“Shoot the Damn Dog” is written by Sally Brampton, a successful magazine editor and prize-winning journalist; who would have thought that behind a very successful and glamorous career, as the editor of Elle and then of Red, was a story that many (of her friends and colleagues) knew nothing about “Depression”. She struggled with ongoing, severe depression and alcoholism. It was the hardest thing for her as she described the struggle in her book “I found that a steady stream of alcohol together…
drienne Rich (1929-2012) was by many regarded as the voice of her generation. Her work was often political, and her poetry explored themes such as change, feminism and sex. In the earlier years, having a family, she often wrote her poems in between chores. Perhaps it was her traditional lifestyle gave her work a “neat and orderly” (Rich, as cited in Mays 912) tint. “Aunt Jennifer's tigers” was published at the mere age of 21. As times changed, so did her poetry, growing more social and political…
ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 4 ANALYTICAL ESSAY ”Everything she had dreamed for herself faded away, like fine mist on a breeze”. This strong quote incapsulates the feeling of a failed dream, though in its original context, the quote also tells a story of 1970’s America and society’s gender roles. The quote comes from Celeste Ng’s 2014 novel ‘Everything I never told you’, which deals with the suicide of a mixed-race child. However, this is hardly the story that Celeste is trying to tell with her novel,…
Virginia Woolf was an English writer in the twentieth century. During this time, society revolved around sex. According to Sigmund Freud, the emotions that were aroused in a young child (typically around the age of four) resulted in an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. This is referred as the Oedipus complex. Virginia Woolf, would take these new psychoanalysis studies and apply them to the female gender. She would try and negate many of the concepts that society…
The Bell Jar is written by Sylvia Plath and published by William Heinemann Limited in London in 1963. This is the only novel written by American author and poet Plath and was first published under the name Victoria Lucas. This semi-autobiography based in New York City in 1953 tells the story of Esther Greenwood and her journey in the city and road down depression. Plath focuses on theme such as restricted roles of women in the 50’s in America and with sub-themes like success equals career.…
conceived theories on how post-industrialism is evolving and what it means in today’s society, a few of which follow. In the early 1970s, American sociologist Daniel Bell was the first to recognize how the structure of work had been shifting from agrarian to manufacturing to a service sector orientation (Krahn et al, 2012, p. 26). Bell theorized that power in society would shift from those who owned/controlled assets, to those who held knowledge and could solve problems (Krahn et al, 2012, p.…
Sylvia Plath writes to express the things that have happened throughout her life that also affected many young women her age. She also writes to discuss stigmatized or provocative topics. Plath takes to discussing subjects such as depression, double standards, and societal expectations, at length and candidly. Drawing from her own life and battles with depression, Plath herself went through some of the more invasive procedures as described in the novel. For Esther Greenwood, the therapy “took…
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…
A very prominent theme throughout the book, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was that thoughts haunt people which creates a bell jar around people, trapping them in the vortex of madness which is their mind. In the beginning of the book Esther contemplates what it would be like to be “burned alive” through electrocution (1). This thought essentially comes back to haunt Esther when she talks to Hilda who is “glad [the Rosenbergs are] going to die (99),” which contributes to the accumulation of…
“Ariel”, and “The Bell Jar”. Despite all of her brilliance, she was plagued with a sea of mental illnesses. “The Bell Jar” was written to chronicle the events that occurred before and after her first suicide attempt. Her most famous poem, “Daddy”, mentions how she tried to join her father in death. There is even a psychological phenomenon named after her. Her life, though successful, was unhappy, as evidenced in The Bell Jar, Daddy, and the Sylvia Plath phenomenon. “The Bell Jar” is thought to…