Sylvia Plath was a troubled writer to say the least, not only did she endure the loss of her father a young age but she later on “attempted suicide at her home and was hospitalized, where she underwent psychiatric treatment” for her depression (Dunn). Writing primarily as a poet, she only ever wrote a single novel, The Bell Jar. This fictional autobiography “[chronicles] the circumstances of her mental collapse and subsequent suicide attempt” but from the viewpoint of the fictional protagonist, Esther Greenwood, who suffers the same loss and challenges as Plath (Allen 890). Due to the novel’s strong resemblance to Plath’s own history it was published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath expresses the themes of alienation and societal pressure on women in the 1950s through symbolism, an unconventional protagonist, and imagery.
Through an overwhelming sense of symbolism, the author demonstrates both the separation and pressures that Esther Greenwood goes through. The reoccurring image of a bell jar haunts Esther throughout her story representing both her mental illness and her alienation from the society surrounding her. As Dunn states “a glass ‘bell jar’ is used to cover and protect laboratory materials. Significantly, a bell jar also allows objects to remain in view.” Much like a scientific specimen, Esther is readily visible to those around her both observation and study. The jar in this case represents her mental instability, which causes her to be isolated from the rest of society and treated abnormally. Furthermore, “Plath [uses] the bell jar to indicate the circumference of the world of pain and mental suffering Esther Greenwood, the heroine, lives in” (Evans 105). The heroine herself admit...
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...scandal that they did in the tabloids and had only seen it as an immediate means out, a way to escape. Rich in descriptive phrases and words this imagery contributes to the themes.
From headlines to cadavers, bell jars to mental illnesses, and a subdued matron to a rebellious young lady, this novel hosts the two overarching themes of alienation and constraints on women in the 1950s. Esther Greenwood separates herself from nearly all of society and simultaneously must overcome the strictures that are set upon her and hinder her from the future she aspires towards. Through extensive imagery, symbolism, and characterization Sylvia Plath delves into how people strive for perfection and acceptance through social standards and additionally how those that do not comply completely with them are alienated from the group of society, either by themselves or by the group.
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 main character in Sylvia Plath's novel, The Bell Jar, could be the spokesperson for all of Steinem's ideas. Esther Greenwood breaks all of the traditional rules that a female in her time should have been following. Esther is a bold and independent woman. Which makes Buddy Willard, he...
In Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood seems incapable of healthy relationships with other women. She is trapped in a patriarchal society with rigid expectations of womanhood. The cost of transgressing social norms is isolation, institutionalization and a lost identity as woman. The struggle for an individual identity under this regime is enough to drive a person to the verge of suicide. Given the oppressive system under which she must operate, Esther Greenwood's problems with women stem from her conflict between individuality and conformity.
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.
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.
Sylvia Plath wrote the semi autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, in which the main character, Esther, struggles with depression as she attempts to make herself known as a writer in the 1950’s. She is getting the opportunity to apprentice under a well-known fashion magazine editor, but still cannot find true happiness. She crumbles under her depression due to feeling that she doesn’t fit in, and eventually ends up being put into a mental hospital undergoing electroshock therapy. Still, she describes the depth of her depression as “Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street a cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (Plath 178). The pressure to assimilate to society’s standards from her mother, friends, and romantic interests, almost pushes her over the edge and causes her to attempt suicide multiple times throughout her life. Buddy Willard, Esther’s boyfriend at a time, asks her to marry him repeatedly in which she declines. Her mother tries to get her to marry and makes her go to therapy eventually, which leads to the mental hospital. Esther resents the way of settling down and making a family, as well as going out and partying all night. She just wants to work to become a journalist or publisher. Though, part of her longs for these other lives that she imagines livings, if she were a different person or if different things happened in her life. That’s how Elly Higgenbottom came about. Elly is Esther when Esther doesn’t want to be herself to new people. Esther’s story portrays the role of women in society in the 1950’s through Esther’s family and friends pushing her to conform to the gender roles of the time.
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.
One is often enticed to read a novel because of the way in which the characters are viewed and the way in which characters view their surroundings. In the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Esther Greenwood is a character whose "heightened and highly emotional response to events, actions and sentiments" (Assignment sheet) intrigue the reader. One of her character traits is extreme paranoia that is shown in different situations throughout the novel. As a result of this, she allows herself to be easily let down, as she believes that all events that are unsatisfactory are directed towards her. Finally, it is clear that she attempts to escape this notion by imagining an idyllic yet impossible life that she envisions in remote circumstances. It is clear that Plath's creation is a Novel of Sensibility as her writing not only possesses all of the qualities associated with this genre, it also effectively takes the reader into the story with the protagonist.
The Bell Jar, written by Sylvia Plath, starts of in the summer of the mid-1950s. Esther Greenwood, the main character, is a 19 year full of ambition and creativity that works at a popular magazine company. Esther mainly has two “best friends”, Betsy and Doreen. Having a pretty decent life in New York she feels as though she is missing something and that she isn’t experiencing life as some of the other ladies her age are. Esther is faced with the thought of not being what she should be. Which is, what the other women of her age are expected to be, by society’s views. The night before Esther is supposed to go back to her mother, who lives in the suburbs outside of Boston, she goes to a country club dance with Doreen and Doreen’s boyfriend and
Throughout The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath explores a number of themes, particularly regarding the gender roles, and subsequently, the mental health care system for women. Her 19-year-old protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is the vessel through which Plath poses many probing questions about these topics to the reader. In the 1950s when the novel was set, women were held to a high standard: to be attractive but pure, intelligent but submissive, and to generally accept the notion of bettering oneself only in order to make life more comfortable for the significant male in her life. Esther not only deals with the typical problems faced by women in her time, but she has to experience those things through the lens of mental illness though it is up for debate whether or not it was those same issues that caused her “madness” in the first place. In particular, Esther finds herself both struggling against and succumbing to the 1950s feminine ideal- a conflict made evident in her judgments of other women, her relationships with Buddy Willard, and her tenuous goals for the future.
...which were dead in mothers’ belly, were placed in the bottle. To Esther, this image always linked to abnormal growth, suffocation and death: “The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t sir” (p.178). The latter part in the novel, Esther experienced a serious of symbolic events, and she began all over again and was ready to new life. However, what waited for her was still the contradiction that the society put on women, and the value of women could not be totally reflected as before. It could be predicted that in such society-value was distorted like the bell jar, Esther would be probable to fall into the “crisis of roles” and lost the courage for living again. The novel did not describe Esther’s “new born”, anyhow, the “new born” of the author-Sylvia Plath did not last for a long time.
One’s identity is the most important lesson to be learned. It is vital part of life knowing who you are in order to live a fulfilled life. Without knowing your identity, and the way you perceive life, it is difficult for others to understand you, along with a struggle to live a happy life. In Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” Esther Greenwood struggles to find her own identity, and in the process, she develops a mental illness which helps her discover the person she is on the inside.
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 scews her outlook on life.
Esther’s psychological transformation from a perfectly healthy person ends up suffering from depression. Her influences around her have negatively shown Esther a negative path to take. The events during the 1950s such as the Rosenbergs executions have only made the transformation even powerful. Sylvia Plath’s life could be compared to the Bell Jar because she was in the same situation as Esther. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and psycho dynamic has addressed depression through the main character Esther.
Every institution Ester has—her friend group, her work colleagues, her family, and her therapists—all fail her. This leaves her with, what Sigmund Freud would call, cognitive dissonance: a gap between who she felt she should be and her actual internal state. “[The Bell Jar’s] subject matter . . . has increasing relevance 40 years on. The book examines a contemporary concern--how is it that privileged and educated young people (especially young women) increasingly turn to varied kinds of self harm, as a way of coping” (McClure)? This explains why most of the books readers “most enthusiastic admirers . . . have been the young [ones], who tend to take health, whether physical or mental, enormously for granted” (Perloff). Simply stated, the people who benefit from this novel the most are those that are the most like Ester. While The Bell Jar might be especially applicable to modern life, it was still relevant to readers at the time it was published. “The major publishing successes of the 1970s included several of Kurt Vonnegut's novels . . . as well as The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. They all sold out immediately, were checked out from public libraries (quite often never to be returned) and were celebrated and widely discussed” (Durczak). Looking back, this was the beginning of bibliotherapy. People were running off to their rooms, closing their doors, and sitting down to sort through both their and their protagonist’s