Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The use of symbolism in the bell jar
Contexts of American women during the 1950's
The use of symbolism in the bell jar
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: The use of symbolism in the bell jar
What is in the spring of your life if the spring of a life refers to your first twenty years in your life? The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel by Silvia Plath, describes Esther Greenwood’s harsh spring of her life. Narrating in the first person, Esther tells her experience of a mental breakdown in a descriptive language, helping the readers visualize what she sees and feel her emotions. The novel takes place in New York City and Boston during the early 1950s when women’s roles were limited to domesticity. The repression of women’s roles in the American society during the 1950s and other influences such as her lack of confidence, her hesitance, her mother, and her feminist point of view seem to affect her mental breakdown.
Like most young adults, Esther, a nineteen-year old college student, also struggles with choosing her career after college due to the suppressed social conditions for women and her lack of confidence about herself. In the chapter seven, she adds up things she is not good at. Plath employs symbolism to demonstrate what Esther is not confident about. She cannot cook unlike her grandmother and mother. As cooking represents domestic work and women were supposed to do housework especially at this time, she expresses her uncertainty about being a good wife and mother. Also, she does not know shorthand, which signifies a practical job. Esther mentions that her mother has kept telling her that she needs to learn shorthand to get a job despite having a bachelor’s degree in English as women had difficulty in succeeding as professionals in their careers during the time. As a widow raising two children, her mother has to deal with family finances. Therefore, her mother emphasizes a practical standpoint in terms of ca...
... middle of paper ...
...sther enough due to the clouds of her life as a widow, stressing practicality in career and acceptance of the irregularities in the society. I have seen a dandelion in full bloom between the cracks of concrete. The spores of a dandelion look like a big one flower if seen from a distance, but a dandelion embraces numbers of spores. This makes me think a dandelion torturously breaks its body into numbers of pieces to survive. Again, I have seen a success of spores that overcame pains of torturing its own body despite the tough environment. Esther resembles Plath as The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical novel. However, even if Plath eventually died from suicide, no one can say Esther will walk in the same path with Plath. Esther can become the one of a successfully full-blown dandelion.
Works Cited
Plath, Silvia. The Bell Jar. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.
Her mother serves as the first of her teachers in conveying this message. For example, Mrs. Greenwood wants her daughter to learn shorthand because it will get her a living until she can marry, because it can even get her a husband. She consistently emphasizes the importance of Esther staying “pure”, so she can get the best of possible husbands. So early on Esther realizes that, for most women, marriage and family comprise the main substance of their lives.
Throughout Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood’s unsuccessful suicide attempts stem from her evolving relationship with Buddy Willard. Esther’s way of expressing herself is through passing away, in which her constant desire to die roots itself in her multiple suicide attempts. However, she does not follow through with committing suicide which demonstrates her reluctance to end her life. Since Buddy holds much significance over the way she thinks and makes her decisions, his hypocritical comments cause her to re-evaluate her attitude towards him. Esther’s changing notion of Buddy provokes her to further explore her feelings for him, where if she killed herself, she would have no longer been able to look into her true feelings for him.
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.
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...
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.
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
Also during this time period was the baby boom, every woman was having babies. Thus, the pressure was on Esther to get married and have children. She was pressured by society to be like everyone else and settle down like everyone else had.
From the very beginning, Plath lets the reader know that all is not as well as it seems. Esther has won a fashion magazine contest. As her prize, she was given a job and accommodations in New York City. While this seems like a dream come true, Esther says, “I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” This use of metaphor helps the reader to better understand how Esther felt. Right from the start, there is something different about Esther, and her unhappiness continues to grow throughout the story. Esther takes to hanging out with another one of the girls, Doreen. Doreen has a habit of blowing off deadlines in favor of men and alcohol. Esther follows her around one night, and upon returning to her room comments, “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” This statement, made more effective by the first person point of view, conveys Esther’s growing sense of unhappiness.
It is obvious that Esther is at a crossroads and feels torn by life. She best describes her feelings with the following passage: "I saw myself in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each a...
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 The Bell Jar, gender roles are presented as barriers that stop female characters from reaching their full potential and from being in control of their own lives. The novel relates to the Feminist Phase of Second Wave Feminism which is focused on the oppression of women and the roles of women within a society.
The book starts in New York City, where she has a temporary job at the fashion magazine as a result of winning a writing contest.2 This obviously correlates with the life of the author herself, as she experienced a similar event.5 The author never denied the work’s autobiographical nature.12 Both women lost their fathers at an early age. , the suicide attempts obviously resemble one another.3, number, number Other instances of autobiographical novelization appear throughout the book. The most interesting similarities, however, exist between the emotional conditions of both Sylvia and Esther.
The bell jar also represents her losing a connection to reality and to people around her. The protagonist is trapped in the walls of glass, slowly suffocating her sense of reality and sense of belonging in her world. Ester Greenwood, the protagonist of, The Bell Jar, had many parallels to the author Sylvia Plath’s life, including her struggles with mental illness and correlations to life events such as the multiple suicide attempts, death of their fathers at a young age and the New York internship. There were many events that linked Ester to Plath’s life. Unfortunately, Plath was trapped in a bell jar as well, but unlike Ester, she couldn’t escape it.
Sylvia Plath portrayed a lot of meaning in this book. The main idea and meaning that she, as a writer, was trying to portray to the reader, is to understand how the worries, burdens, and pressures of being a young, mature adult are enough to put someone, like Esther in a depression so deep that it gives the illusion to the reader that she is insane and not in touch with reality. I believe that it is a matter of her being depressed and not of her being insane because of all that is on her mind she cant think clearly which makes her seem insane because if the strange things that she talks of such as not being able to sleep or eat, or even write. I think that the author did a very good job of making her seem depressed to the point of “insanity” because of how she Esther feel like she wasn’t sleeping when really she was sleeping for hours upon hours when she was put into the institutions. At an earlier