Best Blog Ever #6: Mrs. Bridge Ch.10-17 (Jay)

1) RACISM. That's one way to start a blog. Considering we have so little direct insight into Mrs. Bridge’s mind, it's hard to make a definite decision on her stance on race. So, based on Mrs. Bridge’s actions and the little commentary Connell give us, is Mrs. Bridge racist? Is she just complacent? Does she have any opinions on race at all?
2) We haven't talked about Walter Bridge much, but I think he's a fascinating character, though he may be the most bland and static character you ever read about. He managed to be present for the entirety of chapter 12, the longest chapter we've read so far, and somehow say almost nothing. It's obvious that neither one of them like the Van Meters, but there's a stark difference in the way Mrs. Bridge handles their outing and the way Walter does. Instead of going silent, Mrs. Bridge entertains Mr. Van Meters antics. What does this interaction say about Mrs. Bridge’s character, Walter’s character, and the dynamic of their marriage?
3) “You should say the cleaning ‘woman.’ A lady is someone like Mrs. Arlen or Mrs. Montgomery.” I'm going to abuse my power as the blog writer to ask you guys: What the hell does this mean? Is this a race comment? Does it strictly have to do with socio-economic class? I have no idea, so I'd love to hear what you guys think of this quote.

Blog Five. Emma's Post: Where the Boys Are

“Experience! That’s what separates the girls from the girl scouts.” - Ryder

“Girls like me weren't built to be educated. We were made to have children. That's my ambition: to be a walking, talking baby factory. Legal, of course. And with union labor.” - Tuggle

“What can be more interpersonal than Backseat Bingo?” - Merritt 

“Dean Caldwell, I-I'd say there were probably a half a million co-eds in this country. I imagine 98% of them are overly concerned with that problem. So in that respect I guess I'm fairly normal.” - Merritt 

Merritt: "A little, yes. No girl enjoys being considered promiscuous, even those who might be."

George: "Now that's a pretty old-fangled notion, Merritt. Sex is no longer a matter of morals. That idea went out with the raccoon coat. Sex is part of personal relations."

1. Clearly, the gender roles in this movie are very defined and somewhat antiquated. One of the characters expresses her wish to be a “walking, talking baby factory,” and the boys in the film constantly gripe about girls. There’s a clear dichotomy between “good girls” and “promiscuous” ones, which is reiterated throughout the film. Despite this portrayal of women, however, there are parts of the movie that are arguably very feminist. Merritt’s speech at the beginning of the movie, while humorous, touches on some deep issues regarding female sexuality. Conversations throughout the film reexamine these questions very candidly, and we see the girls exploring their notions of sex and sexuality as the plot unravels. Do you see this movie as mostly sexist? Feminist? Neither?

2. In a conversation with Merritt, Ryder claims, “Experience! That’s what separates the girls from the girl scouts.” Do you think Esther would agree with this quote after her affair with Irwin?

3. Based on your own observations, what has changed in the past 57 years in terms of the way we teenagers talk about and think about sex? Are 98% of us still overly concerned with the problem of sex? Is promiscuity “an old-fangled notion,” or still a common epithet assigned to women?

Also, while finding these quotes, I found out that Dolores Hart, who portrays Merritt Andrews, later went on to become a nun and cut off contact with the outside world. Just a fun fact. 

Blog Four. Marisa's Post. End of The Bell Jar.

1. “My head ached. Why did I attract these weird old women? There was the famous poet, and Philomena Guinea, and Jay Cee, and the Christian Scientist lady and lord knows who, and they all wanted to adopt me in some way, and, for the price for their care and influence, have me resemble them” (My 263, probably around your 215-216).
This quote really struck me because it sounds like Esther is describing a role model. Jay Cee and the famous poet all differ from other girls Esther interacts with. Do you think any of these women (or any other character we see throughout the book) served as a role model for Esther? Someone to emulate and respect? Or do you think these characters only provide another source for negativity that Esther feeds off of?

2. What was it about Irwin that drew Esther to him specifically? Do you think Esther freed herself of a weight when she lost her virginity and why/why not?

3. How do you think Esther’s mental state has improved over the last chapters of the book? What changes do you see in Esther from when she spent that summer in New York to when she steps in for the interview and what do you think brought about these changes?

I am going to add to Marisa's questions with this, as a way to look at Plath's novel as a whole. The Guardian asked several writers to reflect on the novel four years ago, on its 50th anniversary.  Go ahead and take a look at what they said here.  I am particularly struck by what Lena Dunham, creator, writer, and star of Girls on HBO and writer/director of the film Tiny Furniture, wrote. 

I wonder if Plath would have been saved had she been born in a different time: in a time when psycho-pharmacologists are no more shameful to visit than hairdressers and women write celebrated personal essays about being bad mothers and cutters and are reclaiming the word slut. Would she have been a riot grrrl, embracing an angry feminist aesthetic? Addicted to Xanax? A blogger for Slate? Would she, like me, have found a cosy coffeehouse environment on the internet, a way to connect with people who understood her aesthetic and validated her experience? Would she have been less dependent on the approval of viewers and critics and more aware of the positive effect her book was having on splintered psyches and girls with short bangs everywhere? Or would that kind of connectedness and access to unmitigated and misspelled negativity have driven her even madder?

Feel free to comment on what Dunham or any of the writers wrote—I'm interested in what you think of their views, whether you comment here or if this comes up in class.  But first, address what Marisa's asks.  See you all tomorrow.  

Blog Three. Nell's Post. The Bell Jar. Chapters 12-14.

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but some there else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.” (147)

1. What is this thing she is trying to kill? Where does it come from?

2. Chapters 12, 13, and 14 show Esther’s rapid descent deeper and deeper into her illness. The writing has become a choppy stream-of-consciousness of nonsensical thoughts strung together. She seems to be withdrawing farther into her own mind, or perhaps her sickness is growing and consuming her; either way the world has become a blurry mess of colors and shapes and people who aren’t really human. She is angry and violent and cruel—breaking the mirror, kicking the “negro”, smashing the thermometers. The Esther of chapter 14 seems nothing like the Esther at the beginning of the novel. Is there a way out? Do you see a path towards recovery for Esther or is she too far gone? Will her life end in a successful suicide or will she continue to live in an institution or will she make it out? And why? What have we read about her past, what do we know about her personality, that leads you to your conclusion?

3. Which moment from the reading struck you as the apotheosis of Esther’s devolution, as the epitome of her insanity as we see it so far? (a quote would be nice)

Just because I'm posting this for Nell (thank you, Nell): here is an image of the first edition of the novel, attributed to Victoria Lucas.

Blog Two. The Bell Jar. "The Silence Depressed Me. It Wasn't The Silence of Silence. It Was My Own Silence" (18).

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.  Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say:  'I'll go take a hot bath. (19)

Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices.  Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly spread as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread.  Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn't ooze off and ate them. (27)

Of course, I would never have succeeded with this scheme if I hadn't made that A in the first place.  And if my Class Dean had known how scared and depressed I was, and how I seriously contemplated desperate remedies such as getting a doctor's certificate that I was unfit to study chemistry, the formulas made me dizzy and so on, I'm sure she wouldn't have listened to me for a minute, but would have made me take the course regardless. (36)

"I don't really know," I heard myself say.  I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.  (32)

I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling.  I felt like a hole in the ground.  (16)

This is, I think, maybe my fifth or sixth time I've taught this book, and it's become a harder read for me this time than it has been the five or six previous times.  This world inside Esther's head and the world that surrounds her are, for me, a sad, sometimes terrifying, place; and yet, it never fails, there are students reading it, girls almost exclusively, who say "I get it totally," or "This is my story."  I'm thinking too, about what Agasha and Jaliwa said when we read Black Ice last semester: "I'm reading about my own life."  There's a powerful responsibility that comes with books that touch people so closely, so deeply; a responsibility to be honest and analytical, as we always are in this class, but also to be sensitive and respectful to the experiences that people may share that connect their lives to the life we see in the book.  I'm thinking this now because some students have already revealed their connections to Esther's experiences in one of the other classes that is reading this.  There's a courage and strength there—and a risk that they are assuming.  I don't know what will happen as we move through this book,  but let's be what we have been so far: honest, analytical, challenging, attentive, non-judgemental, and sensitive, kind, and gracious to each other.

1. Three chapters into the book:  what's it like being Esther?  Quote a couple times in your response.

2.  Esther is clearly—I think—being drawn deeper and deeper into the bell jar (if you don't know what a bell jar is...)

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_jar
For you, where do you see in the reading her illness most displaying itself?  And how so? Quote once in your response. 

3.  One of the striking parts of the novel for me is how Plath presents a young woman falling into mental illness...and at the same time—in my opinion—showing how in the world she lives in, mental illness may be a reasonable, perhaps logical, response to this world.  Again—just my opinion.  What do you think of that? 

See you all tomorrow.

Blog One, Spring 2017. The Bell Jar. "I Knew Something Was Wrong With Me That Summer..."

...because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fonts along Madison Avenue" (2).

"I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.  I just bumped from my hotel to work  and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus" (3).  

"I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls like me all over American who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes I'd bought in Bloomingdale's one lunch hour with a black patent leather pocketbook to match" (2).

Sylvia Plath. She was played in a movie by Gwyneth Paltrow. People who have never read either her poetry or her novel are familiar with her tragic, romanticized life—and death.  A storied college career at Smith College.   Marries an older well-known British poet, Ted Hughes.  Publishes two heralded poetry collections before her suicide at the age of 30.  The Bell Jar published posthumously under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.  She experienced a success after her death that she never had in her short 30 years of life. Her life becomes an example of the difficulties of being a modern woman and an artist in the years after World War Two.   Here is a brief biography of her.  

I admire The Bell Jar for many reasons—and I'm not alone. The writing is, in my opinion, gorgeous. Plath is known, rightly, for her rigorously crafted poetry. But she has crafted a tight narrative in this, her only novel, that manages to communicate the inner being of Esther Greenwood.  Few books in my reading experience come close to this book in portraying the terror of, as Olivia Babuka Black termed it two years ago, "spiraling out."  Esther's first person narrative puts us right in the middle of the tornado that is her life at this moment. We know that she will have a child in the future, and with that, the possible assurance that she has put her life back in order. But other than that detail, the narrative keeps us firmly in the moment. And the moment, given no commentary from the future Esther, leaves us living Esther's life with her as it teeters toward a terrible spiral.

So:

1. Reaction to the book so far? Like? Dislike? Neutral? What particular moment or line or scene stays with you? Quote from the novel in your answer (but avoid the quotes I've used above).

2. How do we see Esther struggling here in this first chapter?  Pick one example of this—and how it shows her as a young woman struggling.

 3. The fact is, as we will discover, Esther suffers from a mental illness. At the same time, Plath presents a world that Esther exists in that is terribly unhealthy, confusing, and destructive (I would argue) for her.  From what we see in this chapter, how is this world conspiring against Esther?  Name one way we see it as a unhealthy, confusing, or maybe even destructive force?  And if you find yourself in agreement with someone else's assessment (perfectly possible), do your best to add to that classmate's argument. That would be the same for any of the questions above.

Below is Plath interviewing writer Elizabeth Bowen at the time in which The Bell Jar is set.

See you all tomorrow.  Just 12 weeks. 

Blog Twenty Seven. 25th Hour. "You Tell Them The Whole Thing. And Then You Ask Them If They Know How Lucky They Are To Be There."

MONTY. I don't want you to visit.

His voice is rough and slurred, his split lips impeding his diction. [Naturelle] opens a bottle of rubbing alcohol, wets a cotton ball, presses the cotton lightly against the gash in his forehead. He shudders, his fingers gripping the edges of the sofa cushions.

MONTY. I don't want you to come see me up there.

Naturelle struggles mightily to keep herself together. She continues cleaning his wounds.

MONTY. Why'd you stay with me? You should have left a long time ago.

NATURELLE. You idiot.

MR. BROGAN. And maybe one day years from, long after I'm dead and gone, you gather your whole family together and you tell them the truth. Why you are and where you came from. You tell them the whole thing. And then you ask them if they know how lucky they are to be there. It all came so close to never happening. This life came close to never happening...

Here's a part of the, for me at least, amazing ending

I loved Nell's reaction to the ending.  "No...No...You're kidding"—or something along those lines.  Well, I felt the same way when I saw it with Clark Cloyd when it first opened.  I totally thought the fantasy was reality.   It's as audacious an ending as there has been in a mainstream studio movie. I know a number of you—Nell definitely—were sucked in by this fantasy, this wish-fulfillment, of Monty (and maybe his father). I've seen this movie several times; and for some reason, this time I found the ending—the fantasy—uncommonly powerful and emotional.  I want Monty so much to make his life "right"—that he will use a second chance to make the world a better place than he left (and had a hand in ruining).  And I love looking at the beautiful children and grandchildren he and Naturelle could have had. 

So, to keep this short and sweet:  And here's the screenplay. 

1. Your reaction to the "ending": from the moment Monty goads Frank into beating him (it didn't take much), through his goodbye (his last, I think) to Naturelle, through the scene above. Along with your reaction, answer the question: what's the meaning of this ending? How does it resolve the conflict(s) of the movie? Do you find it satisfying or not? And why?  

2. Is the movie misogynistic? I ask that because the last time we watched this movie, we spent a good portion of the discussion debating this.  And a couple of you—Agasha?  Nell?—responded to the comment on made about the possible sexist ways the film portrays its women.  So going with this train of thought:  misogynistic—how so or how not? Think about this question before answer it. And think too: is the movie portraying, commenting on, a misogynist mind set that is in the story, or is it reflecting Spike Lee's misogyny.   Remember: Lee did not write the film—David Benioff did (though clearly it stylistically and thematically is consistent with many of his other films).

3.  Finally: do the 9/11 references have a place in this movie?  Do they serve a purpose in it?  If so, how?  If not—how do they, for you, affect the experience of watching the movie?

Finally, fittingly, we end the semester with a rant that most definitely and consciously mirrors the rant in our first text of the year, Do The Right Thing.

This is the last blog of the semester.  Thanks for the effort, thought, and insights you put into it.  Have a good weekend.  Be sure to see me starting Monday if you have questions about the paper.