The treatment of madness in the bell jar and the yellow background Mental illness and madness are themes often explored in literature and the range of texts they explore these themes is extremely varied. Various factors can threaten a character's sanity, from traumatic events that trigger a decline to pressures from larger, impersonal sources. In general, writers have tried to demonstrate that most threats to sanity comprise a combination of long- and short-term factors: the library fire in Mervyn Peake's novel "Titus Groan" accelerated the descent of Lord Sepulchrave in madness, but in the long term. The problem can be identified in the weight of tradition which made him fear «that with him the line of the Groan should perish». This interaction between acute and chronic is, it would seem, a matter of agreement among authors who have explored this issue. How the characters respond to these threats is not. In some works the threatened character manages to acquire power: he finds a way to maintain himself and emerge from the test undefeated, if not indomitable. Esther Greenwood, as portrayed in Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar," is one such character, although the question always remains whether such a victory is a permanent solution. In many other works the characters' only option is to escape. This may be an escape from reality as described in Roald Dahl's short story "Georgy Porgy". It may be 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') ca... in the midst of paper... ...demonstrates throughout the first half of the novel that Greenwood is increasingly withdrawing from herself, with her inability to identify with her reflection in a mirror ("The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian" - uses no words to suggest that "the face in the mirror" is herself, and it is only from the context that the reader knows this) being the symbol of it. The first half of The Bell Jar, then, demonstrates that Esther Greenwood's initial responses to the pressures that threaten her sanity are first to lose her emotional connection to the world, and second to lose this connection to itself. Such a response only leads to further problems that the author will delve into in the rest of the novel, and it is a noteworthy point that in many cases defenses that may be useful at first in response to a threat may end up as part of the same problem.