As the famous psychologist Carl Jung once said, “An archetype is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flower, the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return”. This particular quote showcases the significance of archetypes by illustrating how they each run a similar path, much like a watercourse, and brings about the understanding that they are recurring tools used in written work. The concept of archetypes has been around for some time now thanks to psychologists like Jung. A popular example of archetypes in literature is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, where a young Esther Greenwood recalls her time in …show more content…
Nolan. Dr. Nolan is introduced towards the ending of the novel as Esther is being treated, and upon their first meeting, Esther recalls thinking, “I was surprised to have a woman. I didn't think they had woman psychiatrists. This woman was a cross between Myrna Loy and my mother. She wore a white blouse and a full skirt gathered at the waist by a wide leather belt, and stylish, crescent-shaped spectacles.” (Plath 186). During the time period The Bell Jar was set in, it was not very common for women to have the same jobs as men, so Esther is naturally surprised to meet her new female psychiatrist. With her, Esther is able to develop a fondness she never truly felt she had with her own mother while growing up. The mother archetype is typically portrayed as a caring and patient female who tries to guide or escort her child through life properly. Much like a real mother, Dr. Nolan tries to be kind and helpful to Esther by listening and offering her opinion. She manages to act professionally while trying her best, with the limited resources and knowledge she has access to. Dr. Nolan treats Esther …show more content…
She is first mentioned at the beginning of the novel and is a contrast to Betsy. Doreen is one of the first people Esther meets in New York and she fascinates Esther. On one particularly outing Esther says, “Doreen looked terrific. She was wearing a strapless white lace dress zipped up over a snug corset affair that curved her in at the middle and bulged her out again spectacularly above and below, and her skin had a bronze polish the pale dusting powder. She smelled strong as a whole perfume store,” (Plath 7). Part of the reason Doreen captivates Esther is because she is unlike the conventional female population of the time. The temptress is usually a beautiful woman who gets any man she wants, such as Lenny in Doreen’s case. Rather than behaving and dressing like Betsy and the majority of women, Doreen is the complete opposite. She wears more revealing clothing and acts like a seductress. Unlike Betsy, she did not plan on saving her purity for marriage or being tied down to one man. Doreen does not feel the need to follow society’s guidelines and instead acts freely.¬¬ seeking only to please herself rather than trying to please others. ¬Even though she may seem like a bad influence, “Doreen is an unconventional woman and yet it is she, along with the equally unconventional Doctor Nolan, who becomes a positive role model and nurturing figure for Esther. Thus, when the figure
The subversion of the archetypal symbol takes place within various levels of the narrative, the first being the immediate layer of the narrative itself, and the second being the symbols within the narrative. I shall first discuss how Bei Dao subv...
A pattern of repeated words or phrases can have a significant impact in conveying a particular impression about a character or situation, or the theme of a story. In the story "The Storm," by Kate Chopin, and "The Chrysanthemums," by John Steinbeck, imagery is an integral element in the development of the characters and situation, as well as the development of theme.
...es these primitive standards, she becomes melancholy because she does not attune into the gender roles of women, which particularly focus on marriage, maternity, and domesticity. Like other nineteen year old women, Esther has many goals and ambitions in her life. Nevertheless, Esther is disparaged by society’s blunt roles created for women. Although she experiences a tremendous psychological journey, she is able to liberate herself from society’s suffocating constraints. Esther is an excellent inspiration for women who are also currently battling with society’s degrading stereotypes. She is a persistent woman who perseveres to accomplish more than being a stay at home mother. Thus, Esther is a voice for women who are trying to abolish the airless conformism that is prevalent in 1950’s society.
When Esther is finally through with Dr. Gordon’s shock treatments, she expresses her frustration with her mother, who brushes it aside and tells Esther that she wasn’t like “Those awful dead people at that hospital (145-146). Her mother doesn’t understand the scene Esther saw, with the stories of people and their first shock treatments. She does not realize the vitality of Esther’s conditions. When Esther considers converting to Catholicism, believing that her conversion will take away her suicide attempts, her mother laughs it off. Esther also notes that her mother did not care to mourn for her dead husband. Her mother believed that her husband would’ve lived a miserable life and would’ve wanted to die instead. Although Esther was firm in her stance against her mother, she could have acted so hostile against her mother because of what she was going through. Her mother could have wanted to help her, but her way was possibly different than that of
Before examining Beowulf through the archetypical lens criticism, it must be explained exactly what an archetype implies and how it affects the work being examined. An archetype is a concept that was first defined by Carl Jung, a swiss psychologist who attempted to relate recurring themes in literary works to a collective unconscious that all humans have. Jung theorized that this phenomena of recurring themes of heroes, mentors, heralds, shapeshifters, and so on in literary works could be contributed to the idea that there was a collective set of innate emotions and ideas that resided in all humans. This theory has been able to account for several literary works analyzed through the archetypical lens criticism.
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.
Literature is the superlative resource when one is attempting to comprehend or fathom how society has transformed over the centuries. Many written works—whether fictional or nonfictional—express the views of gender roles and societies’ expectations. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is an exemplary novel that explores these issues. Ester Greenwood was portrayed the superficial and oppressive values of the mid-twentieth century American society through her experiences of gender inequalities and social conformities. Plath’s own life was correspondingly mirrored in this novel; which in turn left the reader aware of the issues in her time period. At the conclusion of The Bell Jar, the audience realizes that she was pushed to completely conform to society.
Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is one of the many novels that can be analysed through a Jungian archetypal lens to show how the unconscious projection of archetypal images affects how a person views others people's actions and their behaviours. In this novel the narrator John Wheelwright projects different archetypes onto different people dependant on their role in his life. This shows us how the novel A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving is not objective because as a reader, you see all events and characters though John’s eyes. Everything that you read is tainted by the archetypal images John’s unconscious self which are being projected onto different characters and situations. This leads the reader to the question of how does one know that the story of Owen Meany is true, and that all the characters are portrayed truthfully.
Esther Greenwood faced pressures and expectations in The Bell jar unalike Holden Caulfield’s . Her character deals with the gap between what society tells her and reality. When Esther’s Scholarship takes her to New York. She knows she has a great opportunity and should make the best of it. Ester demonstrates that with this quote from the book. “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.”(Plath 3). At the same time she endures a beginning to the worst possible situations in her life. In particular after getting acquainted with her surroundings.
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.
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.
...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.
Dr. Nolan is the only role model character in the novel in which Esther shows love to. Dr. Nolan supports Esther in a way that she wishes her mother could support her. She encourages Esther’s unusual thinking and doesn’t tell her it’s wrong to think the way she does. She puts great trust into Dr. Nolan because she promised her that nothing would go wrong during her shock treatment, and Esther accepted her proposal.
Carl Jung is the father of archetypal criticism and creator of the term collective unconscious. Jung (1875 – 1961) was born in Switzerland and learned from Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalytic critic, before breaking off and creating his own literary theory. Because of his shift to the Archetypal theory, also called mythic criticism, Jung was repelled by the psychoanalytic community, until he came up with the idea of a collective unconscious. “Jung’s ideas caused him to be banished from the psychanalytic community for the next five years. During this time, he formulated his own model of the human psyche, which would become his most important contribution to psychology and literary criticism (Bressler).” The collective unconscious is the common knowledge of themes and archetypes that every human has gained from ancestral memory. This is the bases for Archetypal criticism, the reason for humans being able to recognize archetypes and recurring patterns in literature. Archetypal literary works relate to the beliefs, knowledge, and desires of readers through recognizable themes and archetypes (Bressler 149). Archetypes are universally recognized patterns, characteristics, or objects that invoke similar emotional responses from every person. Archetypes give literary works deeper meaning because
The first theory to be discussed is structuralism, this theory is composed of many different branches. The branches that this paper will be looking into is archetypes. The definition of of archetype is typical images, characters, narrative designs and themes and other literary phenomena. Archetypes have their own form of criticism that is called archetypal criticism. Archetypal criticism means the generic, recurring and conventional elements in literature that cannot be explained through historical influence or tradition.