From Under The Bell Jar

By Sam Barnett

“I could tell we were his first crazy people.” -- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s semi autobiographical narrative of a young woman’s mental breakdown and suicide attempt, echoing the author’s own life and bleakly masquerading as fiction. Despite my expectations, the novel is not a suave, sprawling lace work of psychology. The novel isn’t grand or romantic in it’s descent into insanity.

It somehow manages to knock all of my expectations out of the ball park and exceed them, with the gut punching realism of it’s prose. The Bell Jar plays a horrific game with the reader--always too close for comfort, too bright, too loud, too crude, too honest, too relentless. The effect is brilliant.

The novel passes in the style of a tirelessly lucid dream. Livid and cagey in it’s portrayal of the subtle arrogance of perverted innocence, The Bell Jar holds it’s mocking feminist commentary on the social structure of the 1960s all under the tender pretense of sitting pretty.

The novel's narrative is filtered through the perceptive young Esther Greenwood, a ‘scholarship girl’ whose prestigious college remains unnamed (although presumably Smith College, which Plath attended in 1950 and graduated from in 1955). Esther specializes in unscrambling the structured anatomy of strait-laced academia. In other words, she is intelligent in the sense of knowing how to please, one of her main short comings.

Esther 'excels' through the school system by finding loop holes, hitting the right notes by studying just hard enough to earn herself a gold star. Through this method she's won several scholarships and a semester internship at a high end New York fashion magazine, throwing herself (and several other picturesque college girls who've also scored the internship) under the spotlight as, by everyone's expectations, the next up and coming It Girl of the intellectual socialite scene.


This is one of The Bell Jar's best executed ploys. Esther's life follows the exact patterns of the fictional cream colored bubble that is the American Dream.

Esther also struggles with the tentative long distance relationship between her and Yale student Buddy Willard. Buddy is the specimen of the golden guy, complete with a boyish masculinity and natural athletic celebrity. He hangs by a thread, a resilient parody of himself without losing contact with the painstaking regret that nails his humanity. As the novel progresses and Esther's world kaleidoscopes, Buddy appears as a mutilated shade of himself. The reader witnesses the results, with Esther's high school love, after the painted coating of idolization dries. Esther has built Buddy into a hero, categorizing him clearly. Maybe neither Esther or Buddy need to be saved.Or maybe they need to be saved from each other, from the ideals they have created.

The Bell Jar is effortlessly sly with it's dialogue. Every word spoken directly to Esther is sleek and condescending. When she is adressed in public by people she barely knows, she is nonchalantly given pet names. It leaves the reader to wonder: how much of Esther's mentality is a response to her society?

Esther constantly observes the easy uniformity of freshly drawn life. She comments in one passage while viewing patients in a waiting room hospital:

"I made out men and women, and boys and girls who must be as young as I, but there was a uniformity to their faces, as if they had lain for a long time on a shelf, out of the sunlight, under the siftings of pale, fine dust." (p.g 115)

The hospital is seen as having the same harrowing mechanics of a living doll house.

Later Esther day dreams different scenarios in which she takes her own life. In one of these passages, Esther carefully plots over dosing on her mother's pills. She counts out the time it will take her to stash away enough pills if her mother gave her one to take each night at bed time, before stumping herself:

"And in fifty nights, college would have opened, and my brother would have come back from Germany, and it would be too late." (p.g 137)

Esther plans her suicide around the start of her college and, as a scolded child, doesn't dare break the uniformity and therefore cannot imagine suicide once school, the institution, resumes. Is this even more chilling than Esther's desire to kill herself? The lovingly methodical, calculating way in which she structures death around the restlessness of registered life? Life which consistes of plotted routine and the sexism of the fairy tale ending, where Esther has no choice but to attempt breathing within the corset of the American Dream she wears. What is this world of The Bell Jar? How closely it mirrors our own.

Atlas Shrugged

In Greek mythology, Atlas was a titan who fought with Cronos against Zeus. When Zeus won, he forced Atlas to hold the heavens on his shoulders for the rest of eternity--a pretty daunting task if you ask me.* The title of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, when taken into consideration with the whole, is absolutely perfect. It captures the essence of Rand's philosophy and puts into perspective the possible outcome of collectivism in the modern world.

Atlas Shrugged tells the story of struggling industrialists in a predominantly anti-industrial world. America, the last free-market economy on Earth, is finally hit by the storm that is collectivism, and the leaders of American industry--the presidents of its large companies--receive the brunt of it all. Innovators like Hank Rearden, who fashions the worlds strongest metal alloy, and pushers like Dagney Taggart, who unites the country with her transcontinental railroad, are criticized as being greedy capitalists who have no regard for the monetarily less fortunate community. They are blacklisted as enemies of society and go on strike in response, while their hard-fought-for businesses are practically taken over by the unintelligentsia, who, in their effort to share the wealth and put the community before the individual, end up creating a chaos, the likes of which one wouldn't wish on any country.

One of Rand's main precepts is that the mind and its creativity are the forces behind the mechanisms of the world. When the populace drives out the industrialists, they drive out the innovators and pushers, creating a sort of stand still. In other words, Rand believes that, without the minds to guide it, labor will become chaotic and unproductive and will eventually feed off itself until nothing is left. In still other words, without the mind, labor will cease to exist. Rand also stresses the importance of the individual and how the individual will do the most good for the community if he is left to do what is best for him. Once again, the industrialists are the protagonists. They are the persons who fight for individual freedom and the right to do what's best for one's self; they fight for the idea that it is in man's nature to work for incentives (symbolized by the American dollar that is backed by gold) and that, if all men simply think for themselves and work to get those incentives for themselves, they will end up doing what's best for the community. They are attacked by the people who advocate complete selflessness and the whole "brother's keeper" ideal, ideas which buddy up with the anti-thinking campaign in bringing the world to shambles.

In Rand's analogy, the industrialists are Atlas, and the world is the heavens.** She likens Atlas' shrug to the strike that the industrialists go on. If one actually imagines the world as being held up on some giant man's shoulders, one will realize the destruction that would be caused if that giant man shrugged. In her two-word summary, Rand brilliantly captures the power of the mind and industrial spirit (they hold up the world) and the messy outcome of collectivism (a shattering of man's nature and thus an end to his will to survive, which, to Rand, is to produce).

*Many people mistakenly believe that Atlas was made to hold the world, but it was the heavens that he was sentenced to carry forever.

**Rand may have also mistaken the object of Atlas' permanent torture, or she may have purposely likened the world to the heavens. According to Rand, life on Earth can be pretty heavenly for one as long as one is thinking and working for himself.

Dracula: The Bona Fide Vampire Story

By Jannel Banks

Teens the world over are going bananas over vampires, particularly those heartthrobs created by Stephanie Meyer in the major bestseller Twilight; however, many are unaware that this craze is but a resurgence of the vampire mania brought about by the 19^th century classic Dracula. With its vivid prose and thrilling storyline, Dracula cemented the concept of the vampire as the Devil’s soulless fiend and forever rooted it in the popular mind. In order to gain a better understanding of the importance of this masterpiece, one must examine the state of vampire literature before and after its publication. Seeing as Carmilla is the only pre-Dracula vampire book I’ve read, I’ll use it as the model for that era. As for the post-Dracula piece of literature, Twilight and its sequels will serve the purpose just fine.

THE VAMPIRE

The vampire creature itself is obviously of the utmost importance when considering vampire stories. The following characteristics have continued to define the vampire: its consumption of blood, the potential to live forever, and abnormally significant strength. Aside from these, the vampire has undergone much transformation since Carmilla’s publication. Carmilla and Dracula are the most similar, so I will start with a differentiation between the two. While Carmilla is a pathetic specimen who can only transform into some fluffy black cat (based on the novella, this is her only unique power), Dracula can transform into a wolf or bat as well as dust or mist capable of movement. Probably the most overlooked of Dracula’s powers is his ability to control the weather, i.e. “the storm, the fog, and the thunder”; adding to the list of things under his command are rats, wolves, foxes, owls, and other “meaner things”. Dracula also resembles the superhero Mr. Elastic in that he can squeeze himself through small openings, like the chink between a door and wall. Stoker apparently meant to compensate for this lavish amount of power by coming up with a corresponding amount of shortcomings. In order to rejuvenate himself, Dracula must sleep in soil taken from his last mortal resting place. (Stoker was not specific in this regard, but it can be assumed that lack of this sleep results in a decrease in strength.) Dracula cannot cross running water except at high or low tide, and he cannot enter a building unless invited into it by one of its inhabitants. He is powerless when he is in close quarters with garlic and holy articles and during the daylight hours, unless he is on his own earth or other unholy soil, such as that of a suicide’s grave.

Edward Cullen, the main vampire in Twilight, might as well be a part of a separate mythical species. He lacks all of Dracula’s powers, but he does have very potent ones of his own: super-speed, closeness to indestructibility (only wolves and other vampires can break him), and the looks of a Greek god. Edward likewise lacks Dracula’s weaknesses, making him the man to bet on if ever there were a fight between the two. In spite of this, Dracula is the better vampire (Carmilla was out of the running from the start). In his one book, he instills more terror in his readers than Edward does throughout the entire four-part saga. In fact, I know of many a teenage girl who would like to have him take a bite out of her. The scare factor is lost in Meyer’s endless discussions of his gorgeous face and chiseled body as well as other characteristics that will be discussed later. The sum of Dracula’s powers and weaknesses may make him relatively harmless if approached correctly, but the mere fact that he has such demonic powers and lacks the good looks to compensate will continue to guarantee him a place in readers’ nightmares.

HUMANITY

The best vampire is the scariest vampire. I mean, with our inexplicable affinity for the grotesque and macabre, why else would people create them? Vampires are meant to be either the terrifying causes of insomnia or the horrifying stars of nightmares. In addition to physical characteristics, another major contributor to the scare factor is a vampire’s lack of humanity. Unlike the soulless demons in Carmilla and Dracula, the vampires of Twilight have a choice between a weird diet and cold-blooded murder, making them much more accessible. The Twilight vampires are also very much capable of love, the most humane of humane feelings, while, as far as the story goes, Dracula and Carmilla are only capable of a sadistic desire to prolong the lives of certain victims. The more relatable to humans a vampire is, the less threatening he becomes. If the average teenage girl has a crucifix in her hand and has to approach either Dracula or a very hungry Jasper (Edward’s brother who still has a lust for human blood), she’s going to accost Jasper and try to appeal to his better nature. It’s not difficult to see that, when it comes to heartlessness, Dracula and Carmilla take the cake.

SETTING

More than any other genre, horror relies heavily on setting. A demonic creature can’t produce the desired fearsome effect if placed in a land full of Skittles and teddy bears. Carmilla and Twilight both have decent settings, but Dracula continues to live up to its name with its superbly chilling backdrop. Bram Stoker is responsible for originating the goosebump-inducing vampire castle, which has and forever will be present in any classic vampire connotation. Stoker describes “a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky”—can’t you just hear the crackling thunder and creepy organ music? That is where a vampire is supposed to reside, not some snazzy glass-paneled abode. By prompting the frightened villagers to make guards against “the evil eye” and offer Jonathan evil-inhibiting paraphernalia, Stoker also makes great use of his minor characters to set the mood. Yet another act of brilliance is Stoker’s decision to move Dracula to London, where most of his reader base would reside. In bringing the monster so close to home, he gives it tangibility, which obviously adds to its scare factor. Carmilla resides in a crumbling Gothic chapel in an abandoned village, which, in turn, is isolated amongst sprawling woodlands. In terms of the vampire lair, Le Fanu does just fine, but, by placing her far away from large aggregates of people, he fails to give his vampires tangibility. In other words, no one cares about one family living in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, Meyer lacks the creepy setting typical of a vampire lair, but hits the mark when it comes to tangibility. The Cullens reside in Forks, Washington, a real town that’s not too far from Port Angeles, the largest city on the Olympic Peninsula. A bunch of vampires running rampant in a city with as many nooks and crannies as Port Angeles has is pretty darn scary. Still, because it achieves both tangibility and creepiness, Dracula once again prevails.

GOOD AND EVIL

Personally, the factor that most distinguishes Dracula is its emphasis on good and evil, represented by God and the Devil respectively. It gives the whole plot a higher purpose; by killing Dracula, the vampire hunters are not only protecting Mina but are also doing God’s work in ridding the world of one of Satan’s terrestrial servants. Although Carmilla does show aversion to hymns, the war between God and the Devil is not a significant part of the plot. Twilight lies even further from the dichotomy. It’s basically a love story between a human and a vampire, and the world would suffer minimal change whatever its conclusion.

It is no wonder why Dracula is taken as the authority on vampires. Stoker’s skill at furnishing such a horrifying story gives it every reason to be so. One cannot call himself a vampire fanatic if he does not read this classic. Dracula is the bona fide vampire story.

What Makes a Classic a Classic?

By: Athena Meno

It is universally known that a story with enough tenacity, gusto, and with enough gumption to withstand the test of time is thereby called a classic.

But my question is: What makes a classic a classic? Is a classic found in the tragic death of two star- crossed lovers who died because of their family differences? Is it found in the life of a boy, who flies with the clouds at his heels, and at times risks his life to fool a notorious pirate with a hook? Or is a classic found in an attic where a girl, no older than her teens, hides away in order to avoid the harmful fate of a death camp? Certainly that is how those classics became such, but does it stand the same for all?

Can the struggles, of love, youth, and survival really be the hidden messages all writers strive for in order to truly obtain, for their stories, the title “Classic.”

Although I must say that the stories mentioned (which are: Romeo & Juliet, Peter Pan, and The Diary of Anne Frank) are in fact magnificent classic tales, I do believe that what makes their stories and all other classics is far beyond the story alone, but the characters and the message within the story that make it perpetual.

I believe what captures the wide-spread high acclaim of the stories we call classics, is how it mirrors mankind by portraying humans at their best and their worst. Classics tell tales of the struggles of man and how far people could go to achieve what they believed was impossible, what was true, and what was right. It gives us an idea of the lifestyle that people had to live through at a certain time frame, with or without complaint and how they adapted to a situation that was presented to them. It tells us tales of dreams, wishes, memories, hopes, and fears that people go through almost every day.

Classics also have a wide-spread amount of various characters, with their own stories to tell, and can practically walk and talk all on their own. Characters such as the ones described, stay with readers long after they had finished those last few pages. And who truly live on; not only in pages and texts, but in the life and mind of those select few who cared to listen to their tale.

That is what truly makes a classic a classic; a story with characters, which live beyond their pages, and message that, is worthwhile for all ages to come. It is in this that writers try to recapture what so many knew before them so that they too can be a writer of a classic.

Dracula: The Decline of an Empire

By Sam Barnett 


“History is movement, and if you’re not riding with it then in all probability you’re beneath its wheels.”--Alan Moore 

What defines a civilization has largely to do with progression. Decline and change; following a map of culture that is human precisely because it is sporadic. We drift as individuals and as a society towards sunsets we can’t see.  Our history is ruptured with invasions and betrayal as well as renaissances and revolutions, often coexisting within the folds of the same warped, glassy eyed period. 

Dracula is exempt to history, parading through the filmy centuries (the reader can only guess at Dracula’s age as one is never given an exact number), a shadow against the swiftly evolving horizon. 


He’s missing something vital, which the stolen blood that swims through his veins cannot replace. The vampire watches, as through a mirror, change he can only perceive and can’t touch. Is this what separates Dracula from humanity?  The abrupt distinction is tightly drawn. 

Is this what makes the vampire inhuman, more subtle than the killing to survive aspect, but the simple fact that he holds to his past, knows the secrets that are as a law reserved for the humbly churning Earth beneath our feet?  The paradox with the vampire is that the vampire disease encases the victim’s humanity. As Dracula grows older he finds himself removed from humanity and transcending history. History is humanity. 

Dracula can only flirt with history. As he reveals: 'I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.'  The most blunt idea to take away from this statement is that Dracula longs for London to capture the lust of life and blood. But, personally, I argue that it’s more than that.

Dracula does not seek to meld himself into the lives of Londoners, because at this point he must realize that all attempts would be futile. Dracula wants to understand the primal mechanics of society, to pin the rapture of this change he cannot feel like a butterfly under glass. 'Well I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master.’ 

With this quote Bram Stoker reveals that Dracula is built upon the persona of his history, earlier in the novel he relates to Jonathan Harker the wars and escapades of his past. He cannot seem to escape his past, or reinvent himself as a vampire must. History trudges along without him on board.  Perhaps this is what leads to Dracula’s demise. 

Stoker teases the reader with  fragments of Dracula’s past and with this device Stoker builds Dracula up to be a sort of legend within himself, and that the reader is only being treated to a snapshot of who Dracula is and once was. 

If one views the life of Dracula as a thread separate from the novel, I find the phase in Dracula’s life that Stoker chose to intercede, a strange choice. Personally, I get the feeling that the ordeal with Harker at Dracula’s castle is not the pinnacle  of Dracula’s existence. The process of abducting Harker and the cat and mouse games that follow seem almost routine. I see Dracula not as the legendary monster he once was, but nearly a shell of himself, attempting to live up to the ideals of his past. Which is what makes Stoker’s choice so genius. 

He cuts into Dracula’s life in it’s final stage. It’s the decline of an empire. We see Dracula, the timeless wanderer in a state of total abandon, the shadow against the rapt tides which toss him  and faze him and surge on. In the beginning of the novel the reader observes Dracula in the closest state to his prime. His ego is built upon the rumors of the townspeople, who in fear speak of him with the same kind of fervor as a figure of worship. Dracula’s native Transylvania is a dream scape and he is the creature of nightmares. 

Dracula transitions from Transylvania into the bustling reality of an overcrowded London and Stoker’s allegory works beautifully. The old meets the new, and the new stamps out those which cannot adapt.