The Bell Jar People's lives are shaped through their success and failure in their personal relationships with each other. The author Sylvia Plath demonstrates this in the novel, The Bell Jar. This is the direct result of the loss of support from a loved one, the lack of support and encouragement, and lack of self confidence and insecurity in Esther's life in the The Bell Jar. It was shaped through her success and failures in her personal relationships between others and herself. Through life, we often lose someone we loved and cared deeply for and supported us through life. This is demonstrated by the loss of a loved one when Esther's father died when she was nine. "My German speaking father, dead since I was nine came from some manic-depressive hamlet in the Prussia." (Sylvia Plath page 27.) Esther's father's death had showed that she was in need of a father figure for love, support and to act as a model for her life. Esther grew up with only the one influence of a parent, her mother. Often times the loss of a friendship can be a great loss of support and confidence within our lives because we can lose them forever. This is demonstrated when Buddy Willard Esther's boyfriend break up. "He told me that his annual fall chest x-ray showed he had caught tuberculosis...in the Adirondacks" (Sylvia Plath pg. 58.) Buddy and Esther break up due to the fact that he was not very honest with her in many ways. He did not have the courage to admit to a certain side of his character and not only that Buddy was diagnosed with an illness but he had other relationships aside from Esther. Therefore Esther experienced another loss of a loved one. Within life, we gain the support from someone that helps us get through life but often times leaves us when we need them most. This is proven when Doreen; Esthers co-worker at the modeling magazine begins to lose contact with Esther through life "Doreen is dissolving... none of them mean anything anymore" (Sylvia Plath pg.17) Doreen begins to lose contact with Esther throughout life, just when Doreen had opened new doors to her. Esther was coming through a very difficult time in life, when Doreen started drifting away from Esther. Once again, Esther experienced the loss and support of a great friend and advocate. Ones' life is made up by framework. You gather friends and folks together and ... ... middle of paper ... ...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. After building confidence within herself, Esther decided to write an autobiography using herself as the heroine but she felt that she could not write a novel based on life because she felt she had not experienced it. "How could I write about life...baby or even seen anybody die." (Sylvia Plath pg. 99) Thus, this proves that Esther did not even have the self confidence within herself to follow through with her own ambition of becoming a writer. During a journey through life one starts with a foundation to build on and decide on framework of ones life. In order to sustain and maintain life one needs a basis of love, support, food for thought and life to breath, expression and experience. If an individuals life is shaped and directed by the successes or failures of human relationship, without substance, one might as well seal up their life with a vacuum lid and live in a glass jar.
In fact, Ishmael, and the other boys, made it their goal to make the staff miserable. Life as a soldier made Ishmael broken and distrustful. In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael stated “People like the lieutenant, whom I obeyed and trusted, had made me question trusting any one, especially adults” (153). Ultimately, he learned to depend on himself. He felt like he did not need any help. In fact, Ishmael felt like the staff at the rehabilitation center did not have the right to know his story because they would never understand. It always enraged him when the staff told the former child soldiers that it was not their fault they were in that position. Along the way, Ishmael met Esther, a caring nurse. Esther was one of the first people who Ishmael relied on. For a while, Ishmael ignored her kind gestures and her friendly words. However, Esther was persistent when it came to Ishmael. She was always willing to see him, to tend to his wounds, and to listen to his stories. In addition, she never judged him for the actions he carried out during his time as a soldier. Through patients, Esther was able to befriend
In the novel, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath the protagonist is named Esther Greenwood. Through the book Esther wonders if she should marry and live a conventional domestic life, or attempt to satisfy her ambition. Esther is from Massachusetts who goes to New York as a college student who is working for a month to be a guest editor for a magazine. She and the other eleven girls are pampered all the time. She has two friends who worry her, Betsey is very perky, but Doreen is very rebellious. Esther once goes on a date with a man named Marco who tries to rape her, but doesn’t succeed. This is something that can have an emotional, psychological, physical, personal, and social effect on someone and their day to day living. After having all of this happen to her with Marco and her two friends she says “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and the...
"The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head…” For most people, when the name Sylvia Plath comes to mind, the word “psychotic” is the word that follows; however, there was more to Plath than her demented works. Throughout her shortened life, Plath had a variety of titles bestowed upon her: daughter, sister, student, wife, mother, teacher, author, and poetess However, Sylvia Plath was a haunted soul, as she also had the labels of “manic depressive” and “bipolar.” Her constant struggles with her mental illnesses are evident in her writing, especially her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.
In the novel, Esther Greenwood, the main character, is a young woman, from a small town, who wins a writing competition, and is sent to New York for a month to work for a magazine. Esther struggles throughout the story to discover who she truly is. She is very pessimistic about life and has many insecurities about how people perceive her. Esther is never genuinely happy about anything that goes on through the course of the novel. When she first arrives at her hotel in New York, the first thing she thinks people will assume about her is, “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a
Bernard, Lauren. "TAKING ON A MOURNING HER MOTHER NEVER BOTHERED WITH: ESTHER’S ANGUISHED MEMORY AND HER RESISTANCE TO A DOMESTIC LIFE IN SYLVIA PLATH’S THE BELL JAR." Ed. Steven Axelrod.Department of English University of California, Riverside, 2009. Web. 5 Dec. 2013.
Esther is having a hard time accepting the person that she is trying to become. She views herself as an outlier and has little confidence. The loss of identity that she has created has a negative impact on who she is as a person. In another example, while Esther is in the elevator, she looks at herself in the mirror and does not recognize her reflection, “A big, smudgy-eyed Chinese women staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I looked,” (Plath 18). In her reflection, she views herself as someone she no longer recognizes. She has lost her identity of who she once was and now identifies herself as a
Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised as a Unitarian Christian by her German father and Austrian mother. Because of her father’s European culture, there was a constant cultural gap that got in the way of their communication and paternal connection, which led to a distant relationship between them. When Plath was only eight years old, her father died because of his untreated diabetes. After which, Plath experienced a loss of faith and remained equivocal about religion throughout her life. In 1950’s, Plath attended Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts, which was an all-girls college. Plath excelled in her studies; however, she found college life stressful and tedious because of the social and academic rigors. In 1953, Plath won a Guest Editorship at Mademoiselle in New York City. Her experiences in New York began a downward spiral in her life because of her competitively harsh environment. It is said that many events during her New York experience influenced her writing of The Bell Jar, which is arguably a semi-autobiographical novel that parallels Plath’s own depression to Esther’s fall into mental illness. After returning from New York, Plath made numerous suicide attempts and was later checked into a psychiatric hospital where she met doctors who would help her recover. Plath’s cold and clinical environment greatly influenced her writing of The Bell Jar, which explores the
“My heroine would be myself, only in disguise…There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.” In Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, there were many examples of things that correlated between Esther Greenwood and Sylvia Plath’s lives. For example, the characters were drawn together by the intention they both had of killing themselves, their risk factors, the events that pushed them to suicidal thoughts, and the once–and–for–all decision of life or death.
On the eve of her freedom from the asylum, Esther laments, “I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead- after all, I had been ‘analyzed.’ Instead, all I could see were question marks” (243). The novel is left open-ended, with a slightly optimistic tone but no details to help the reader fully understand the final step of her healing process. Esther desired to be free of social conventions and double standards, but consistently imposed them upon herself and on the people around her. Her evolution in understanding never reaches a satisfying conclusion, and the reader is also left with nothing but question marks.
She claims that she has `always wanted to learn German` although `the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam`. Esther associates the language with her `German-speaking father`, who `cane from some manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia'. I think that Esther`s stunt in progress is directly linked to the death of her father, and the little that she knows about him, and that a major factor contributing to her eventual suicide attempt is the fact that she used to be the best and no longer can be.
When Esther went to go talk to a physiatrist for the first time, she tells him a variety of issues she is having, like, “...I told Doctor Gordon about not sleeping and not eating and not reading. I didn’t tell him about the handwriting, which bothered me most of all.” (130). These are things we saw Esther doing in the first chapters of the book that we lose after the Marco incident. Esther’s depression also changes the setting of the book by itself, through the actions it puts Esther through, like the suicide attempts.
At the end of the novel, Esther finally see’s a light at the end of the tunnel. She finally realizes that there is hope for her to become healthy again. Once Esther realizes that she will not always feel as bad as she does, she also comes to the conclusion that all the negativity and questioning in her life have made her into the person she has become. Esther finally realizes what her true identity is and she is okay with who she has become.
"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days" (Plath). Plath was in fact a schizophrenic, never really being cured and only receiving temporarily relief from her own mind with electroshock therapy. Her novel, The Bell Jar, is almost a self-biography with the veil of fiction over the story of Plath’s own life being so thin that her mother fought its publication (McCann 1631). Nevertheless, Plath’s immense hard work paid off and it was published. Writing was Plath’s passion and when she wrote, her life became an enthralling story. Sylvia Plath’s late teenage years, time right after college, and time in the mental hospital were all influential in writing The Bell Jar.
Even from a very young age, children and people alike are encouraged to have an idea for a plan for their lives. Often times what an individual chooses has a major impact on that person’s physical life as well as he or she’s emotional stability. In the Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, using the characterization of Esther and her mother, exposes the how women during the 1950s can often spiral into depression as a result of the harsh expectations that encompass them.
Esther distinctly begins to fall into her depression when realizing how trapped she is as a woman when it comes to career: she bursts into tears when asked what she wants to be at the photoshoot (Plath, 53) distraught with not knowing how her life will turn out. “At the close of the war, employers reestablished the prewar sexual division of labor. To justify the discriminatory practices against women, popular culture began to create the concept of the proper role for women” (Holt, 2). Gender roles were heavily enforced and Esther feels as if she had no power, and that only one career could be chosen which she could not come to terms with. Even if she had been able to choose just one to focus on, she would have to be an expert, and fight