Digital Humanities

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 3 My final book cover of The Bell Jar was an attempt to take a little bit of everything from the past fifty years of cover editions and compile it all into a cover that displays, what I like to believe, things Plath would have approved of. Though there were two large concepts that were missing in the final cover compared to my original sketch, such as a city in the background and a rose in the girl’s hand, in the end they didn’t fit and I tossed out the ideas in order to keep the cover pretty and simple.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 The first thing I knew I’d want on my new cover was a girl, not too young like some of the other editions but not too old either. The girl I found in Google photos looks to me about twenty years old. Though you can’t see her well since I covered her with a lot of purple, she came up with a search of Depressed Girl, and it’s true, she looks very sad and sits lonely on a bench, but yet she is in nice clothes—another aspect I hoped for. I had such a fun time with the paint bucket tool when I was making things purple, and I went a little crazy on making the girl who was once fully visible, purple. I was just about to press Undo when I looked at it in a different light and actually came to love how much the girl faded into the background, because that’s basically what I wanted in the first place!

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 In almost all of the older editions, the woman/girl’s face is somehow covered, whether it is blurred or she is turned away. If not her face, then the cover will only depict a body part, such as her foot or hand. I chose to cover her face with the title because with the gray-filled rectangle covering only her face, at one glance it would be obvious that that is the purpose it’s serving.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 The two things that didn’t make it into my final design was a city and a rose, both ideas found in earlier versions. The city is important because it shows the setting, but also would show that despite the bustling city and its population, the girl is still sitting alone on a bench. A rose would have been nice because it shows the delicacy, femininity, and innocence that Plath seems to write her characters with.

All in all, I was very happy with the way the cover turned out! It has almost all of the aspects I was looking for, and in the end just shows a portrayal of a young, lonely, depressed woman whose face is covered by a dark object (the title), but in the background is the mauve color that so many editions held. This was my substitute to the rose, because the both have pretty much the same connotations.