I can't help but think it weird when Esther thinks she's outsmarting her pyschiatrists. Like when she sits there in the doctor's office and thinks she's clever because she's not mentioning a letter she wrote that would show how bad her handwriting has become, but then she throws the torn pieces of the letter on the desk and then again picks them all up so that he couldn't show them to her mother. Wouldn't this kind of behavior only make it more obvious that she has an issue?
Why is it that Esther only stops eating, sleeping, reading, and writing after she gets home from her New York trip? Could it be that depression (a result of her rejection from that summer writing course and having to leave New York to return to her home where she would have to continue a dull life (even though she didn't do too much when she actually was in NY) served as a trigger for madness in her brain?
It seems a bit surreal that everyone around Esther is either a doctor or ill in some way; Buddy Willard has TB, Joan ends up in the same asylum/institution as Esther; it's almost as if Sylvia Plath is trying to create a scenario where one character's illness spreads to infect another in a different way, just as madness affects everyone around it.
Overall, The Bell Jar was a good read, though I wouldn't want to read it again for reasons I can't quite put my finger on...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment