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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.
In the short story “Initiation” author Sylvia Plath suggests that conformity, although the societal norm, is not always as grand as it is made out to be, while also suggesting that even though conformity typically hinders one’s self growth, there are times when the fear of conforming can make one’s sense of self stronger. These two ideas together show that Plath uses this short story to convey the message that even though conformity is not inherently a positive thing, it can drive a person to look in on themselves and develop a unique identity. Plath uses symbolism, and character introspection to assert this idea.
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...
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.
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.
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
The glass of which a bell jar is constructed is thick and suffocating, intending to preserve its ornamental contents but instead traps in it stale air. The thickness of the bell jar glass prevents the prisoner from clearly seeing through distortion. Sylvia Plath writes with extreme conviction, as The Bell Jar is essentially her autobiography. The fitting title symbolizes not only her suffocation and mental illness, but also the internal struggle of Plath's alter ego and novel protagonist Esther Greenwood. The novel illustrates the theme confinement by highlighting the weaknesses of both Esther and Plath.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
Allen, Mary. “Syvia Plath’s Defiance: ‘The Bell Jar’,” The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. 1976. 160-78. Rpt in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz. Vol 62. Detroit: Gale, 1991. 395-400. Print.
Through the diction in which she utilized in order to shed light upon the complications of trying to transform and grow in a restrictive society, she used pervasive imagery, allusions, metaphors, symbolism, and other literary devices to further her theme and idea of the novel. Plath created Esther in her image to show how one was forced by society to define themselves by the culturally entrenched stereotypes and expectations of women. In doing so, it detailed the hazardous effects of culturally committing to the conventional model of women. But, it also outlined the transformation of Esther Greenwood from a society-abiding woman to someone who dared to question the conventional model of women. Through the precise detailing of her struggles and complications, Plath was able to utilize several effective literary to enhance the theme of women who undergo the struggle of growth and transition within a restrictive