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Esther Greenwood's search for identity in the bell jar
The bell jar esther defying society
The bell jar esther struggle to identify her
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The essay “Seeing Through the Bell Jar: Distorted Female Identity in Cold War America” by Rosi Smith, argues that the book, “The Bell Jar”, by Sylvia Plath is about women in 1950s America who struggled to find their personal identities outside what was defined by the Cold War Ideology of the role of women in the household. According to Smith, the character Esther Greenwood’s inability to integrate her identity is because of the state of the political environment and time frame in which the book is written. Smith argues that, “In a society where paranoia and surveillance were rife it is impossible to separate image, performance, and identity, because all are ideologically constrained and Esther’s profoundly personal self-alienation is inextricable from the external political climate” (35). Smith is saying that Ester is hampered by outside forces other than her own mental state or pathology.
The story about Esther is that she is an intelligent young woman who is attending a prestigious college. Esther has won scholarship after scholarship and is currently working on an internship at a magazine in New York. But after disappointing news that she was denied entry into a coveted writing course, Esther starts to enter into a state of depression. Her depression is compounded by the fact that society expects her to desire to be a stay at home wife and mother and not the hard-working, intelligent, self-sufficient female that she is capable of being. We see Esther spiral into self-destructive behavior where she makes a suicide attempt and ends up in a mental hospital. Esther is ‘punished’, as she sees it, with shock therapy. The end of the novel brings us to Esther’s evaluation in front of several doctors to decide whether she...
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...the backdrop of today’s political and social ideals I might not have felt much empathy for Esther as I do with her placed in the Cold War era, with limited life choices for intelligent, fulfillment seeking women. Women of this era were confined by their femininity and it left those who were more intellectual thinkers to feel unfulfilled in their expected gender role of ‘housewife’.
In conclusion, I enjoyed Smith’s arguments on gender roles and what was expected of women in the Cold War era. It was enlightening to see how far women have come today, based on the ideal role of the 1950s woman.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Print.
Smith, Rosi. "Seeing Through the Bell Jar: Distorted Female Identity in Cold War America." Seeing Through the Bell Jar: Distorted Female Identity in Cold War America. 33-55. Print.
In the end, it is clear that in recent decades, the domestic ideology and cold war militance have risen and fallen together. Immediately after World War II, stable family life seemed necessary for national security, civil defense, and the struggle for supremacy over the Soviet Union. For a generation of young adults who grew up amid depression and war, domestic containment was a logical response to specific historical circumstances. It allowed them to pursue, in the midst of a tense and precarious world situation, the quest for a sexually-fulfilling, consumer-oriented personal life that was free from hardship. But the circumstances were different for their children, who broke the consensus surrounding the cold war and domestic containment. Whether the baby-boom children will ultimately be more successful than their parents in achieving fulfilling lives and a more just and tolerant world remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: gender, family, and national politics are still intertwined in the ongoing saga of postwar cultural change.
The character of Esther is widely criticized for her perfection as a character, both receiving positive acclaims and negative feedback. Esther’s reserved, quiet character illustrates the role of women during the Victorian period and what little impact on society women played. Critics of Bleak House generally praise the narration and Dickens’s use of Esther’s character, which gives direction to the novel.
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
Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell Jar”, tells a story of a young woman’s descent into mental illness. Esther Greenwood, a 19 year old girl, struggles to find meaning within her life as she sees a distorted version of the world. In Plath’s novel, different elements and themes of symbolism are used to explain the mental downfall of the book’s main character and narrator such as cutting her off from others, forcing her to delve further into her own mind, and casting an air of negativity around her. Plath uses images of rotting fig trees and veils of mist to convey the desperation she feels when confronted with issues of her future. Esther Greenwood feels that she is trapped under a bell jar, which distorts her view of the world around her.
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
depth of women and their experiences in and around the Depression, Cold War and World War
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.
Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011. 42.
Ambiguity in literature after World War II reflects and explores issues of self and society. These two ideas often work against each other instead of coexisting to form a struggle-free existence. J. D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath, and Richard Heller illustrate this struggle with their works. These authors explore ambiguity through different characters that experience the world in different ways. Identity, while it is an easy concept, can be difficult to attain. These authors seek out ambiguity with the human experience, coming to different conclusions. Ambiguity becomes a vehicle through which we can attempt to define humanity. J. D. Salinger’s novel, Catcher in the Rye, Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Ball Jar, and Richard Heller’s novel, Catch 22 explore ambiguity experienced through an attempt to find self. Each experience is unique, incapable of fitting a generic mold created by society.
Life is full of endless amounts of beautiful encounters for every character in the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, except for Esther. She suffers from a severe and complex mental illness that impacts her life greatly. Although it is clear that Esther suffers strongly from depression in the novel, Sylvia Plath chooses to tell her life abstractly through countless symbols and ironies to prove that Esther depression completely consumes her. Everything that Esther sees is through a lens of depression, which scewed her outlook on life. An irony that is carried throughout the entire novel is the fact that Esther works in a prestigious fashion world, yet she sees everything gruesomely and cynically.
The events in New York introduce us to the beginning of Esther’s psychological transformation. The story first inaugurates with the executions of the Rosenbergs, where the Rosenbergs were electrocuted to death. They were believed to be supporting communism. The executions of the Rosenbergs deeply affected Esther’s mental state because of the way that they were executed. She believed that electrocution was unconstitutional and should have not been applied to them. According to Esther in chapter one, “I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I’d been to buy those uncomfortable, expensive clothes”(Plath 2). This quote emphasizes how Esther is becoming unable to control her mind mainly because of the events surrounding her. Based on Freud’s theory, a person’s mind is composed of both unconscious and conscious thoughts. When these thoughts interact they create a state of repression, where the person becomes unaware of conflicting problems that they be having. According to Rashmi Nemade author of “Psychology of Depression- Psychodynamic Theories Esther”, repress...
Often times we look through people and not truly at them. Sylvia Plath was one person who was looked through a lot when she desperately wanted to be noticed. As a striving poet and author in a time period where women were not expected to perform such tasks Sylvia struggled to keep it all together. Although she had her high points, like we all do, it remains apparent that she was battling with a deep inner conflict. Sylvia brings her emotional burden to life in her first novel The Bell Jar. Feminism, communism and a suicide attempt are all intertwined in this biography. The life of a not only a tortured poet but a struggling mother is obvious throughout her work. In order to grasp the lasting impression of Sylvia Plath, we have to understand where she comes from, how the critics and the people of her time viewed her, and the impact she left for the rest us.
The Bell Jar is an autobiography of a female sophomore. The girl-Esther, who is 19 years old, came from suburban area of Boston. As she had talent writing skills, she was invited to New York to serve as guest editor in a national fashion magazine office. In her one-month stay in New York, on one hand, Esther was cautious and conscientious to learn from an able and efficient female editor-Jay Cee, and she dreamt to follow Jay Cee’s successful step. On the other hand, she met various men and women in her colorful social life. These experiences reminded her of her life in women’s university, especially her relationship with her boyfriend- Buddy Willard. As the recollection often interweaved with reality, they brought Esther perplexity, discouragement and lost. Esther could not even more figure out the significance of reality as well as the goal of her own life. When her life in New York came to an end, Esther came back her hometown to spend the summer vacation with her mother. However, a new incident hard hit Esther- she was rejected by the writing course that she was given high expectation by professors in her university. The conservative atmosphere in the town made Esther feel days wear on like years. Esther denied completely that all achievements she got in past 19 years, and she even felt doubtful and terrified toward the future. Facing such heavy pressure, she was broken down totally. Since she was lost at that time, she tried to put an end to her life. After she was saved, she received psychological consultation in a psychiatric hospital. In this period, she rethought and relocated her position, and she rebuilt confidence step by step. At the end of the novel, Esther waited to leave hospital and she looked forward to starting a...
In Plath’s The Bell Jar, imagery is used to show the contrast between Esther’s internal self and the external society. The bell jar, that slowly descending over her, is a symbol for the growing isolation Esther feels as her depression worsens throughout the novel and also the alienation she receives as a result of a societal stigma associated with mental illnesses such as depression. Within the first half of the novel, there are many dark images, such as the dead babies in
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.