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The bell jar esther struggle to identify her
Esthers death the bell jar
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The Bell Jar The book starts with the setting in New York as the main character is pondering the execution of the Rosenbergs. Esther the main character is in New York because of contest held by a fashion magazine. While in New York Esther tells about her life by the encounters she's had. She is a college student and is in the honors courses. The whole trip to New York had messed up Esters way of thinking. For example before she went to New York she had planed to finish college and become a poet or English professor, but now she had no idea. When Esther returned home she became very depressed. She wanted to disregard the whole New York experience by taking a exclusive summer writing course. Only the best of the best writers had been able to be excepted to this class and Esther was sure she had made it until her mother had told her she was not accepted. This was what pushed Esther over the edge. She became more and more obsessed about how she would kill herself and planed it out carefully. When the time came she just couldn't do it. So she began to preoccupied herself by thinking of other ways of death. She couldn't sleep or read this bothered her because she loved to read. Finally she went to see a doctor who gave her shock treatments. This made Esther even worse an so she slipped even deeper into her depressed state. She knew the bell jar was almost completely apon her and there was nothing she could do to prevent...
throughout this book is very visible. It has to do with her search for a name,
The primitive American culture during the 1950’s has damaging effects on Esther’s mental stability because she discovers that marriage halts career focus and promotes male dominance. Esther is a young woman who aspires to achieve a high standing in society by becoming a renowned writer. However, her motivation to follow her passion is stifled by the other women prevalent in the society. During her internship for the New York magazine, Esther witnesses:
Money, money, money, money, money. People just care about the Benjamins, the moolah, the cash, the dough— but is it really essential to the human existence, or does society just accept the systematic oppression that comes with the dog-eat-dog nature of our economic system since it benefits the people on top? Monetary gains are all well and good; however, when does it commence to overtake our lives and when does it become our end goal? Instead of relying on money for food, shelter and our overall well-being, society views it as a tool that gives them power over other people, thus putting one’s economic status on a pedestal and making life a difficult competition. So yes, it is a dog-eat-dog world, but that’s not exactly a healthy perspective
When Esther is finally through with Dr. Gordon’s shock treatments, she expresses her frustration with her mother, who brushes it aside and tells Esther that she wasn’t like “Those awful dead people at that hospital (145-146). Her mother doesn’t understand the scene Esther saw, with the stories of people and their first shock treatments. She does not realize the vitality of Esther’s conditions. When Esther considers converting to Catholicism, believing that her conversion will take away her suicide attempts, her mother laughs it off. Esther also notes that her mother did not care to mourn for her dead husband. Her mother believed that her husband would’ve lived a miserable life and would’ve wanted to die instead. Although Esther was firm in her stance against her mother, she could have acted so hostile against her mother because of what she was going through. Her mother could have wanted to help her, but her way was possibly different than that of
For her entire life, Esther has juggled different versions of herself that she takes on to please other people; this leaves her inner self feeling lost and confused. Esther Greenwood is a girl who has known one thing in her life: winning prizes and scholarships. The summer after her junior year of college, she wins a fashion magazine contest for a month-long internship in New York. Cognizant that she should be having the time of her life, Esther only feels numb and disappointed. She stands at the bottom of New York’s “granite canyons,” seeing them as inaccessible (Plath 1). Their sheer height disallusion her from even attempting to climb them, and dust blows in her face, suffocating her words and vision. Like a leech, Esther latches onto various people in her life to feel like she is living. For her friend from the magazine, Doreen, she acts strong and daring when she allows hersel...
...a Plath page 93) After finding out that she had not made the writing course, Esther thought to herself; that even before entering the essay, she knew she would not make the course. Proving that even before entering her essay for the college, she had no confidence in being accepted.
with the people around her. At the end of the novel, the bell jar has
Artistic works, including books, tend to reflect their creator. Sylvia Plath authored The Bell Jar shortly before committing suicide. A semi-autobiographical work, many real events became included with names and places changed, though thinly veiled to those who knew her. Published after her death amidst much controversy, the novel follows Esther Greenwood through her depression, suicide attempt, and struggle to recover. While many factual physical events appear in the book, clearly other internal factors affecting Ms. Plath during her final days have representation through the thoughts and feeling of her protagonist. The Bell Jar provides an accurate portrait of the environment and inner struggle of its author in her final days.
Before visiting New York and getting thrown into the real world Esther had been very successful academically:
On April 12th, 2014, Syracuse Stage presented the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. The play was directed by Timothy Bond, and turned out to be an interesting production. The Glass Menagerie is a memory play that is set in St. Louis in 1937. Its action is taken from the memories of the narrator, Tom Wingfield. Tom who has a dream of being a poet works in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. Their father, Mr. Wingfield ran off years ago. They had not heard from him except for in one postcard, they said he fell in love with long distance. Their mother Amanda, who genuinely wants the best for her children, pressures them with her uncontrollable desires for them. She is disappointed that Laura, who is crippled and is painfully shy, does not attract any gentlemen callers. She is even more disappointed to see that her son is following in his father’s footsteps.
...dition, so the doctor thought that this weakness was the reason she died.What really killed her was being put back into the role that was forced and expected of her. When her husband walked in, all of her feminine freedom vanished.
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” ( http://thinkexist.com/quotes/sylvia_plath/)
her life. She longed to live an independent life, but struggled to earn a living wage with the jobs she
Tennessee, lying midway between the fruitful Southern climes of Florida and the wintery North, represents a perfect location for Wallace Stevens to explore his attitudes toward the sort of creative identity he makes for himself in either location. The South, characterized by its warmth and wildness clashes with the “gray and bare” (10) industrial North on that hill in Tennessee in “Anecdote of the Jar”. Though the jar takes dominion, the poet does not necessarily place favor on either side of the conflict since Stevens was “of two minds… about this midway South” (Stevens, 208). Here we see that Stevens is in a place both geographically and poetically between the two extremes. He has not yet reached his destination on his poetic journey, but seems closer to the beginning of his trip than the end. Old images of nature and Keats’ Urn crop up here in Tennessee and though he has not yet finished “taking the leaves off the tree”, Stevens he has more than begun to strip it bare. “Anecdote of the Jar” reflects Stevens’ ambivalence about man’s ability to create order in a chaotic world and the role of the artist or poet in using old forms to create a new order.
a. While we can appreciate writers of the past, we should not limit ourselves to