Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Laura had not listened to the stock-dove; she had not seen the haze thickening overhead. She walked up and down in despair and rebellion. She walked slowly, for she felt the weight of her chains. Once more they had been fastened upon her. She had worn them for many years, acquiescently, scarcely feeling their weight. Now she felt it. And, with their weight, she felt their familiarity, and the familiarity was worst of all: Titus had seen her starting out. He had cried: “Where are you off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait a minute, and I’ll come too.” She had feigned not to hear him and had walked on. She had not turned her head until she was out of the village, she expected at every moment to hear him come bounding up behind her. Had he done so, she thought she would have turned round and snarled at him. For she wanted, oh! how much she wanted, to be left alone for once.

The story of Laura Willowes begins, as most stories do, with a bunch of men. In fact, much more time is spent in the early going talking about family history, her brothers' marriages, her father's illness and death, and her subsequent shuttling off to live with her brother Henry, than about Laura herself. Aside from her love of her father and her love of nature, Laura does very little: she is passively acted upon and her feelings about the things that are happening are opaque to us. The biggest development in the first half of the book is right there in the title: Laura becomes Aunt Lolly.

Her role is circumscribed by the expectations placed on a single woman with no family around the turn of the century. She assists her sister-in-law around the house, takes care of the newborns, most notably a boy named Titus, and is occupied from dawn to dusk with responsibilities that are pushed upon her, though she hardly seems to realize it.

But the structure is such that the reader is barely aware of what is going on; Warner strings us along in such a traditional realist narrative that none of this seems out of the ordinary--after all, that's how most of these stories go, regardless of mode--Agnes Grey, Emma, etc. And then, at almost exactly the midpoint, Lolly decides to move to Great Mop and start her own life. Her brother, Henry, greatly objects, first because she's, well, a single woman, and secondly because he's gambled away her trust in what I can only assume is the Dogecoin of 1926. He sister-in-law passive aggressively wonders how she'll carry on without Lolly. Only Titus, now in his late teens, supports her schemes, although once he realizes she's serious his ardour cools as well--but the next section picks up in Great Mop, with Lolly alone, at least for a while.

Lolly starts coming into her own, forming some loose community with the inhabitants of Great Mop, and even feints at the idea of a romance, but this is not that sort of book, and just as Lolly is asserting herself, who should show up but Titus. At first happy to see him, Lolly soon finds herself being fed back into the same sorts of rut she left to escape--she's mending clothes, making food, handling social events and worst of all, she's once again never alone. So one day, while out walking, Lolly makes a deal with Satan--he can have her soul, and he'll give her back her agency.

So, this happens about 50pp from the end of the book, and after Titus is attacked by bees, rapidly engaged, and leaves within 48 hours, Lolly is all in--but it's not as if she goes all in with cauldrons and newt's eggs. She's content only to have her solitude back. The final setpiece in the book is a conversation with Satan, which is where most of what I've spelled out thematically comes together--indepenedence is so desirable, so necessary, for women that they make easy prey for Satan. But Satan doesn't appear to prey on them, per se. It's about the thrill of the chase--once they're caught he has no interest, contra the patriarchal God of Henry, in a relationship. He's a deistic sort, gentlemanly, cagey about the whole "eternal hell" thing, and he leaves Lolly, on the last page, feeling unsettled and simultaneously at peace. Better to recline in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Girl Code by Andrea Gonzales and Sophie Houser

A week later, I checked their website to make sure they had processed everything correctly.  They had... but they put my name under the "Parents" information and my father's under "Camper."  It was incredible--I must have sounded so grown-up they thought I was the parent.

...They were all boy, huddled around computers and talking to each other, playing video games on their DSs.  The room seemed like a totally different universe.  Anxiously, I scanned the room for people without a Y chromosome.  There were two... but they were staff members.  I had heard there weren't a lot of girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), but I didn't understand how bad it was.  That's why they put my dad's name down as the camper--because he's the guy.  I sat down, a bit regretful about my decision to come here.  I felt out of place.

A few years ago, my student Annie made a video game for a project on The Odyssey.  It was a rudimentary side-scrolling game like I used to play on Nintendo, and you played as Odysseus, fending off the dangerous sexuality of wily seductresses.  (It was a statement about the gender politics of the epic, which are, like the book itself, three thousand years out of date.)  Years later, with a friend at a coding camp, she repurposed that game into one about the taboo against menstruation, called Tampon Run.  It went, as the kids say, "viral"--suddenly she and her partner were fielding interview requests from radio stations, blogs, Time Magazine, you name it.

Stoic yes, curt maybe--but howling?

Girl Code is the story of the game's creation, and the pair's subsequent fame.  It's part lighthearted memoir, with Annie and Sophie trading chapters about the bewildering experience of becoming famous.  Tampon Run brought invitations to hackathons and Silicon Valley startups, but also at least one sexist radio interview.  That's the other part: a treatise about the low visibility of women in tech fields, experienced through the eyes of two young coders experiencing it for the first time.  Annie talks about her desire to use coding to bring awareness to women's issues like the menstrual taboo, but how can that be possible in a world that doesn't yet know how to take women seriously?  The tone wavers between humorous (Annie's one of the funniest kids I've known, and it shows) and inspirational, but the stark realities of the tech worlds just that lurk at the edges of the book's perception are serious and real.  But more than humor and inspiration, the book provides practical assistance to attack the problems it identifies: an appendix about basic coding for young readers.

If Annie reads this review (if I wrote a book, I'm pretty sure I'd be googling it daily) I express, once again, my pride and admiration.  Girl Code is a testament to her and Sophie's intelligence, chutzpah, and character.  Can't wait to see what she does next.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I feel bad that I've fallen so far behind on my reviews, because I've read some great books this year that are definitely going to get the short shrift because it's been so long since I read them. That includes this one, possibly the most widely-disparaged book ever to find its way onto high school reading lists.

Of course, it's not too surprising that The Scarlet Letter doesn't connect with most high-schoolers. For those unfamiliar, the story concerns Hester Prynne, a single woman in a strict Puritan community, who is discovered to be pregnant and sentenced to spend the rest of her life wearing a red letter "A"--for adultery--as punishment for her transgression. As for the father, well, that's the Reverend Arthur Dimmsdale, the town's most respected citizen and the next thing to an angel in the eyes of the townfolk.

What follows from this is a long meditation on sin, guilt, the nature of love and religious belief, all written in Hawthorne's typically slow-moving and flowery prose. Oh, and the book opens with a fifty-page framing story about an accounting house where the record of The Scarlet Letter is found, to discourage the rare kid who found the adultery story compelling.

And, in spite of all this, I loved it. It might be the best thing I've read so far this year.


Some of this is just my literary taste--I love Hawthorne's baroque verbiage and slow pace, but I can see how it could be a turn off--but there's more to the story than that. For one thing, the novel is full of ambiguity. As I recall, it never even spells out that Rev. Dimmsdale was the father until the very end of the novel, although the reader is expected to have intuited it pretty early. The meaning of the scarlet "A" is never explicitly mentioned either, and those are two of the main plot points of the book! They aren't hard to discern but it does demonstrate the confidence Hawthorne has in his readers.

 Hand in hand with the plot ambiguities, Hawthorne allows a lot of moral wiggle room as well. Until a short speech at the end, which feels shoehorned in to please censors, Hawthorne casts no shade on Hester. In fact, as the story progresses, she sometimes seems like the only moral person in a town full of hypocrites. Knowing how Hawthorne felt about Puritans, it seems likely that he DID feel this way, but it's still strange to see a woman have an illegitimate child and come out of the situation better then she went in. I don't know that I've ever read a book this old that was so loath to pass judgement on its characters.

Also, despite its stuffy rep, The Scarlet Letter is a deeply strange book. Occurrences throughout--Hester's vindictive ex, a vision in the sky, Dimmsdale's ever-increasing torment, and Hester's possibly-demented daughter--point to supernaturalism without ever spelling it out. At points, it feels almost like a Gothic novel, with "ghosts" everywhere, and skeletal hands behind the scenes pushing things along, except in this case, the hands are God's and the devil is a disgruntled ex.

Pain, Parties, Work by Elizabeth Winder

When Pain, Parties, Work, a new micro-biography of Sylvia Plath, came up for review, I decided I should introduce myself to some Plath, who I had never read. I owned The Bell Jar and some poetry, and decided to start with the novel. Having read Pain, Parties, Work, I’m really glad I did--although I knew that Plath’s experiences as a junior editor for Mademoiselle had informed her most famous work, I didn’t realize to what extent. A Venn diagram of Plath’s trip and the plot of The Bell Jar would almost be a circle.

For those unfamiliar, Plath was an amazing poet and writer whose suicide has come to define her, unfairly, as the patron saint of depressed teenage girls. Elizabeth Winder, a poet herself, wrote the book as a way to rewrite Plath’s story in popular culture, and, while I’m not sure the book will be enough to change public perception, Winder does a good job turning Plath into a fully-formed human being.

The layout of the book is interesting--it looks something like a magazine itself, with sidebars and images interspersed throughout the text, and the actual chapters vary in structure as well, from oral histories from Sylvia’s roommates on the trip to poetic excursions into the ephemera of Mademoiselle, the fashion world, and other, related topics. This makes for a fast read, but the information is good, and as a transformative tool for Plath, it works wonders.

Plath wasn’t the type to lock herself in a room to write. Instead, she gathered her inspiration from her experiences, particularly, as Winder notes, the concrete details of her experiences. Winder makes the case for Plath as an aesthete, appreciative of beauty for its own sake, one who believed the art needed no purpose but to exist. Not only was Plath a concrete thinker, she was also a social creature. She had a policy of never turning down a date, saying that even the worst of them provided material for her writing. Indeed, several of the dates mentioned here provide fodder for their lightly-fictionalized counterparts in The Bell Jar.

Plath’s fellow junior editors didn’t know what to make of her, and I don’t either, exactly, after reading Pain, Parties, Work. What I can say is that, between The Bell Jar and this book, my perspective on Plath has been challenged and upended. It’s challenged my sometime unintentionally sexist views on literature, and made me more open to trying other female authors who I might have previously dismissed. And I’m sure future readings of The Bell Jar will be greatly enhanced, knowing something about the story behind the story.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.  It says that the great mistake of Western culture, through most of its history, has been the undervaluation of this femininity.  It says this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it.  But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior.  the mistake, says the mystique, the root of women's troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love.

I can only imagine how amazing and revolutionary The Feminine Mystique was when it came out.  I found it fascinating, though, fortunately, a little hard to relate to.  Some of the ideas and paradigms that existed in the 50s and early 60s were just bananas (one of my favorite parts of the book was when Friedan listed a selection of articles found in women's magazines of the day, including, "How to Snare a Male," "Really a Man's World, Politics," "Don't Be Afraid to Marry Young," and, of course, "Do Women Have to Talk So Much?").  Sometimes I wondered if it really could have been that crazy, though I don't doubt that it was.  I look forward to getting a chance to talking to some of my older female relatives who grew up in the teeth of the feminine mystique to find out what it was like.

Anyway, Friedan explains how after the feminist successes of the 1920s and the cultural transformations that followed World War II, the American middle class was swept by what she calls the feminist mystique, which encouraged women to stay at home and fostered the belief that a woman's highest purpose was to bear and raise children, the keep up her house and cater to her husband's needs.  Unless a woman worked toward those ends, and only those ends, she couldn't truly fulfill her femininity or her true nature as a woman.  The (incredibly patronizing) belief was that women were intrinsically different than men and that there was something special and magical about them that gave them these unique abilities to be wives and mothers, and that it should be celebrated.  (But while you're being all mystical, get back in the kitchen and make my dinner).

The feminine mystique was reinforced by many media and influences.  Women's education was dominated by "functionalist" philosophies and classes, which taught women how to fulfill their function (bearing and raising children), how to adjust to being a wife and mother, and other relevant skills, like cooking and cleaning.  Increasingly, women got married and had babies before even graduating high school, but those who did get to college didn't engage or pursue career ambitions; instead of B.S.s or B.A.s, they only sought MRSs.  Girls were taught that studying too hard or pursuing a career (beyond a temporary, low skill job like a typist or operator) was too masculine and would make it harder to find a man to marry (without which they'd be unable to fulfill their roles as women).  One girl is quoted as saying, "It's not too smart to be smart."

Even though, Friedan says, companies and their advertisers (or "manipulators") didn't invent the feminine mystique, they absolutely spread it and strengthened it.  It served their interests to have women at home, buying things to make being a housewife easier (though not too easy; she still had to feel like she was important to the process).  The chapter on the manipulators was really fascinating.

The catalyst for The Feminine Mystique was Friedan's observation that many women were suffering from "the problem that has no name," which she saw as a frustration, disappointment and depression with being just a housewife.  Because of the pervasiveness of the feminine mystique, women suffered alone, wracked by guilt and afraid of being judged for not being wholly fulfilled by embracing their femininity.  The problem that has no name manifested itself in various sinister ways, including depression, alcoholism, and suicide attempts. Women tried whatever they could to feel alive, including seeking sex, both in an out of marriage, to destructive extents, trying to find an identity by filling their houses with material goods, and smothering their children until their sons become as emotionally stunted and immature as they are (it doesn't really matter that the girls are emotionally stunted and immature, because that's what makes a good wife and mother).

Friedan's answer to extinguishing the feminine mystique was through actual education and finding something that actually fulfilled her and made use of her talents (this latter point seemed pretty focused on middle and upper class white women who had the luxury of finding their calling, however long it took or however little it paid).  She acknowledged that women who had career ambitions and planned on being "career women" were more stressed out as seniors in college than those who planned on just being housewives, but argued that being stressed is part of growing up and facing the challenges of the real world, as opposed to trying to escape to the relative ease and safety of moving from your parents' house to your husband's and never having go through the growing pains of maturity.  According to Friedan, women are as much subject to Maslow's hierarchy of needs as men, and those women who self-actualize are happier, have happier husbands and marriages, and raise more independent, self-sufficient kids.  I believe Tina Fey would certainly agree, based on what I read in Bossypants.

As insightful and powerful as this book is, it is not without flaws.  One of the things I've focused on most in my feminist renaissance is recognizing my privilege.  As a upper class, straight, white male, there are a lot of things that are a lot easier for me than for other demographics that I have to remember not to take for granted.  Friedan, though, has privileges of her own.  I don't want to diminish the seriousness of the issues that Friedan addresses in this book, because they are very important, but there is an extent to which they are first world problems.  Sure, forcing women, through education and societal pressure/expectations, to surrender their individuality and live their lives "defined only in sexual relation to men - man's wife, sex object, mother, housewife - and never as persons defining themselves by their own actions in society" can be dehumanizing.  That being said, it does make it seem pretty crass when she compares the effects of the feminine mystique to the Holocaust (seriously, she calls a housewife's home a "comfortable concentration camp"), especially less than two decades after an actual genocide (another word she uses).  Her perspective on homosexuality also isn't the most progressive (I'd like to think that most feminists today wouldn't say that "...homosexuality...is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene.").  I also found her a little repetitive at times and thought she sometimes tried to shoe horn issues or ideas into her theories in a way that wasn't really necessary or convincing.  However, on the whole I thought it was powerful and fascinating.

As foreign as some of the descriptions of life in the early 60s were, I also thought there were some interesting parallels to today.  A common topic that keeps popping up on various sites, like The Atlantic, Slate, New York Times, etc, is whether women can have it all.  Friedan would say that women shouldn't have to choose between having a family and a career (that choice is the one imposed by the feminine mystique), and that having a family and a career is almost essential.  One thing I wonder, though, is whether Friedan goes too far in denigrating women who are "just" housewives.  Is there a way to be a stay at home mom (parent) without losing your individual identity and suffering all of the ills laid out in this book?  Does a woman who chooses to stay home with her children today, when the pressure to do so isn't nearly what it was when the book came out, still suffer from the feminine mystique, or does the increasing interconnectedness of the 21st century mean that one can stay at home without letting the world pass her by?  And how does this apply to men who stay at home?  Meagan and I haven't made any decisions about what we'll do when we have a kid, but we know that we'll do whatever is best for our family.  This may mean that one of us stays home, and I fully accept that it may make sense for that parent to be me.  We'll see, though I think it's evidence of progress not only that our decision won't be determined by anatomy, but that we generally won't be scorned or judged because of it.  That being said, I wonder how much my male privilege prevents me from realizing the more subtle ways that the feminine mystique still exists in America.  I know that we have much less flexible and generous maternity leave than in other countries and that when women do take maternity leave, there is sometimes an assumption that they won't come back to work, at least not for long.  I also know that women are still responsible for more housework and childcare than their husbands (though that ratio is certainly better than it was 30 years ago) and that a presidential candidate of a major political party said just last year that if you're going to have women working for you, you have to be flexible with their hours so they can go home and make dinner for their kids.  So yeah, we've come a long way, but I definitely don't think we're there yet.  In fact, I think this book is almost equally as important today as a reminder of where we've been so we don't go there again.  When women like Suzanne Venker are spouting off on FoxNews.com about how women just don't want to be CEOs and that women actually had it better back in the day (who cares if you feel intense societal pressure to conform to some rigid, unfulfilling paradigm when you get to get off the Titanic first!), it's clear that we need to remain vigilant.

On the other hand, I wonder if we're moving toward a "new feminine mystique," where women's strengths are actually valued and not just invented as a way to oppress and patronize women.  I haven't yet gotten to Hannah Rosin's The End of Men, but I read the summary article she wrote and have read enough articles about it to get the gist.  In it, Rosin argues that the days when the most economically valuable traits were physical strength have passed us, and there are more jobs that require communication and compromise, which women traditionally excel at to a greater extent than men.  As a result, there are more opportunities for women than for men, and that trend is becoming more pronounced.

On the whole I thoroughly enjoyed The Feminine Mystique and thought it was very well written and thought provoking.  I definitely recommend it, because as I mentioned, even though it came out 50 years ago this year, it isn't a relic of the past and is still relevant today.

Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

But, born a woman--and born to suffer, in endeavouring to repress my own emotions, I feel more acutely the various ills my sex are fated to bear--I feel that the evils they are subject to endure, degrade them so far below their oppressors, as almost to justify their tyranny; leading a the same time superficial reasoners to term that weakness the cause, which is only the consequence of short-sighted despotism.

Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin really did belong together.  Her Wrongs of Woman is cut from the same cloth as Godwin's Caleb Williams.  Both focus on members of unrepresented groups--for him, a servant, for her a woman.  Both of them depict their protagonists as being unfairly imprisoned, both to expose the injustice of the English legal system, and to serve as a symbol for social repression ("Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?").  Both pepper their accounts with stories culled from real life accounts of injustice so that we might see that they are more than novels--they are what really happens on a daily basis.

Both are boring as hell.  Wollstonecraft is a better nuts-and-bolt writer than her husband, but her heroine, Maria, has a shadow of Caleb Williams' already paper-thin personality.  Perhaps some of that isn't her fault;  she died before Wrongs of Woman could be finished and so it remains fragmentary.  But I often get the impression that she felt that giving her heroine any kind of weakness or flaw that might make her seem realistic would only play into the hands of her detractors as exemplary of women overall.

Maria is generous, intelligent, and compassionate, but when the story opens, she finds herself committed involuntarily to a mental institution at the behest of her cruel husband, George.  She finds a sympathetic soul in the equally unjustly imprisoned Henry Darnford, to whom she spills out her sad, sad tale: George only married her for access to her uncle's wealth, and when she spoke out against him, he used his superior legal and social clout to have her committed, separating her from her newborn child.

In the late 18th Century, this might have been a moving piece of literature.  Scenes like the one in which a judge, though faced with the cruelty of Maria's husband, admonishes her impertinence in speaking out against him, might have inspired rage.  Or the one where Maria's husband, mired in financial difficulties by his own licentiousness, tries to pimp her out to a friend for cash.  But Wollstonecraft doesn't need to persuade me, and though we have our own breeds of sexism to combat in the 21st Century, The Wrongs of Woman seems like an answer to an already resolved question.  It's so much of its time that it doesn't seem interesting except as a historical artifact.  Maybe that's a good thing.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

The Taming of the Shrew makes me, as it has made many readers over the years, deeply uncomfortable. The story of a woman (Katherina) being tamed by a man (Petruchio) so that she will become more docile and obedient is inherently repellent, and modern audiences are unsurprisingly ill at ease with sentiments such as these:

PETRUCHIO: But for my bonny Kate, she must with me.
Nay, not look big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret;
I will be master of what is mine own.
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.

I sincerely doubt that one could write a play in the 21st century in which a man calls his wife his "household stuff" and not be perceived as a villain. This is tempered somewhat by the undeniable fact that, like Benedict and Beatrice, Kate and Petruchio are well-matched for each other because they share an affinity for a kind of verbal (and physical) sparring as flirtation:

PETRUCHIO: Come, come, you wasp. I' faith, you are too angry.

KATHERINA: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.

PETRUCHIO: My remedy is then to pluck it out.

KATHERINA: Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies.

PETRUCHIO: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting?

KATHERINA: In his tongue.

PETRUCHIO: Whose tongue?

KATHERINA: Yours, if you talk of tales. And so farewell.

PETRUCHIO: What, with my tongue in your tail Nay, come again,
Good Kate. I am a gentleman.

Zing! It is clear to me that, despite Petruchio's mercenary intentions and Kate's unwillingness to be controlled, they have an affection for each other. (Kate, for example, seems to be genuinely upset when it seems as if Petruchio will leave her at the altar.) But try as I might I cannot close-read away the thought that Petruchio, who "tames" Kate by withholding food from her and keeping her from her family, is awfully cruel. Bloom sees a strong undercurrent of irony in Kate's final speech, in which she extols the virtue of submissiveness, and believes that The Shrew is actually the story of how Kate tames Petruchio by letting him think he's getting what he wants. If you can find that in here, let me know:

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband.
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

This speech is so over the top that the temptation to read it as ironic is very strong, but it seems to me that treating earnestness as irony becomes an unwise critical loop by which we question whether anyone really believes anything. If Kate does not believe this, she has learned this lesson deeply and is too cunning to provide any wink to the audience.

Of course, Shakespeare never was a moralizer, and attempts to tease out the moral prescription of The Shrew are short-sighted. The feminists will find it to be feminist, and the misogynists will find it to be misogynist. As a comedy, it is not the best--too much time spent on the idiot romance between Kate's sister Bianca and the disguised Lucentio, for one--and I wonder if, had it been a greater play, such a question would have occupied us less.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

"And I knew in that spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat."

She's quite blunt, that Esther Greenwood.

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's thinly veiled autobiographical account of her first nervous breakdown and the events leading up to it. Looking back, it is easy to imagine that Esther Greenwood's views on marriage were unconventional for a 1950s college girl. And that was probably somewhat true.

The Bell Jar begins during Esther Greenwood's summer as a Junior Editor to a women's magazine in New York City, before her senior year of college. Esther has been told her whole life what a brilliant and talented writer she is. She, perhaps rightly, feels that all doors are open to her until she meets with an influential female editor at the magazine, who paints a picture of the difficulty young women have breaking into the literary world. Despite this, Esther mostly still feels secure that she will be able to make her career as a writer.

Throughout the summer, Esther maintains a superficial countenance of interest in her job and the other girls. Her mental break is only mildly foreshadowed by Esther's growing sense of hopelessness about her future. She is "practically engaged" to a boring and unfaithful medical student, but any pessimism is still tempered by the plans for her writing career. It is only when she returns home from New York to find that she has been rejected from a writing class due to the quality of her work that the darker parts of her mind begin to best her.

After returning home, Esther does not wash or change her clothes for weeks. She suffers insomnia and cannot eat, think or write clearly. She has not slept for two weeks straight when her mother brings her to a psychiatrist for shock treatments, which hurt and terrify Esther. She plots to kill herself, imagining a variety of ways and discarding them one by one: too bloody, too uncertain, too difficult. Finally, Esther disappears, only to be found huddled in a crawlspace in her mother's basement, barely alive after an overdose of sleeping pills. Only when checked into an asylum, the setting for the book's final chapters, does Esther begin to heal. She finds that the electroshock therapy, administered correctly by the gentle Dr. Nolan, delivers an antidepressant effect, lifting the mental "bell jar" she feels trapped inside.

The Bell Jar is mostly autobiographical. Plath attended Smith College on scholarship, graduating in 1954. The summer before, she served as a junior editor to Mademoiselle magazine. That same summer, Plath was rejected from Frank O'Connor's Harvard writing class, an event which is thought to have precipitated her first suicide attempt.

This book's immediate success likely had a lot to do with the fact that it was first published over a decade after the book's events took place, in January 1963. The early 1960s had a very different feel than the early 1950s, a difference felt acutely by British and American women. 1963 was a watershed year for the feminist movement. The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique that year is popularly credited with ushering in the "Second Wave" of feminism. 1963 was also the year that Plath committed suicide, one month after the novel's publication.

It was in this historical context that Plath's only novel was first read by a generation of women, who applauded it and fought for it's U.S. release. In reading it for the first time now, in 2009 at the age of 24, I can relate to many of Esther/Sylvia's fears. Esther imagines her life as a fig tree, with dozens of figs, each representing a different life choice: marriage and children, becoming a poet or an editor, traveling; as Esther frets about which fig to choose, they begin to blacken and die and fall off the tree, one by one, her choices narrowing as she struggles to decide. I know that I've felt overwhelmed at times imagining the way my life might unfold. I would probably regard anyone my age that didn't feel that way as suspect.

I really enjoyed this book. If my perception weren't clouded by the fact that Sylvia Plath did eventually succeed in taking her life, I'd probably see the ending as hopeful and the period covered in the book as an anomaly in an otherwise charmed life. I think that Esther's feelings of confusion as she confronts her future are felt today by both men and women. I don't see The Bell Jar as a purely feminist treatise, although it is sometimes lumped in that genre.

Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters by Jessica Valenti

In a world where "rape culture" is prevalent, women are still not making as much money as men on the dollar, and abstinence only education is still what's being pushed in the classrooms, I would have to wholeheartedly agree with Valenti that fighting for women's rights is an important issue and that feminism still has a function in our society. It's feminists like Valenti, however, that frighten me. Yes, there is good cause for women to be angry, but if the well educated women are screaming and slinging a distracting amount of obscenity around while they are trying to get their point across, they aren't going to use their platform for change effectively.

Full Frontal Feminism quickly glosses over all of the major issues in a way that would not be very enlightening to anyone with previous knowledge on women's issues/rights. I suppose this is appropriate though, given that it is after all suppose to be a young woman's guide and targeted directly at women who do not already consider themselves feminists (though why one of those would read this without it being shoved at them I do not know.) Valenti's writing tries too hard to be hip and push the envelope with an excessive amount of f-bomb dropping and conservative-bashing. For example, in her chapter about women reclaiming a more healthy sense of sexuality, she included not having sex with Republicans in her sex tips. Is that really necessary?

The main issue I have with Valenti is that the majority of her book rides on opinion and not fact. Given that she studied at Rutgers and worked for a variety of women's organizations (such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood) it seems like she would be a woman ready to back up her witty quips with stats. While there are places where she does give reference where reference is due it's not nearly consistent enough.

I use to volunteer at the Women's Center on campus and if I ran out of things to do on my desk shift I could usually be found reading the books on their Women's Lit shelf. Let's just say that if I went back now to volunteer I wouldn't be putting my copy of Full Frontal Feminism on their shelves. I'll stick to Eve Ensler and co.

If you are interested in what Valenti has to say, she's responsible for the feministing website.