The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

1199 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Themes and poetic style of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Research Paper Title

The Bell Jar "place[s] [the] turbulent months[of an adolescent’s life] in[to] mature perspective" (Hall, 30). In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses parallelism, stream of consciousness, the motif of renewal and rebirth, symbolism of the boundary-driven entrapped mentally ill, and auto-biographical details to epitomize the mental downfall of protagonist, Esther Greenwood. Plath also explores the idea of how grave these timeless and poignant issues can affect a fragile, aspiring woman during an unforgiving period for women.

Sylvia Plath discretely places many similarities between herself and Greenwood, displaying a sense of verisimilitude and depicting a true-life experience of mental illness in her writing. This essential connection between Plath and Greenwood allows the reader to gain a keen understanding of the author’s state of mind. The parallelism displayed in The Bell Jar proves the novel to be “autobiographical” in a sense (Hall, 30). Sylvia Plath’s early adolescent years are told through the fictional scope of Esther Greenwood’s. Both Sylvia and Esther interned at a hip magazine company during college, where their depression took its roots. Both had fathers who died early in their lives, leaving permanent scars and an absence of a paternal caring figure. Esther regards her father’s death as “unreal”, refusing to even shed a tear at his funeral (Plath, 165). Plath places a symbol of herself within Esther; this symbol portrays her own hardships allowing the reader to read true emotions and happenings, verisimilitude. Similar to Esther’s obsession with false personalities, Plath does not publish The Bell Jar as an autobiography but rather as a work of fiction. She publishes her novel under a ...

... middle of paper ...

... of renewal and rebirth, symbolism of the boundary-driven entrapped mentally ill, and auto-biographical details encapsulate Esther’s breakdown and journey back to normalcy. Bell Jar employs many different tactics of exploring a young, struggling girl’s journey through hell and back again in attempt to find inner peace.

Works Cited

Alienation. New York: Infobase, 2009. Print.

Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Sylvia Plath, Revised. Ed. Joseph M. Flora. New York: Twayne, 1998. Print. Twayne’s United States Authors 702.

McCann, Janet. “On the Bell Jar.” Critical Insights: The Bell Jar: 3-21. Literary Reference Center. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. 25th Anniversary ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Print.

Smith, Stan, and Lynda K. Bundtzen. Sylvia Plath. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1989. Print.

Show More
Related

  • The Characterisation of the Heroines in The Bell Jar and Quicksand

    2358 Words  | 5 Pages

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This essay will compare the ways in which the novels "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath and "Quicksand" by Nella Larsen deal with relationships, paying particular attention to how this aids the characterisation of Esther Greenwood and Helga Crane, the central characters respectively. It will explore their relationships with other characters in the novel, especially how the authors use relationships to fulfil their writing aims. It will also discuss the relationship between the protagonist and the reader, and how successfully this is achieved through the novel's language. Finally, it will attempt to compare the ways in which they relate to the world around them, which is particularly fascinating as although both novels could pass as fiction, they are largely autobiographical, raising the question of why the author's chose to tell their own life stories in this relatively detached way.

    Read More

  • A Courage’s Attempt to Take Her Life back in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”

    1990 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950-1962. 430 Ed. Karen V. Kukil. Transcribed from the original manuscripts at Smith College. New York: Anchor, 2000.

    Read More

  • Esther Greenwood in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

    945 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Symbolism Within the Bell Jar Novel

    1662 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Owl Song Analysis

    1774 Words  | 4 Pages

    "About." Personal Blog, n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. [When finding an explanation for the similarities between the writers, it is important to play close attention to biographies. In case the psychoeconomic factors that Ruonco describes are true, then biography constitutes most of the development of the Sylvia Plath affliction. Moreover, the biography provides an insight into the views of the author for a better and more accurate understanding of her poetry. Furthermore, it is imperative to use her auto-statement since she referres to her "muse" as something out of her control which can be traced to Kaufman's

    Read More

  • The Feminine Ideal in The Bell Jar

    1397 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Bell Jar Rhetorical Analysis

    750 Words  | 2 Pages

    Plath uses metaphors to describe the protagonists entrapment, suffocation and torture. Bill Gibson (2000) clearly defines the purpose of the metaphorical bell jar, stating that the “bell jar is a entrapment, and a way of placing one on a display of sorts, behind a glass”. Hence, Plath uses the bell jar to describe how she feels- an object, to be stared and looked upon. - mom low ideas of mental illness- So plath uses the imagery of the bell jar to convey the suffocation and isolation that is felt by all women. Also, the unlimited expectations that society creates for women and esther’s failure to achieve the expectations leads to her sorrow and disillusionment. Hence, esther

    Read More

  • Theme Of Depression In The Bell Jar

    1229 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Comparing Women in The Bell Jar and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

    948 Words  | 2 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Depression in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

    1110 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Mirrors by Sylvia Plath

    975 Words  | 2 Pages

    Giles, Richard F. “Sylvia Plath.” Magill’s Critical Survey of Poetry. Ed. Frank N. Magill, b. 1875. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1992.

    Read More

  • Did Esther Trap Herself in "The Bell Jar"?

    1590 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...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.

    Read More

  • Esther Greenwood's Search for Identity in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

    1059 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Character Analysis Of The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

    1641 Words  | 4 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • A Women's Relationship With Men in The Poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath

    1014 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sylvia Plath." Contemporary Literature Fall 1996: 370-90. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter and Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 111. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.

    Read More

More about The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Open Document