The Bell Jar

Plath employs vivid imagery in her depiction of the apartment owned by Lenny, a popular disc-jockey or “DJ” who dates Doreen: 

It was built exactly like the inside of a ranch, only in the middle of a New York apartment house. He’d had a few partitions knocked down to make the place broaden out, he said, and then had them pine-panel the walls and fit up a special pine-paneled bar in the shape of a horseshoe. I think the floor was pine-paneled, too. Great white bearskins lay about underfoot, and the only furniture was a lot of low beds covered with Indian rugs. Instead of pictures hung up on the walls, he had antlers and buffalo horns and a stuffed rabbit head.

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Plath employs detailed imagery in her depiction of the mental health facility operated by the relatively unsympathetic Doctor Gordon: 

Doctor Gordon’s waiting room was hushed and beige. The walls were beige, and the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. There were no mirrors or pictures, only certificates from different medical schools, with Doctor Gordon’s name in Latin, hung about the walls. Pale green loopy ferns and spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on the end table and the coffee table and the magazine table. At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I realized it was because there were no windows.

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