Comparing the Treatment of Madness in The Bell Jar and The Yellow Wallp

Treatment of Madness in The Bell Jar and The Yellow Wallpaper rational illness and madness is a theme often explored in literature and the range of texts exploring these is tremendously varied. Various factors can threaten a characters sanity, ranging from traumatic events which innovation a decline to pressure from more vast, impersonal sources. Generally speaking, writers have tried to show that most threats to sanity comprise a combination of long and short-term factors - the burning of the library in Mervyn Peakes novel Titus Groan precipitated Lord Sepulchraves descent into madness, but a longer term problem can be discerned in the weight of tradition which caused him to worry that with him the line of Groan should perish. Such interplay between the acute and the chronic is, it would seem, a matter of agreement between authors who explored this issue. The manner in which characters respond to these threats is not. In some works the threatened character succeeds in becoming e mpowered - they find a way to maintain themselves and emerge from the trial by ordeal undefeated, if not unbowed. Esther Greenwood as portrayed in Sylvia Plaths autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is one such character, although the question always remains whether such a advantage is a permanent solution. In many other works the only option for the characters is escape. This may be an escape from reality as described in Roald Dahls short story Georgy Porgy. It may be an escape from self-awareness as shown in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans novella The Yellow Wallpaper. The ultimate escape is self-destruction - Sepulchraves death in Titus Groan and Sylvia Plaths real-life suicide in 1963 (barely three weeks after The Bell Jar was published) ca... ...emonstrates throughout the first half of the novel that Greenwood is increasingly withdrawing from herself, with her failure to identify with her reflection in a reverberate (The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian - she uses no wo rds to suggest that the face in the mirror is herself, and it is only from condition that the reader knows this at all) being symbolic of this. The first half of the Bell Jar, then, demonstrates that Esther Greenwoods initial responses to the pressures threatening her sanity are firstly to lose her emotional get in touch to the world, and secondly to lose this link within herself. Such a response only lead to further problems which the author explores in the rest of the novel, and it is a turn on worth noting that in many cases the defences that can be useful at first in response to a threat can end up as part of the problem itself.