Canonical Text:

The Bell Jar: by Sylvia Plath

While some might object to me placing this in "the canon," it is a standard high school text, and it deserves its place there for several reasons.  As a novel, Sylvia Plath's masterpiece can stand up with the best of modern American classics.  The work pushes boundaries stylistically, and Plath offers up her own brand of wry humor, biting social commentary, and a character whose voice and personality shine forth from the page.  Half-way between a work of pure fiction and an autobiography, The Bell Jar also offers a tempting venue for discussing the interaction between known facts about the authors of novels and the work that they create.  This is one of those rare novels that offers a wealth of interpretive ground to fertilize: gender theory, new-criticism, good old reader response and Marxist theory all come to mind.  Like much of the great literature, its very ability to be picked apart and analyzed speaks to its strength and appropriateness for the classroom.

Click the names of the strategies to open a new page with a more lengthy description.

Pre-reading Strategy: Internet Research

This activity will consist of using the internet to research mental health practices of the 1950's and 60's, with a focus on women and girls.  We will work in groups on this project, and each group will present their findings to the class in short speeches.  The purpose of this activity is to introduce some of the ideas and themes that The Bell Jar will deal with.  In addition, it should be fun as the students find some of the more... interesting methods used to treat those with mental health issues, as well as to see the sorts of things that could get you landed in a mental institution in that era.  I expect that many students will not know much about the topic, and I believe that a nuanced reading of the novel requires some background knowledge.

During-reading Strategy: Critical Lenses

This activity will break the class into two halves, with each side looking at the text through a different critical lens.  Each group will be given time to study a lens, such as Marxist, gender theory, or new-criticism and then will select passages on the homework readings that they think will help them to build a theory.  The groups will then present their interpretations of the same passage to each other on the next day to show them how one text can be read in multiple ways.  The ability to form thesis statements and back them up with textual detail is an essential skill for students of literature, especially the college-bound, and this activity will help to build these skills.

Post-reading Strategy: Music Storytelling

As an alternative assessment, the students will be asked to work in groups of two or three to make a soundtrack for The Bell Jar, which is  a moody novel that lends itself to this sort of unconventional activity.  The main character in the novel exhibits serious mood swings and quirks of perception, and using music to represent these gives the students a chance to both be creative as well as demonstrate an understanding of the communicative power of music.  They can use any genre of music, so long as there is some justification for the songs and arrangement, which will be demonstrated by a short reflective piece of writing.  The class will take a period to listen to these play lists together and discuss them.

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