Do The Awakening and The Bell Jar Place Readers at Risk?
Justine was one of these students, and she describeD in her essay how reading both novels was almost more than she could endure. She began by noting that she was depressed and lonely the preceding summer. “My grandmother’s death, being isolated in the dorm, attempting to write at the time what seemed the most impossible paper to make up an incomplete, most of the summer away from my boyfriend, and fear that I had a sexually transmitted disease drove me to putting an iron in the bath tub in an attempt to electrocute myself (grateful then and now that the cord could not reach an outlet). I turned my incomplete in on time and it turned out I did not have a sexually transmitted disease.” With her mother’s help Justine recovered, but this summer she started to feel depressed again, particularly when she identified with Esther Greenwood’s symptoms. “The Bell Jar made me think about suicide more clearly because of its realness in terms of Esther’s suicide attempts. I hate to admit the similar
