Similarly, in The Bell Jar, Esther struggles with her responsibilities. Being apprenticed to the editor of an intellectual fashion magazine is a huge responsibility to Esther and as such she finds herself pretending.
“I’m very interested in everything.’ The words fell with a hollow flatness onto Jay Cee’s desk, like so many wooden nickels.”
Even though she speaks the truth when she says that she’s interested, she can’t make the words sound convincing. This could be because she doesn’t quite know what she’s doing there. She has lost her sense of reality – she feels hollow, so the ‘words falling with a hollow flatness onto the desk’ is a metaphor for how she feels inside her own mind: hollow and empty. When she gets the scholarship to a New York College, she struggles to fit in with the other competition winners. This results in her often feeling isolated and self-contained. “It was my own silence”. The noise and complexity of life in New York could cause Esther to feel lost; this could ultimately be the catalyst of her disturbed train of thought. Her mind seeks to protect itself and by doing so, provides her with thoughts which drown out the rest of the real world so she is effectively living in a virtual reality. However, it is a virtual reality very unlike that of Jeanette, who deliberately immerses herself in a fairytale in order to escape reality. Esther doesn’t have that choice, she is forced into this virtual reality of her own thoughts because they have drowned out the rest of the world – she can’t escape it.
This could be a metaphor for how her world is falling apart, hence why her mind would seem to be ‘silent’. She is imagining living in a silent world because she doesn’t know how to handle herself in an unfamiliar environment. She is used to living in a much quieter little town; to come to live in New York is a massive change which could easily have caused her to forget who she is and why she’s there.
It is difficult to identify one character as being more disturbed than another in Oranges are not the Only Fruit. The protagonist’s mother could be construed as ‘mad’ because of her lack of compassion for her adoptive daughter and her evident obsession with the church, Pastor Spratt and God. Similarly, some of the other characters could also view the character of Elsie as mad, yet this could be due to old age and forgetfulness. The protagonist on the other hand, experiences mental disturbance because of how she feels about herself, offering obvious points of comparison with Esther in The Bell Jar, but also, to some extent the character of Ophelia.
Furthermore, in Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Jeanette loses who she is because she cannot cope with living up to her mother’s expectations. Therefore she immerses herself in a virtual reality where she can be free to be different. Jeanette loses her sense of self because of how her love for Melanie is viewed by other people; because she was brought up in the church, most of the people she knows conform to God and His ideologies, of which lesbianism is deemed to be unacceptable, therefore Jeanette’s relationship with Melanie is seen as wrong by almost everyone she knows. However Jeanette differs to Ophelia because Jeanette has a relationship with another woman, whereas Ophelia’s relationship with Hamlet is not a physical relationship. This contrast presents a number of ideas and themes in that perhaps Jeanette’s love for Melanie is the cause of her downfall. However for Ophelia, it is the death of her father, Polonius that is the initial trigger for her downfall.
Another theme presented by Jeanette’s love for Melanie is that of rejection. As Jeanette is rejected from the church for her lesbianism, she loses everything she was brought up to believe in. This compares to Ophelia because she was brought up to behave in certain ways and to believe in certain things. Ophelia conforms to these behaviours and ideas because she knows no different and she fears what could become of her virtues if she chooses to not to conform to the behaviours presented to her by her father. On the other hand, Jeanette chooses not to conform to her mother’s ideologies – which again compares to Ophelia because essentially they are both having their lives dictated by a parent. Instead she decides to follow her heart and ultimately rejects her mother’s image of the perfect daughter.
Sexual relationships in all three texts could be significantly important to the downward spirals into madness experienced by Esther, Jeanette and Ophelia. Because of the era in which Hamlet was written (Elizabethan era), sexual relationships before marriage were heavily frowned upon. As such, Ophelia was forbidden from having any such relationships in order to preserve her virtue. The era dictates that she is worth nothing without her virtue before she is married.
“Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain, if with too credent ear you list his songs; or lose your heart; or your chaste treasure open to his unmaster’d importunity.”
As her brother, it is Laertes’s job to inform Ophelia of the dangers of falling in love with Hamlet. Laertes knows well the way in which young men think – being one himself – and so he knows that Hamlet will try to take Ophelia’s virtue. He warns her against getting too close to Hamlet, as this will result in her losing her virtue. She has a duty to both her brother and her father: this duty is to ensure that she retains her virtue so that she can be of more financial gain to her father and Laertes. By being forbidden from having any sexual encounters, Ophelia could want to defy the ruling of her father and, knowing that to do so would probably result in him disowning her, she resists what she wants and instead does as she’s told. This lack of freedom in her choices could be the start of what could be considered madness because she is unable to live of her own free will. In contrast, Esther feels as though she has to lose her virtue in order to fit in with the other girls around her – particularly Doreen. *
