Kruthi's Coming of Age Blog

  While reading Fun Home , I came to recognize that Bechdel has a penchant for using complex metaphors and symbolism to describe her situation and relationships. To me, one of them stood out as particularly useful for analyzing her and Bruce’s story. Her vivid description of her childhood home, which takes up the bulk of the first chapter, seems strongly reminiscent of her thoughts about Bruce and his personality. Even though the home is just an object, a passion project of Bruce’s, his relationship with the home speaks volumes about the kind of person Bruce is.  One significant parallel I noticed was Bruce’s fixation on being in control of the things around him, and of being the architect of his life and home. Just as he carefully curates each room in the home, he also curates his appearance and reputation. Through Bechdel’s narration, we get a sense of how important it is to Bruce that every area of the home be organized and beautiful. In the context of the home itself, ...

     The Bell Jar is an excellent novel about coming-of-age and struggling with mental health,  but it would be a shame to leave it at just that. To me, it has various other unseen virtues. For example, I found it to be rather darkly funny and an excellent use of satire. Throughout the book, it is abundantly clear that Esther finds society to be absurd and almost grotesque, and Plath does an impressive job of conveying this through Esther’s language and inner thoughts.      Probably one of the most, if not the most, targeted subject of Plath’s sharp humor is the set of norms and expectations laid out for Esther and other women of the time period. One example is how Esther perceives motherhood and the process of childbirth. Describing the delivery of a baby, she says: “The woman’s stomach stuck up so high I couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindl...