Monthly Archives: April 2014

Ladies’ Day: The Bell Jar

Posted on by
2

In the story, the banquet, which Esther attends, is held by Ladies’ Day magazine staff. The connection here can be made that it is a celebration of women, and for Esther this means she can enjoy herself and eat all of the luxurious food she wants without worrying about the price because she is at a banquet.

“There was eleven of us girls from the magazine, together with most of our supervising editors, and the whole staff of the Ladies’ Day Food Testing Kitchens in hygienic white smocks, neat hairnets and flawless makeup of a uniform peach-pie color”

Ladies’ Day from Wikipedia :

In the western liturgical year, Lady Day is the traditional name of the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin (25 March) in some English-speaking countries. It is the first of the four traditional English quarter days. The “Lady” is the Virgin Mary. The term derives from Middle English, when some nouns lost their genitive inflections. “Lady” would later gain an -s genitive ending, and therefore the name means “Lady’s day.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Day

Jitterbugging

Posted on by
Reply

 Jitterbugging  (noun)

Definition: a very lively type of dance from the 1940s

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jitterbugging?show=0&t=1397137285

Found in: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Quote: “The two of them didn’t even stop jitterbugging during the intervals. I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground.” (pg 16)

Here, the word jitterbugging is used to explain the dance that was continued thorough the breaks. You can almost envision Esther sinking to the background as people dance lively around her.

Mountainous

Posted on by
Reply

Mountainous (adjective)

Definition: extremely large

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mountainous

Found in: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Quote: “I figured the girl across from me couldn’t reach it because of the mountainous centerpiece of marzipan fruit…”

Here, the word mountainous is used to describe the large centerpiece that was blocking the girl from reaching over.

Literary Arts Festival–THURSDAY, 4/10 at 5:30!

Posted on by
Reply

LAF-poster1 2014

Please consider attending the Literary Arts Festival tomorrow. Bring your friends and family! Share the LAF poster with them!

If you attend the festival (or a significant portion of it–I’m not expecting anyone to skip class, abandon children, or not show up to work), and write a blog post about it, you will receive extra credit for our class–a 100% on a quiz added to your quiz grade, for example.

Are you on Twitter? It would be great if you could tweet the event, using the hashtag #LAF2014.

Take pictures, too! Share them in your post, on Twitter, or anywhere else you think is appropriate.

 

Discussion on The Bell Jar

Posted on by
10

As you finish reading The Bell Jar, let’s share our thoughts on any of the following questions by adding a reply to this post in the comments:

What difference does it make to have a first-person retrospective narrator for this narrative?

Which relationship is most important for Esther to negotiate in the course of the story? How successful is she, and why does it matter?

Or, ask another question in the comments for you and your classmates to respond to.

 

 

Irk

Posted on by
1

Irk- (transitive verb)

Definition: to bother or annoy (someone) ; to make weary, irritated, or bored

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irk

Found in: “Quicksand” By, Nella Larsen. (Pg. 374)

Passage: “Most people achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they didn’t, they couldn’t endure. I think there’s less of these evils here than in most places, but because we’re trying to do such a big thing, to aim so high, the ugly things show more, they irk some of us more. Service is like clean white linen, even the tiniest speck shows.”

After reading this definition I now understand that Dr. Anderson was trying to say that because Helga was trying to make everything so perfect, everything little thing started to bother her even more.

The Bell Jar: Bell Jar

Posted on by
1

The bell jar is an inverted glass jar, generally used to display an object of scientific curiosity, contain a certain kind of gas, or maintain a vacuum. For Esther, the bell jar symbolizes madness. When gripped by insanity, she feels as if she is inside an airless jar that distorts her perspective on the world and prevents her from connecting with the people around her. At the end of the novel, the bell jar has lifted, but she can sense that it still hovers over her, waiting to drop at any moment.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_jar

The Rosenbergs: The Bell Jar

Posted on by
2

The Rosenberg’s are first mentioned in the very beginning of of chapter one. Esther begins to talk about the summer that they were executed by the electric chair, and how she was annoyed with hearing about it. She did, however, state that she couldn’t help to wonder how it would feel to be electrocuted.Esther also brought up the topic in the beginning of chapter nine, where her and Hilda walking in the hotel cafeteria. Esther tries to stir up conversation by addressing the Rosenberg’s and notes that the execution was that night. It’s not said why they were executed, but Hilda’s response of disgust towards them suggests that it was something that was so terrible, that they didn’t deserve to be alive.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s were American citizens who were executed on June 19, 1953. They crime they were charged with was espionage, which is the act of spying or using spies to obtain political and military information. In this case, the Rosenberg’s were accused of sharing atomic bomb information to the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Their execution was contriversal because, as the time of the trail, there wasn’t any concrete evidence that tied them with other atomic spies that were under investigation. It wasn’t until some time after the investigation was more evidence found that showed that Julius ” had for some time been disclosing U.S. military secrets to the U.S.S.R. from his post in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.” according to the cold War Museum website. this evidence only confirmed Julius’ involvement, but not Ethel’s.

Shock Therapy a/k/a Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

Posted on by
1

In the 1960s at the time of The Bell Jar, so little was fully known that Esther is simply considered to be “insane.” She stays in an “insane asylum” where she is not so much treated but managed and controlled. It was not until the 1990’s many of these expansive asylums were completely overhauled into modern medical centers or closed because of underuse, underfunding or scandal. (Pelayo, C.).  The insane asylums of this time became the psychiatric hospitals of today.

Esther receives a series of shock treatments which was very common back then and used much more recklessly than they are today. The ‘shock treatment’ referred to is known as ECT or Electroconvulsive therapy, a form of psychiatric treatment (usually for major depression) which was developed during the 1930’s. It involves the inducing of seizures in a patient through the administration of electric shock to the brain via electrodes placed on either side of the head.  (Wikipedia). Ester says “Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite”. (p. 143).

Nowadays, patients receiving ECT are given a short-acting anesthetic and a muscle relaxant to prevent a full-blown seizure occurring. However, during the 1940’s through 1960’s, ECT was often given in its ‘unmodified’ form without anesthesia or muscle relaxants. (Wikipedia). It is this primitive form of ECT which Esther received. Later in the reading we get a sense that these treatments weren’t quite administered with accuracy and purpose. When Esther told Dr. Nolan how she did not like Dr. Gordon because of “what he did to her” (p. 189) referring to the ECT, Dr. Nolan replied by saying “That was a mistake and it is not supposed to be like that”. (p.189). It seemed more as though Dr. Gordon tried to shock and shake Esther back to the world of the sane. We can understand her experience when she says, “Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world”. (p. 143). Sadly, people didn’t really know enough about the brain, mental illness, and psychiatry to truly be helpful back then. Electroconvulsive therapy does exist today, however it’s not like the shock treatments to which Esther was subjected to.

Article Reference :  Pelayo, Cythia, Retrieved from  http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abandoned-insane-asylums

Homework for this week: annotations

Posted on by
Reply

In class on Thursday, we talked about information we would want to have to make more meaning of The Bell Jar. Certainly knowing a little bit about the Rosenbergs would put the opening scene into historical context, and would help readers make meaning of the opening in the novel overall.

For your post this week, choose some aspect of the novel that you could learn more about through research, and write an annotation to the text about your topic. An annotation is a note that adds outside information to a text. In our anthology, there were several short annotations that gave some information about people referred to in Quicksand, for example. Collectively, we will provide annotations to the entire text. If someone has already chosen what you want to work on, you should only continue working on that topic if you have something else to add. Otherwise, please choose a new topic.

Include the passage in which your topic appears–enough of it to make sense to someone who hasn’t read the novel, and a citation for that passage. Be sure to include the sources of your information as well. Choose the category Sylvia Plath, and any tags that you think are relevant. Aim for a 300-word post.

If you’re not sure what you would want to research, perhaps some of your classmates have suggestions. Please feel free to reply to this post with topic suggestions.

For commenting later this week, I’ll post a topic for us to have a conversation in the comments, rather than commenting on the annotations.