“The Bell Jar” is a piece written by Sylvia Plath, and published under a pseudonym in 1963. In this novel, Plath expresses much of her internal conflict with society, and how she related to the gender roles of that time. The story, which many regard as autobiographical, awoke the interest of many interdisciplinary professionals when it overlapped the real life events that accompanied its publication. Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, just a few days before the novel’s publication, after having a history of clinical depression and other mental disorders. To this day, this book has been studied extensively as a feminist text because of its representation of mental illnesses and womanhood during the 1950s. Moreover, because the story is highly influenced by the author’s own life, it …show more content…
The protagonist, Esther, is an overachiever student, constantly being praised because of her intelligence and superb academic performance. Due to her writing abilities, she wins an internship in New York, along with girls from all over the country for a known magazine; however, though she is supposed to be having a great time, Esther is not satisfied. She realizes that she is very different from other girls her age, is not as wild as her roommate Deedee, not as authoritarian as her boss Jay Cee, not as proper as her friend Betsy, which soon starts to drag her increasingly more absorbed in questions about her identity and her place in the world. Then, coming home from her trip another shattering realization awaits for her when she fails in what she believes is her most pure identity, a brilliant writer, and gets denied admission to a prestigious writing course. This shatters her world, and confuses Esther so that develops a psychological illness. Thus, the novel explores Esther’s battle with depression from her particular introspective
In Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood seems incapable of healthy relationships with other women. She is trapped in a patriarchal society with rigid expectations of womanhood. The cost of transgressing social norms is isolation, institutionalization and a lost identity as woman. The struggle for an individual identity under this regime is enough to drive a person to the verge of suicide. Given the oppressive system under which she must operate, Esther Greenwood's problems with women stem from her conflict between individuality and conformity.
Sylvia Plath was a well known poet who published only one novel before her tragic death in 1963. The Bell Jar is a first person account from a young woman named Esther Greenwood who suffers a psychological meltdown. Throughout the novel, she moves back and forth through time as she remembers the events that lead to her being released from a psychiatric hospital. Through research, one may infer that the novel is written from events in Plath’s past. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar coveys Plath’s last attempt to reconcile with her demons.
The Bell Jar, a novel whose legacy has shone on for decades serves as homage to those in crisis, especially those dealing with the apprehension of adolescence or even clinical depression. Sylvia Plath uses a plethora of bona fide incidents and sentiments neatly chiseled from her own life constructing a quasi-autobiography. This is done while simultaneously drawing similarities to other influential masterpieces in history. Esther Greenwood’s emotional odyssey of the stages of her depression is exhibited throughout the novel. The Bell Jar is a beautiful tribute to the internal emotional struggles during Plath’s lifetime, expressed through the evolution of the protagonist’s character. 51 years and over three million copies later, The Bell Jar is evermore potent in the literary world today and carries irrefutable, international significance.
Esther’s failure in her writing career is the first of many factors that send her into her depression. After Esther’s scholarship was over, she was sent back home to live with her mother. Now is when everything in her life is a vital step towards a career and her success in college. Esther applied for a major writing course that would help her do so, it would also be a major part of her future college career and a reason to not spent the summer at home with nothing to do. After she does not get accepted in the writ...
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.
Plath’s work is valuable for its ability to reach today’s reader, because of its concern with the real problems of our culture. In this age of gender conflicts, broken families, and economic inequities, Plath’s forthright language speaks loudly about the anger of being both betrayed and powerless. She was hailed as literary symbol of the women’s rights movement and a feminist writer of great significance. Sylvia Plath began by creating art that imitated life, but ended when life imitated art.
Sylvia Plath is a twentieth century award winning poet and novelist of The Bell Jar. Plath was born on October 23, 1932 in Jamaica Plain Massachusetts. She suffered from depression for most of her life, starting when she was eight years old after her father died. Plath’s depression is reflected in her works, as she strongly relies on her own feelings to create similar moods, tones and themes in her poems and novel, The Bell Jar.
Tracy’s identity development is heavily influenced by her new friendship with Evie from that moment on. Evie is so popular, but she makes very poor choices and Tracy follows her lead because she wants to seem just as “cool” as her new companion. This is a type of peer pressure that affects many teenagers daily.... ... middle of paper ... ...
“How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?” (page 121). Her dissatisfaction with her own life as well as the comparison to one of her peers adds a level of unhappiness that many people experience, but is rarely written about. Usually, the protagonist leads an action packed life that somehow ends with happiness, and don’t have time to envy others or feel unhappy with their own accomplishments. That is why Esther’s journey is different, and why it’s important. Her story is not extraordinary, but that doesn’t make it unimportant.
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1971) is a thinly veiled autobiography. Having been riddled by depression herself, Plath has us follow her protagonist Esther’s journey of self-discovery in order to assert her views on the intersection of mental illness and traditional femininity. In the novel, blood serves to mark transitions in Esther’s life. Time after time, blood intersects with largely feminine milestones and the shifts in her mental health as she witnesses births, is sexually exploited, and must confront her own sexuality. Esther struggles to fit in to the narrow feminine role and views the world through a predisposition for depressive thoughts. The “traditional” era in which she exists enforces very binary gender roles and places her purity
Identity, a difficult and unfavorable fact for those who struggle living up to the impractical standard of society. Existence defined as a mere aspect of living. For those who lack self-confidence, societal expectation and the presumption of gender role can lead to the eventual downfall of mental capability. In The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath, Esther Greenwood, a young educated, middle-class woman, strives to fulfill the expectation of living as a woman in the 1950s. Esther complicates pursuing her dreams and pursuing the already set dream for women and attempts to discover the role she plays. Plath aims to contemplate the theme differentiating the social role each character is expected to perform, in which most
The college Esther is accepted to is never named, but the similarities between it and Plath’s alma mater, Smith College, are uncanny. Both Plath and Esther were awarded noteworthy scholarships and internships to a well-known magazine as a guest editor. Like Esther, Plath had also applied to a creative writing course over the summer only to be turned down. Not long after this, both women became overwhelmed by their mental illness, they crawled under their house where they would attempt suicide by overdosing on sleeping
In the 1950’s, American poetry began to evolve into a new style known as Confessional poetry, which involved a more personal approach to poetry and broached topics such as sexuality, death, and personal relationships. The movement encouraged an unconventional expression of thoughts and emotions. Filled with images of death and anguish, Sylvia Plath’s work falls perfectly into this line of poetry. Having committed suicide at the age of thirty-one, Plath’s final collection of poems, like most of her work, details the depression that led to her untimely death. Plath’s depression greatly influenced the content of her work. She conveyed feelings of entrapment in society that was deemed an inappropriate topic for women. However, it was this candid and uncensored quality of work that made her an icon of the confessional movement. Some considered her later work to be too graphic, as it often detailed suicide, sexual relations, and -on many occasions- concentration camps. However, like all
In Sylvia Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, the reader learns of the adventures of a young woman in a male-dominated society that will not let her achieve her true potential. Plath's alter ego, Esther, is thus driven to a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide numerous times. In many ways, this novel is a feminist text, centered around the struggles of a young woman who cannot reach her goals in our male-dominated society.
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream” (Plath 237). In The Bell Jar, a roman á clef written by Sylvia Plath, Esther Greenwood is trapped in the bell jar of ideals and customs in the 1950s. Even though Esther has a traumatizing experience, she recovers from it and can move on like anyone would after a bad dream. For most people, a nightmare will not restrict their desires, even though it is possible for the bad dream to return. Esther’s recovery from depression and insanity liberated her from her nightmare of trying to comply with the rules of society. However, Esther kept asking questions if “the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again” (Plath 241). Like a