Salma's blog

       In Alison Bechdel's Fun Home , there are parallels in the struggles that Alison and her father, Bruce, experience. They both struggle with identity, more specifically sexuality, but handle it in very different ways. Throughout the novel, Alison gravitated towards self-acceptance and the journey to taking pride in her sexuality. She had the strength to experiment with her identity, read about it in books, and eventually come out to her parents, while Bruce remained hiding behind secrecy and the need to maintain a traditional family image. Their opposing ways of navigating their sexualities not only shaped their personal lives, but also the relationship between them.        This distinction becomes especially clear when Alison decides to come out to her mother and eventually learns about her fathers secret affairs with young men. A significant moment for her had been overlooked by Bruce's hidden life and the facade of the stereotypical famil...

Sylvia Plath's, The Bell Jar, ends in a powerful yet uncertain scene where Esther Greenwood is crossing an imaginary threshold that determines whether or not she is qualified to leave the asylum. Not only is she consumed by fear, but also by the likelihood that she won’t be able to be let out. This moment holds all that she has experienced and has yet to discover. Throughout the novel, Esther undergoes a whirlwind of emotions from the moment she stepped into New York City for her summer internship, to her last possible moments at the Belsize asylum. Through her ups and downs, she finds herself annoyed by society's standards pushing her to be someone she is not. In New York, she felt pressured to be the stereotypical teenage girl that goes to parties and drinks. At home in Massachusetts, she was expected to be the perfect, accomplished daughter that followed societal expectations and wrote in shorthand to showcase the intelligence that she was expected to have. The pressure she ...