• About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Sophia Loren Shares Her Wedding Regret After Meeting Her Husband at 16

    Sophia Loren Shares Her Wedding Regret After Meeting Her Husband at 16

    I Refused to Share My Jacket and Shoes With My Girlfriend and She Is Mad at Me Now

    I Refused to Share My Jacket and Shoes With My Girlfriend and She Is Mad at Me Now

    “We’re Both Married to Other People,” Jessica Chastain Addresses Controversy Over Her Friendship With Oscar Isaac

    “We’re Both Married to Other People,” Jessica Chastain Addresses Controversy Over Her Friendship With Oscar Isaac

    15 People Who Turned Their Scars Into Beautiful Tattoos, Thanks to This Vietnamese Artist

    15 People Who Turned Their Scars Into Beautiful Tattoos, Thanks to This Vietnamese Artist

    Women Reveal the “Girlfriend Effect” That Leaves Their Boyfriends “Unrecognizable” and People Have Mixed Feelings

    Women Reveal the “Girlfriend Effect” That Leaves Their Boyfriends “Unrecognizable” and People Have Mixed Feelings

    Supreme Court Officially Decides Against Reviewing Nearly Decade-Old Wolfgang’s Vault Case

    Supreme Court Officially Decides Against Reviewing Nearly Decade-Old Wolfgang’s Vault Case

  • General
  • Health
  • News
    Holness, Golding continue to lose favour with Jamaicans

    Holness, Golding continue to lose favour with Jamaicans

    PM to indicate gov’t position on CCJ as Jamaica’s final appellate court

    PM to indicate gov’t position on CCJ as Jamaica’s final appellate court

    Brown Burke condemns recent murders of women, children

    Brown Burke condemns recent murders of women, children

    Health Ministry allocates more than $300m for dengue mitigation efforts

    Health Ministry allocates more than $300m for dengue mitigation efforts

    One Don Gang trial ends as sentences handed down for all 15 convicts

    One Don Gang trial ends as sentences handed down for all 15 convicts

    Jamaicans Brett, Williams on target in USL

    Jamaicans Brett, Williams on target in USL

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Tech
    Starlink is offering users in Nigeria a 20% discount as it looks to expand reach

    Starlink is offering users in Nigeria a 20% discount as it looks to expand reach

    Stitch announces $25 million Series A extension to expand enterprise payments product

    Stitch announces $25 million Series A extension to expand enterprise payments product

    Exclusive: Paystack expands further into offline payments as Nigeria’s POS volume surges

    Exclusive: Paystack expands further into offline payments as Nigeria’s POS volume surges

    Five key attributes of innovative startups

    Five key attributes of innovative startups

    WhatsApp hacks are back, and they’re sneakier than before

    WhatsApp hacks are back, and they’re sneakier than before

    X (aka Twitter) used to be great for customer service. Here’s where to go now

    X (aka Twitter) used to be great for customer service. Here’s where to go now

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Sophia Loren Shares Her Wedding Regret After Meeting Her Husband at 16

    Sophia Loren Shares Her Wedding Regret After Meeting Her Husband at 16

    I Refused to Share My Jacket and Shoes With My Girlfriend and She Is Mad at Me Now

    I Refused to Share My Jacket and Shoes With My Girlfriend and She Is Mad at Me Now

    “We’re Both Married to Other People,” Jessica Chastain Addresses Controversy Over Her Friendship With Oscar Isaac

    “We’re Both Married to Other People,” Jessica Chastain Addresses Controversy Over Her Friendship With Oscar Isaac

    15 People Who Turned Their Scars Into Beautiful Tattoos, Thanks to This Vietnamese Artist

    15 People Who Turned Their Scars Into Beautiful Tattoos, Thanks to This Vietnamese Artist

    Women Reveal the “Girlfriend Effect” That Leaves Their Boyfriends “Unrecognizable” and People Have Mixed Feelings

    Women Reveal the “Girlfriend Effect” That Leaves Their Boyfriends “Unrecognizable” and People Have Mixed Feelings

    Supreme Court Officially Decides Against Reviewing Nearly Decade-Old Wolfgang’s Vault Case

    Supreme Court Officially Decides Against Reviewing Nearly Decade-Old Wolfgang’s Vault Case

  • General
  • Health
  • News
    Holness, Golding continue to lose favour with Jamaicans

    Holness, Golding continue to lose favour with Jamaicans

    PM to indicate gov’t position on CCJ as Jamaica’s final appellate court

    PM to indicate gov’t position on CCJ as Jamaica’s final appellate court

    Brown Burke condemns recent murders of women, children

    Brown Burke condemns recent murders of women, children

    Health Ministry allocates more than $300m for dengue mitigation efforts

    Health Ministry allocates more than $300m for dengue mitigation efforts

    One Don Gang trial ends as sentences handed down for all 15 convicts

    One Don Gang trial ends as sentences handed down for all 15 convicts

    Jamaicans Brett, Williams on target in USL

    Jamaicans Brett, Williams on target in USL

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Tech
    Starlink is offering users in Nigeria a 20% discount as it looks to expand reach

    Starlink is offering users in Nigeria a 20% discount as it looks to expand reach

    Stitch announces $25 million Series A extension to expand enterprise payments product

    Stitch announces $25 million Series A extension to expand enterprise payments product

    Exclusive: Paystack expands further into offline payments as Nigeria’s POS volume surges

    Exclusive: Paystack expands further into offline payments as Nigeria’s POS volume surges

    Five key attributes of innovative startups

    Five key attributes of innovative startups

    WhatsApp hacks are back, and they’re sneakier than before

    WhatsApp hacks are back, and they’re sneakier than before

    X (aka Twitter) used to be great for customer service. Here’s where to go now

    X (aka Twitter) used to be great for customer service. Here’s where to go now

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home General

I grew up loving The Bell Jar. Then I noticed how Sylvia Plath wrote about people that looked like me

August 8, 2023
in General
I grew up loving The Bell Jar. Then I noticed how Sylvia Plath wrote about people that looked like me
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Sixty years after its publication, it’s hard to imagine what the world would look like without Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. What would it be like to write a book about a young woman without this totemic touchstone? What would it be like to be a young woman without The Bell Jar?

Plath’s 1963 novel unleashed legions of artistic and chronically misunderstood girls on the world, allowing us to be exactly who we already were: highly sensitive, stuck-up, dazzlingly clever, crazy, ambitious, aimless, awkward and depressed. This book has meant everything to girls everywhere to the point where loving Plath and The Bell Jar has become a shorthand for female adolescent rebellion. When I first read The Bell Jar as a teenager, I didn’t just identify with Esther Greenwood – I was Esther Greenwood. I felt that I was that lonely, awkward girl with a mania for academic achievement and accumulating prizes for my writing, a covert love for beautiful clothes, a well-meaning but uninspiring boyfriend and a mother who lived her dreams through her daughter.

When I returned to this book in my late twenties, I noticed the way Plath wrote about people that looked like me for the first time – something that had completely bypassed me as a teenager. In Plath’s novel, people of colour are mostly absent, save the Black staff at the mental asylum where Esther spends the second half of the book. But in their absence, the idea of people of colour become prisms through which Esther can see herself and her friends. Esther’s friend Doreen, who represents her temptation to become a “bad girl”, is described as being “dusky as a bleached-blonde negress”. Esther herself is “yellow as a Chinaman”, her jaundiced skin representing her queasy unease in the big city. After Esther stumbles home from a dissolute night out with Doreen, she gets into the elevator and feels oppressed by the person she is sharing it with: a “big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman … staring idiotically into my face”.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

I began to ask myself difficult questions about representation and literature: what happens when the book that you think understands what it is like to be you also sees people that look like you as nothing more than an object or an absence? And what does it mean to want representation of a “mad girl” who isn’t white?

Writing my novel, But the Girl was a way of understanding the knotty moments of recognition and repulsion I felt in my reading of The Bell Jar. In my book, I write about a bookish Asian Australian protagonist who is focusing her PhD dissertation on Plath and beginning to make sense of her relationship to canonical works as a way of understanding herself. I write:

Like so many other adolescent rites of passage, I came late to The Bell Jar. When I read The Bell Jar for an undergraduate women’s writing class, I felt something new, brand new. It took me in from the start with its woozy charm and kidnapped my mind clean away. Which meant that it hurt like hell when she wrote about being ‘yellow as a Chinaman’ and worse when a few pages later there was ‘a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman … staring idiotically into my face’. The hurt kept me from reading on for a while. This often happened to me when I was reading books I loved. I felt betrayed because in the most routine, narcissistic, obvious way, I had thought that I was Esther Greenwood.

My protagonist, Girl, grapples with the question: what does it mean to love the literature that hates you? To see yourself in it in ways that were never intended? To fall in love with authors who most likely never interacted with anyone who looks like you? She feels both the pain and possibilities of reading a book like The Bell Jar – one in which she both sees herself in and yet is often jolted out of this “seeing” by the way it sees and unsees people that look like her.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

As Girl reads on about the “big smudgy-eyed Chinawoman”, she realises, alongside Esther, that this Chinawoman is not in fact another person but her own reflection in the mirror. “It was only me, of course,” Esther says to herself. I write:

It was only me. Perhaps I had been too quick to judge. It still stung that she saw me in that unflattering mirror glow, that she thought I looked like her at her worst. But then I thought Esther Greenwood would have been me at my worst: self-involved, so much so that other people could only ever be the backdrop to her own suffering. In a way, she was the person I saw when I came home from a long night out smelling like sweat and smoke after having my heart broken all over again and looked right into the mirror. She was a ‘big, smudgy-eyed white woman staring idiotically in my face’ and yet she was only me. Of course.

Esther looks in the mirror and sees a Chinese girl who turns out to be her. Girl looks into the text and sees a white American woman who might just be her. I see something tender and reciprocal in these twin images of looking for the self in otherness. My novel is about those knotty moments when a person of colour is seen and unseen in canonical works of literature. It is also about the refracted pieces of ourselves that we see in one another. The way that loving anything and anyone can inevitably both make us feel glued back together and shatter us into a million pieces. I still love The Bell Jar and in spite of everything, I still catch glimpses of myself in its broken mirror.

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is out now in Australia (Hamish Hamilton, $32.99) now, in the UK on 10 August (Jonathan Cape, £16.99) and in the US in 2024.

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : The Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/09/i-grew-up-loving-the-bell-jar-then-i-noticed-how-sylvia-plath-wrote-about-people-that-looked-like-me

Previous Post

Russian “double-tap” strike kills at least 7 in Ukraine; 3 women arrested, accused of spying

Next Post

Gusts up to 90mph hit Indiana as severe storms hit US – video

Holness, Golding continue to lose favour with Jamaicans

Holness, Golding continue to lose favour with Jamaicans

October 4, 2023
PM to indicate gov’t position on CCJ as Jamaica’s final appellate court

PM to indicate gov’t position on CCJ as Jamaica’s final appellate court

October 4, 2023
Brown Burke condemns recent murders of women, children

Brown Burke condemns recent murders of women, children

October 4, 2023
Health Ministry allocates more than $300m for dengue mitigation efforts

Health Ministry allocates more than $300m for dengue mitigation efforts

October 4, 2023
One Don Gang trial ends as sentences handed down for all 15 convicts

One Don Gang trial ends as sentences handed down for all 15 convicts

October 4, 2023
Jamaicans Brett, Williams on target in USL

Jamaicans Brett, Williams on target in USL

October 4, 2023
Donaldson blames JFF for the GoFundMe saga

Donaldson blames JFF for the GoFundMe saga

October 4, 2023
Children hospitalised after eating ‘weed sweeties’

Children hospitalised after eating ‘weed sweeties’

October 4, 2023
Japan’s Top FX Diplomat Kanda: Any intervention would not target forex levels but volatility

Japan’s Top FX Diplomat Kanda: Any intervention would not target forex levels but volatility

October 4, 2023
Japan’s Matsuno: Will continue to take appropriate steps on FX

Japan’s Matsuno: Will continue to take appropriate steps on FX

October 4, 2023
Partenaires
afric.info
europ.info
usa-news
lesmeilleureschaussures.fr
goodsforyoutoday.com
looktopbeauty.com
keto-diet.biz
soccernews.info
nba-news.net
sportsprblog.com compar.biz
the-best.top
bestchoices.biz
expert-plus.fr
travel-mag.info
pksportsnews.com
news-sports.org

Categories

Archives

October 2023
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Sep    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (3,849)
  • Entertainment (3,951)
  • General (2,919)
  • Health (1,881)
  • News (4,456)
  • Science (3,037)
  • Sports (4,106)
  • Tech (2,987)

Recent News

Holness, Golding continue to lose favour with Jamaicans

Holness, Golding continue to lose favour with Jamaicans

October 4, 2023
PM to indicate gov’t position on CCJ as Jamaica’s final appellate court

PM to indicate gov’t position on CCJ as Jamaica’s final appellate court

October 4, 2023
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version

I grew up loving The Bell Jar. Then I noticed how Sylvia Plath wrote about people that looked like me- https://www.maquillages.info/   https://maquillages.org   https://www.deguisements-fetes.fr   https://maillots-de-bain-shop.com   https://www.le-noeud-papillon.com   https://www.jeepeg.fr   https://maillotde-bain.com   https://pushkarvisit.com   -/- According to Luke Fickell, Wisconsin is ‘all-in’ on NIL   Barbie film hits $1bn mark at global box office   Zhuhai Championships: Andy Murray loses to Aslan Karatsev in last 16   Breece Hall named Jets’ offensive X-factor for 2023   Soundking AK20 BA Amplificateur pour Basse   -*-$$DAKINE Split Roller Mallette ordinateur à roulettes, 21 cm, 110 L, Carbon   Veuve Clicquot – Coffret Retraite V.Clicquot Rose   Enceinte Mobile 700W Sono Active DJ KARAOKE 12″ Autonome Batterie à LED RVB + Micro VHF USB/SD/Bluetooth – LedWood Boostar1400   Volkswagen: IT-Störung bei Volkswagen behoben   Newcastle adds BetMGM UK to its bookmaker alliances   $$* Amalia   El Rancho Place d’Italie, Centre commercial Italie 2, place d’Italie 75013 Paris   I grew up loving The Bell Jar. Then I noticed how Sylvia Plath wrote about people that looked like me *I grew up loving The Bell Jar. Then I noticed how Sylvia Plath wrote about people that looked like me