a. Jeffrey Eugenides and Sylvia Plath both carefully create characters that exist to exhibit the lives of teenage girls, and their inherit suffering during adolescent. The lives of these teenage girls in The Virgin Suicides and The Bell Jar are shaped by mental illness and isolation, stemming from a withdrawal from society and any kind of community thereafter. The Lisbon Sisters and Esther Greenwood are more often than not, forced to interact with communities and families that prove to be ignorant and intolerant of the difficulties that face these girls who are on the precipice of suicide. Both the Lisbon sisters and Esther Greenwood try to find ways of coping, such exercising their sexuality and youth, under the watchful male gaze. These
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“The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parent’ group donated a bench in the memory to our school.” (226)
b. The setting--curtain-twitching, sprinkler-on-the-lawn suburbia--and the cadence, suggesting both superciliousness and nostalgia, shifting effortlessly from the domestic to the visionary, are as familiar as the pop classics the Lisbon sisters and the boys of the neighborhood, unrequitedly panting after them, play each other down the phone. (Burn)
c. And I thought of how my mother and brother and friends would visit me, day after day, hoping I would be better. Then their visits would slacken off, and they would give up hope. They would grow old. They would forget me. They would be poor, too. They would want me to have the best care at first, so they would sink all their money in a private hospital like Doctor Gordon's. Finally, when the money was used up, I would be moved to a state hospital, with hundred of people like me, in a big cage in the basement. The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.” (160)
d. Throughout the novel, Sylvia Plath emphasizes the curious similarity of physical and mental illness as if to say that both are symbolic of a larger condition, which is our life today.
“The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parent’ group donated a bench in the memory to our school.” (226)
b. The setting--curtain-twitching, sprinkler-on-the-lawn suburbia--and the cadence, suggesting both superciliousness and nostalgia, shifting effortlessly from the domestic to the visionary, are as familiar as the pop classics the Lisbon sisters and the boys of the neighborhood, unrequitedly panting after them, play each other down the phone. (Burn)
c. And I thought of how my mother and brother and friends would visit me, day after day, hoping I would be better. Then their visits would slacken off, and they would give up hope. They would grow old. They would forget me. They would be poor, too. They would want me to have the best care at first, so they would sink all their money in a private hospital like Doctor Gordon's. Finally, when the money was used up, I would be moved to a state hospital, with hundred of people like me, in a big cage in the basement. The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.” (160)
d. Throughout the novel, Sylvia Plath emphasizes the curious similarity of physical and mental illness as if to say that both are symbolic of a larger condition, which is our life today.