commonly used phrase expresses a shared belief amongst Western culture that stress and frustration may very well cause an individual to experience a mental break. Esther Greenwood, the protagonist living in the 1950s America of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, cracks under societal pressures to be the ideally docile, subservient, thoughtless woman, and becomes so dissociated with her life that she attempts suicide, eventually rehabilitated by electric shock therapy and sent back out into the world with
Life Lessons from Winnie-the-Pooh What is it about Milne's Pooh Bear, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger et al. that make them so lovable, intriguing, and permanent? It is because A.A. Milne was not just your garden-variety children’s story writer. Rather, he was a scholarly thinker (Marshall, 13). His iconic book, Winnie-the-Pooh, was first published on October 14, 1926, and there’s a reason it has retained its popularity for nearly a century. It has plenty of wisdom to offer adults and children alike about
Wharton, Plath and Gilman use the relationship between America’s middle-class idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic to distort the icon of the home, from a hub of warmth, joy and growth to a deeply disturbing brokenness that is reflective of the broken relationships within the home, challenging the false claims of the home as a safe, protected place. All three writers subtly link terror - the most important ingredient of the Gothic to acts of transgression, and show how the home