Assignment Three: The Bell Jar

Hi Mrs. Clifford I’m like the busiest person on the planet right now so I’m kind of planning to just let my thoughts stream through on this one.  Sorry if its awful.

 What themes do you see in the Bell Jar? Give evidence from the poems. Does the poetry deal with themes related to love, death, war, or peace? What other themes show up in the poems? Are there particular historical events that are mentioned in the poems? What are the most important concepts that are addressed in the poems?

The Bell Jar deals with themes like mental illness and pressure to conform in society. 

The first lines of this story reference a historical event and offers some foreshadowing about her mental illness, “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenberges, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.  I’m stupid about executions.  The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers… It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.  I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.”  This historical reference places the story in the 1950s when the Rosenberges were convicted of espionage for passing information of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.  The bit on imagining electrocution doesn’t hit you until you have read the rest of the book but it does provide foreshadowing of the multiple electroshock treatments she receives for her depression and their traumatic nature. 

Ester spends a lot of time worrying about what she will do with her life.  She feels pressure to become a housewife, to get married and have kids, but she also wants to peruse her career as a writer and poet.  Another societal norm she confronts is the loss of virginity to become a woman.  She thinks that having sex will have a major impact on her and allow her to really begin her life.  She sees that women are expected to stay celibate until marriage but is angered that men are not held to the same standard.  When she finds out that her old boyfriend was involved with a woman he worked with while they were dating she knows that she cannot marry him.  Her desire to lose her virginity leads her into many dangerous situations and to the spilling of blood several times.  She finally chooses to seduce a math professor when she sees his elaborate library and study, but when they engage in the act she has built up in her mind she is sent to the hospital with uncontrollable bleeding.  Blood is almost always a sign of transition in this novel.

There are some really horrific scenes that deal with motherhood that I would love to write about but I don’t have the book in front of me because my mom is downstairs reading it right now.  She almost never reads so I can’t bring myself to take it from her.