The Bell Jar: What drove her to insanity?

 Warning: This post contains discussion of suicide, sexual assault, and depression, please skip this post if you don't feel comfortable reading about these topics. 

    The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiography about a young woman in the 1950s struggling with clinical depression. Ester (the main character) is a college age writer who is praised for her writing skills. Throughout the novel Ester struggles to understand and follow the conventions for most girls her age. She is expected to remain a virgin, find a husband, get married, and have children. However, she wants to travel, write, and cannot imagine herself ever getting married. She is only respected by other girls when she dates an aspiring doctor, Buddy Willard. Buddy expects her to give up her poetry to marry him and raise a family. Ester is torn between different future careers and attempts to kill herself on multiple occasions before ending up in a mental asylum.

    "When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead if the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line."

    One factor that adds to Ester's madness is the double standard regarding her virginity. She was taught from a young age that women are expected to "stay pure" until the marry and have children. The idea of remaining a virgin does not affect her much until she finds that Buddy, the man she is expected to marry, has slept with a woman before. She is enraged by the hypocrisy of this and does not understand why Buddy did not need to remain a virgin even though she did. I think that Ester becomes further alienated when she realizes that the other women she is around are not bothered by this double standard.  Of all of the factors impacting Ester's mental state, I found this the most interesting. The obsession with female virginity is something that is still relevant today especially in some religious groups.

    After Ester learns about Buddy's past, she refuses his offer to marry him and leaves him. She then becomes obsessed with the idea to lose her virginity. She feels her virginity as something that burdens her and holds her back and wants to have a sexual experience to become more free rather than for her own pleasure. She becomes somewhat competitive and feels as though she needs to have sex to distance herself from Buddy. However in the process of meeting different men she is sexually assaulted. I found the scene where she is assaulted particularly engrossing because it further showed the hypocrisy regarding sexual interactions in this time period. While she is being assaulted she is repeatedly called a slut even though she is the victim of the situation. 

Eleanor Kraatz

Sometimes Dead is Better

    Pet Sematary is a scary story that will for sure keep you up at night. Written by Stephen King, it is not for the faint of heart. Pet Sematary follows the life of Louis Creech, a doctor who moves to Maine, and his family. However, in this horror story, Louis has to deal with a bit more than some simple doctoring. He gets to play god.

    

    As I said, Louis moves to Maine with his family, which consists of himself, his wife Rachael, his kids, Ellie and Gage, and his cat Church. Louis immediately notices that the road near their house is constantly being driven on by large trucks that go very fast. His new neighbor, Judd, comes over and helps the family get settled and also makes friends with them. A few days go by and Judd decides to take the family on a little trip into the woods near their house. He takes them to a place called the Pet Sematary, where children have buried their pets for generations. A key takeaway is the large deadfall of brush and wood blocking the rest of the way into the forest.

    Later, when Louis is at work, some students rush in with a dying friend that was hit by a truck. Louis is left alone with him, and to his surprise the boy speaks. The dying boy tells him that the soil of a man's heart is stonier, and calls him by name. Louis is shaken by the experience and tries to get it out of his mind. Later that night, Louis is woken by the same boy from earlier, who leads him to the Pet Sematary and tells him to never cross the deadfall. Louis believes it to just be a dream until he wakes up with dirt on his feet in the morning.

    Time flies by, and on Thanksgiving Day, the unthinkable happens. Church is hit by a truck. Judd finds him and calls Louis over, and after some thinking tells Louis to come with him, and to bring Church's body. Louis is so worried as what to tell Ellie that he complies and goes along with Judd. Judd takes them up to the Pet Sematary, where Louis expects to bury him, but Judd presses on, and goes over the deadfall. Louis hurries after him and finds himself in a darker area of the forest. Judd refuses to answer Louis's questions and instead brings him through swamps and dark areas until they reach the deeper end of the Pet Sematary, the Micmac Indian burial ground. Judd tells Louis to bury Church in the burial ground, and Louis does it. He is too tired to question what truly happened, but the next morning, when Louis finds Church alive, he starts to wonder.

    Pet Sematary is really, really scary. Trust me when I say you do not want to read this late at night. Also, the book is even scarier if you have not watched the movie yet. All scary things aside, I would recommend this book because it is well written, and I am definitely going to read some of Stephen King's other novels.

Okay for now.

Okay for Now is a novel written by Gary D. Schmidt. First published in 2011, it is a "sequel" to Schmidt's Newbery Honor-winning novel The Wednesday Wars. Okay for Now is an amazing book with a great plot, marvelous characters, and an admirable message. 

    Okay for Now is about a 14-year-old boy named Doug Swieteck. The year is 1968, and Doug is living through the Space Race, Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, and the Vietnam War. Doug's life is not exactly a walk in the park, and he has to deal with an abusive father who got fired from his job for bad-mouthing his boss, a submissive mother, and two older brothers who constantly bully him. 

    On a visit to the local library, Doug becomes very interested in the book The Birds of America, illustrated by John James Audubon. Doug is intrigued by the pictures in the book and soon begins to learn how to draw, inspired by the birds' pictures. Doug's teacher is a librarian named Mr. Powell.

    Later on in the story, Doug meets a girl named Lil Spicer, the daughter of the local deli owner, and Doug gets a job offer from Lil's father to be a delivery boy for the deli. Doug and Lil begin spending a lot of time together, and eventually, Doug develops a crush on Lil. 

    As the story progresses, Doug flourishes into a different version of himself and an improved and happier version. Doug finds love, grows up, and when he realizes that pages of the book of birds or the Audubon book as it is called in the story go missing, he embarks on a quest to recover the lost pages. 

    One thing that particularly interests me about this book is the incredible case of character development. Throughout the story, we see Doug develop into a happier and more respected kid. As the story starts, we are introduced to Doug as a useless low-life with unstable home life, but towards the end of the novel, Doug has made friendships and has discovered a love and talent for drawing. 

    At the beginning of the story, Doug's relationship with his brother, who comes home from Vietnam, does not start in the best way possible, but once he gets a chance to have a deep talk with him, they find out that they have more in common than they had previously thought they did. 

    Some people believed Doug was a mirror image of his father and brothers, who are mean and despicable people. But it turns out that he has a much softer side that cares about the people he truly loves. 

    Overall, we see an enormous change in attitude from Doug, and the author does a splendid job of describing every occurrence in the story. This book makes you want to be beside Doug as he is trying to find out who he is, and it makes you want to get rid of all the bad people and obstacles he faces along the way. In my opinion, this book is a 10/10 and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an engaging story to read.