Esther was the main character in the novel the Bell Jar. Esther faced multiple challenges throughout her life which unfortunately lead to her taking her own life. Sylvia Plath is Esther. Sylvia Plath most popular written novel The Bell Jar creates a theme of someone being viewed as successful but, struggling with their internal feelings. Many believe that poems were the result of her death. Many of her poems would have a dark tone towards it. Plath tends to lean more towards how people treat others and how cruel the world could be. After her most credited novel The Bell Jar Plath’s voice tended to be more aggressive and deep as if she was an expert in the dark side of human nature (Kehoe, 1999). Sylvia Plath was born in Boston Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. When she was younger she had dealt with the passing of her father around the age of 9. Plath was also not able to attend the funeral because her mother and family thought they were too young. Throughout the rest of her years she was a …show more content…
Plath had always knew to respect others and see how different each person really and and how they have their own stories of life (Plath, 1950-1962). Sylvia was interested in others and always saw something unique in each individual she had compared people to her own stamp collector. Plath grew up saying people can't go on to questions others lives and be able to live there own at the same time.(Plath, 1950-1962) In the bell jar Esther would always question why people would be so different how her friends would go out and party and also how her mother was always concerned for her especially her mother. Esther's mother would always ask why cant Ester can't be satisfied with her job and pursue the perfect life that involves a stable job and marrigeEster reflect to her doctor on why she dislike her mother and why others feel the need to question her
...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.
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.
Bernard, Lauren. "TAKING ON A MOURNING HER MOTHER NEVER BOTHERED WITH: ESTHER’S ANGUISHED MEMORY AND HER RESISTANCE TO A DOMESTIC LIFE IN SYLVIA PLATH’S THE BELL JAR." Ed. Steven Axelrod.Department of English University of California, Riverside, 2009. Web. 5 Dec. 2013.
...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.
It is often thought that in order to lead a happy and fulfilled life, you need to be successful. In the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, we are brought to the summer of 1953 in New York City. Here we meet Esther Greenwood, a guest editor for a New York magazine. Esther lives in an all girl hotel with 11 college roommates. Philomena Guinea, a famous novelist, took an interest in Esther’s letter and sponsored Esther’s college scholarship. Esther’s failure to adapt to cultural expectations to be successful and content is what has caused her to feel deadened. The pressure of feeling like a pariah is what influenced Esther’s suicidal tendencies.
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.
Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar is a bildungsroman novel set in New York and Boston.The Bell Jar is a novel which presents feminism, mental illness, sexual double standards and the quest for identity. The Bell Jar itself is an isolated, cold, unbreakable glass and with this Plath is able to portray her mental suffocation and the social criticisms during the 1950’s. The Bell Jar represents Esther’s “madness” but also the madness of all women who are made of unrealistic ideas so are therefore trapped under the “bell jar”.The bildungsroman novel allows the reader to follow Plath’s emotional and psychological growth. Esther is isolated; she was “supposed to be having the time of her life”, “she was supposed to be the envy of thousands” yet she is miserable and is forced to conform to society rules. E. Miller Budick writes that Esther has an urge to establish social norms. In the Bell Jar the protagonist is finding her actual self by
In “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath the main character Esther comes into the novel not knowing who she is; she comes into New York City she says, “I felt very still and very empty, the
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.
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.
...lmsheimer, Lonna M. "Sylvia Plath." American Writers. Ed. Leonard Unger, A. Walton. Litz, Molly Weigel, and Jay Parini. Supplement 1 Part 2. New York: Scribner, 1974. 526-49. Print.
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” ( http://thinkexist.com/quotes/sylvia_plath/)
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
Born October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia was the oldest child of Otto and Aurelia Plath (Perini, pg. 241; “Sylvia Plath”). Her father was a German immigrant and a professor at Boston University while her mother was an Austrian-American high school teacher (Davidson, pg. 665). Together, they lived in Jamaica, Massachusetts, a town right outside of Boston, before the birth of her brother, Warren, in 1935. They relocated to Winthrop, Massachusetts, where Sylvia lived a fairly happy childhood up until the demise of her father, Otto, when she was eight years old (Perini, pg. 241). Losing her father a...