Talk:The Bell Jar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Literature Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Novels, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to narrative novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit one of the articles mentioned below, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and contribute to the general Project discussion to talk over new ideas and suggestions.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class.
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the importance scale.
Assessment comments This article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

-I've seen the Bell Jar also in the series Sabrina, the teenage witch. Could anyone add this?XKemical 17:39, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

-Can someone add Showbread's song "The Bell Jar" to References?

The references would be ubiquitous, if we are to go down this road. Just last night I saw the character Meg reading a copy on 'Family Guy'. Khirad 07:14, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Major Themes

Fair enough on the Feminist focus. Of course the gender related subject matter was subversive and poignant; that is not lost on me. Might I say though, that I, as a man, viscerally related to everything "chemical" she was going through? Just saying, as much as it was a landmark in Feminist prose, it was also way, way ahead of its time in addressing mental illness (which is also a civil rights issue affecting both women and men). I know that this may be a trite reading of the book, but Esther's Bell Jar was mine, as a man, as well. As such, though painfully obvious, I found it odd for mental illness to be conspicuously left out of the "Major Themes" section (the 'Growth Through Pain and Rebirth', as a motif is a good start; but as Plath wrote, "How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"). Could someone smarter than I perhaps add just a little on its impact, if any, on exposing and confronting the taboos and stigmas surrounding mental illnesses; whilst keeping the rest as is? Khirad 07:14, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

I just finished reading this book again and although this isn't a bad article if we remove the part about silly references in movies etc. I would like some sources for the selection of major themes. In particular I'm concerned about the point also raised above. EconomicsGuy (talk) 16:19, 8 January 2008 (UTC)