Mental illness in The Bell Jar Mental illness and madness is a theme often explored in literature and the range of texts that explore them is extremely varied. Various factors can threaten a character's mental health, ranging from traumatic events that trigger a decline to pressures from larger, impersonal sources. Generally speaking, the authors attempted to show that most threats to mental health include a combination of long-term and short-term factors - the library fire in the novel "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake precipitated Lord Sepulchrave's descent into madness, but a longer term The problem can be discerned in the weight of tradition which made him fear "that with him the line of Groan would perish". Such an interaction between the acute and the chronic is, it seems, a matter of agreement among authors who have explored this issue. How the characters react to these threats is not. In some works, the threatened character manages to become autonomous – he finds a way to maintain himself and emerge from the ordeal unconquered, even undefeated. Esther Greenwood, as portrayed in Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar," is one such character, although the question still remains whether such a victory is a permanent solution. In many other works, the only option for characters is to escape. Perhaps it is an escape from reality, as described in Roald Dahl's short story "Georgy Porgy." Perhaps it is an escape from self-awareness, as shown in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper." The ultimate escape is self-destruction - Sepulchrave's death in "Titus Groan" and Sylvia Plath's real-life suicide in 1963 (just three weeks after the publication of "The Bell Jar") can both be considered a final recourse when the pressures that threatened their sanity proved too pervasive and too powerful to overcome. Esther Greenwood's first response is to withdraw: she tries to protect herself by severing her emotional connection with the outside world and also, increasingly, with herself. In various places, Plath describes scenes that would normally be disgusting and horrific - the language used, however, is clinical and cold and leaves the reader with the impression that the narrator is failing to respond emotionally to what she is observing. In describing preserved medical specimens of fetuses, Greenwood says that "the baby in the first bottle had a large white head leaning over a small, curled up body the size of a frog." There is no comment on this or similar descriptions that follow until the next paragraph where she confides that "I was quite proud of the calm way in which I looked at all these horrible things." This response is almost childish and flippant and does not remain easy with the horrible sights she was seeing (and Plath implicitly admits this with the "horrible things" in the world) - nevertheless the tone of the comment underlines the blockage she places. between her and disturbing scenes. The very structure of the writing underlines this: the position of the comment at the beginning of the next paragraph creates a break in the flow of the writing and emphasizes Plath's disjointed emotional state. Other episodes reiterate this. When Greenwood first sees Buddy Willard naked, we expect her to have a passionate or at least emotional response given that they were in a serious relationship. Her comment is "The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I was very impressed" -..