Text Connection
In the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the main character, Esther Greenwood, is suffering from depression and losing her sanity. Today in our society, there several options for “crazy” people which hopefully allow them to continue their lives in the best way possible or create a safe environment for them to live in. However, in those times mental illness was not understood and there were only a few extreme treatments for mentally unstable patients. Some of these referenced by Plath were shock treatments or lobotomies. Shock treatments often left the patients so fried that they were no longer dangerous or even able to do anything, instead sitting there like a vegetables. These shock treatments were often dangerous and could often end in the patient dying. Because of the controversy of testing on humans as well as society’s tendency already to hide away the mentally sick, these shock treatment experiments were conducted in secret. Today, many movies have been based on insane asylums and often include shock treatments as a kind of torture. However, the doctors really did believe that shock treatments might actually be able to help the mentally sick.
I had not thought of any connection to today involving her shock treatments however you do have a good point. There are many movies that show "crazy" people getting the treatment and it is meant to scare people because of the medical knowledge of today and how dangerous we now know that could be. The medical treatments of Esther's time are now used as scare tactics in horror movies. i do not know if movie references are true text connections but it is a good point as to how times do change. You could have made a connection to the underground passages used to transport the mentally unstable from one part of the hospital to the other because the nurses did not want them to be seen by the public, much as it is today. Many asylums to this day are in out of the way places and kept from too many public eyes as to hide away the "not normal" of our society just as they do with Esther and the other patients that reside with her.
ReplyDeleteYour connection to the asylums today was truly enlightening and you brought up another great point concerning the purpose of the book. Building on the topic Holly brought up about people being afraid of the mentally ill; I would like to expand on that issue. Recently, I watched a movie about a young girl and boy who grow up together as neighbors. Throughout the boy's entire life his family basically trains him to not like this girl for some unknown reason. Towards the end, the reason is revealed and it's because the girl had an uncle who was born retarded and who is now in a 'special' home for the mentally challenged. The boy's entire life was wasted on hating this innocent girl who wasn't even mentally ill herself! My point being that during this time people were so afraid of the "crazy" people and the people born "crazy" that they would waste away hating and fearing something they knew nothing of or about. It is truly very sad that these people had to go through this sort of thing. At the very end of the movie you find out that the boy was actually born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, if it weren't for his doctor he would have been retarded his entire life too. The Bell Jar was a breath of fresh air because it called out the cruelty of judgment over the this and showed that society itself is really to blame for the mentally unfit which takes form in Esther’s life.
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