Sandy COA blog

          In Fun Home , I noticed a theme of the characters having roundabout ways to deal with their problems. A lot of them seemed to stem from the lack of room to do so in a healthy way–healthy as in attacking the situation head-on–so they sort of just let out their pent-up feelings through other, more harmful means.           Alison’s father, Bruce, is without a doubt the most apparent example of this. Bruce was a closeted gay man, and he was forced to hide that part of himself. He had a wife and children in a small town, and if his more authentic identity were to get out, it would’ve spread like wildfire–not only his sexuality, but also the fact that he was a pedophile. Because of this, their relationship grew quite cold and distant, with Alison saying there was a lack of a “margin for error” and that “showing affection for [her father] was an even dicier venture” (Bechdel 18-19). Bruce used his passion for architecture an...

               While reading The Bell Jar , I found the shock therapy scenes to be particularly striking, more importantly, Esther’s reactions and the contrast between her experiences with Dr. Gordon and Dr. Nolan. Though the nurses seemed to be the ones to actually perform the treatment, they were under the instruction of the scenes’ respective doctors, and her reactions subsequently affected her perception of the doctors.                Going into her first shock treatment, Esther didn’t seem to fully understand exactly what was going to happen (When she was first told about shock treatment, she said she was curious about what it was). And, leading up to treatment itself, it still wasn’t explained; she was only told it was normal to be scared, “‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse grinned down at me. ‘Their first time everybody's scared to death.’ I tried to smile, but my skin had gone stiff, like parchment....