One of the most commonly recurring phrases in our reading for Thursday from Beloved was "she is mine," or some variation of it. This was used primarily about Beloved the character, but also in reference to Sethe. At first, I found this phrase confusing and did not understand why it was used so many times. However, during the section from Paul D's perspective, there was a passage that sort of clarified it for me. The passage is about family and the way that he views people's families because he wasn't raised in one. It says, "he made them identify over and over who each [person] was, what relation, who in fact, belonged to who." (258) The way that Paul D talks about belonging here made the repetition in the earlier chapters of the phrase "she is mine" make more sense to me. These characters need to affirm that they belong to each other, and therefore that they belong to the family. When Sethe asserts that Beloved is hers, she is reaff...
Jason is bullied pretty ruthlessly in this book. It's so intense that it sort of defined the whole book for me even though the Chapter "Maggot" about the bullying was the 9th chapter of only 13. I think that it works this way not just because of the intensity of what Jason experienced, but also because of the way that it is built up through all of his social interactions in all 8 chapters that come before "Maggot". In the first chapters especially, Jason is constantly talking about his fear of judgment from his peers, and how it is inevitable if he does certain things. On just page 6 he says if people knew about his poetry they would "gouge [him] to death behind the tennis courts with blunt woodwork tools and spray the Sex Pistols logo oh [his] gravestone." He's constantly censoring himself, concealing the things that he is interested in, concealing his poetry, even trying to conceal his friendship with Dean Moran even though Dean is basically ...
The story of The Bell Jar is fundamentally one about mental health and the fairly severe six-month psychological break that Esther experiences during it. Many coming-of-age protagonists suffer mental health issues, Holden Caulfield, for example, definitely had some stuff going on and we theorized that he might be in a mental hospital while telling the story of The Catcher in the Rye . However, the severity of Esther's illness is something that I think is quite rare, in other words, this is not a universalizing coming-of-age narrative. Sylvia Plath is not trying to access some sort of essence of adulthood and convey it to the reader, she is telling the story of one specific person, arguably herself. It is undeniably true that people can relate to Esther Greenwood and her struggles. After all, many of the issues that she struggles to reconcile are larger sociocultural problems that affect many women of her generation, race, and status. It is also tr...
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