. Sometimes it feels like I’m saving her.
The cake is named after Esther’s heartbeat. The heartbeat that she feels betrayed by, when she’d like nothing more than to make it stop, but that later becomes proof of her survival. The heartbeat that continues on.
