Short Story Analysis: The Girl-Shaped Jar by Camille Alexa

To me The Girl Shaped Jar by Camille Alexa fits into the literary category because it is driven by Sammi, as the story is about her character. Where popular fiction is plot driven, this is driven by the character herself.

Sammi is clearly an introvert who has allowed perception to overrule reality. The female-form-shaped jar that she purchases is her perceived perception of what happiness will be. If she can fit in the jar, regardless if she can breathe properly or not, she views that as her way to achieve happiness. It’s addressing the warped perception that society has about women’s bodies and the way society shows us how to be happy. People will do anything to be considered beautiful by society and being beautiful equals happiness. The portrayal of this dark social issue really highlights the flaws in society and how much impact society and media have on women, telling them to be beautiful you need to look a certain way, or to be happy you have to look like this or be like this. This could potentially fit into the popular fiction category as a story about the impact society has on us.

This falls within the horror genre of literature, and more importantly the subgenre of psychological horror because Sammi’s mental and emotional state are both frighteningly unstable. It indirectly shows us the dangerous and scary side to the impact the media and beauty/fashion industries have on people’s idea of who they need to be, and what they need to look like. The dangerous and frightening side to this is the extreme lengths people go to just to fit in to what society has told them they need to be, thus in turn having a detrimental effect of their mental state, and ability to rationalise what they are doing is dangerous and not the norm.

The fact that she is trying to understand the relationship with her boyfriend, if he is that, shows that she is so preoccupied with knowing happiness for the rest of her life, shows that she is out of touch with her actual happiness and reality. She has a warped tunnel vision focus of achieving her perceived happiness, she has withdrawn from friends and the outside world, friends, allowing her to dive deeper into materialising her happiness for the rest of her life. The author uses a narrative style to tell Sammi’s story, by the way she peels back the layers of Sammi’s character, to show her in a truthful and unpolished light.

This story brings a level of discomfort and a chilling level of the reality of the extremes of what people put themselves through to achieve a perceived happiness or perceived beauty. It’s frightening because even though this is a story, we have heard real life stories of the extremes people go to for the same goal and the mental instability of these people and how warped their perception of reality is, it’s scary.

The Girl-Shaped Jar provides us with a small glimpse into this character’s life and story at this moment in time, it is expressing her views about her happiness and how she will achieve it for the rest of her life. This would be considered a flash-fiction because the story is so narrow and short, her life is as hollow as the glass jar she fits in.