Category Archives: Sylvia Plath

Ladies’ Day: The Bell Jar

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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

Discussion on The Bell Jar

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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.

 

 

The Bell Jar: Bell Jar

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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

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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)

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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

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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.

 

Blase

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Word: Blase Adjective

Passage: “We’re on our way to a party,” I blurted, since Doreen had gone suddenly dumb as a post and was fiddling in a blasĂ© way with her white lace pocketbook cover.

Definition: having or showing a lack of excitement or interest in something especially because it is very familiar

This helps me understand the passage because I can see that Doreen was not very interested in the conversation that was going on between the two gentlemen… I find this ironic however because of what happens with Doreen and Lenny.

…and starting The Bell Jar

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For this week, we’re starting to read Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar. I’ve assigned Chapters 1-10. Please try to get through as much of that reading as you can. We’ll begin our discussion of the novel by examining the first few paragraphs very closely, so you should read with pencil in hand and mark up your text with as much information you can get from reading. Include definitions to words you needed to look up, observations you make, connections to other readings, or other aspects of the text you think are important. We’ll then continue our conversation beyond the first chapter as time permits.

I mentioned in my announcement post that you’ll write comments instead of posts this week. Write a comment–roughly 150-200 words–in which you consider one of the following issues related to The Bell Jar:

* Think about the style of narration. What kind of narrator does the novel have, and how does that shape what you know about the protagonist?

* What do you know about the setting? Remember, setting is time and place. How does the setting shape your understanding of the protagonist?

* We spoke about round and flat characters at the start of the semester. Identify a round or a flat character and consider what role he or she plays in the story.

* In what ways is the protagonist of The Bell Jar like Helga Crane in Quicksand? What does that comparison do for your understanding of the protagonist?

* In what ways is the protagonist of The Bell Jar like another character we encountered this semester. What does that comparison do for your understanding of the protagonist?

Then comment on one other comment, roughly 100-150 words.