The Impact Of Suicide In The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

When Maria becomes trapped in the mental asylum, she loses the steady presence of the man she loves. This breaks through her newly built self-esteem and leads to the demise of her mental health. When she is first in the sanatorium, Maria constantly asks, “Is there a telephone?”(Marquez 72). She is desperate to hold on to the life she had with him. Since the matrons of the sanatorium will not let her contact her husband, the bond that she has found with him is disconnected.

Esther’s mother’s incompetence to acknowledge what was wrong with her daughter played a major role in Esther developing depression. Esther had just received her first shock treatment at Doctor Gordon’s private hospital. It was an awful experience for Esther. The machine had been loud and there were blue flashes that jolted her. Doctor Gordon told Esther’s mother that after a few more treatments that Esther should be much better, however Esther never wanted to undergo these treatments again.

Consequently, the characters rebelled against social conventions, with Edna of The Awakening exploring her identity and sexuality, and the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper using her intellect to make a startling discovery of the woman behind the wallpaper. The social and domestic constraints of motherhood had detrimental mental and physical effects on the characters in these stories, and when they refused to conform to the limitations, this failure led to their crippling mental and physical breakdowns. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator suffered from a nervous depression after giving birth to her first child. Her husband was a doctor who confined her to a nursery room and prescribed her total rest. She was denied any strenuous activity and he forbids her to do any work until she was well.

In the movie Provoked, Kiranjit Ahluwalia is a victim of Battered Woman’s Syndrome because she has hallucinations, believes that she was at fault and portrays learned helplessness throughout the movie. Kiranjit is shown to be mentally ill because she has a change in personality. She becomes weaker and more fearful of her surroundings and cringes away from men such as her defendant in court during one trial. Further she daydreams more than usual of the incidents in which her husband abused her such as when she was pregnant, he pushed her down the stairs and later apologized. The viewer of the film portrays Kiranjit as helpless.

She begins letting herself go as she is being weighed down by her depression. Lux speaks with the family doctor and he realizes that “She was in deep denial…[and] she was obviously not sleeping - a textbook sign of depression - [she] was pretending that her problem, and by association, her sister Cecilia's problem, was no real consequence”(151-152). Lux thought that suicide was not a serious action, her coping mechanism is what caused her to believe this. She is trying to come to grips with her grief and denying the severity of suicide was her way to do so. The remaining sisters had planned to kill themselves on the day of Cecilia’s first attempt.

Jay Cee’s comments about her inatequacy and her rejection from writing school have a detramental impact on Esther’s self-esteem that she feels she cannot overcome. She feels she is not good enough or perfect enough to achieve the happiness she desires.

Esther`s Suicide Attempts in The Bell Jar One of the main reasons why Esther tried to commit suicide was the way she perceived her mother's actions, and the fact that she hates her mother: `"I hate her", I said, and waited for the blow to fall.` she obviously believes that hating her mother is wrong, as she expected the doctor to react negatively to her comment. Throughout the novel, her mother has contributed to Esther`s problems. From Esther`s point of view, consequences of her mother's actions have lead to further problems for her. It was her mother who denied Esther the right to go to her father's funeral: `My mother hadn't let us come to his funeral because we were only children then, and he had died in hospital, so the graveyard and even his death seemed unreal to me.` The fact that Esther couldn't really accept her father's death contributed to career problems: she had no idea of what to do with her life, she `thought that if my father hadn't died he would have taught me....` Before visiting New York and getting thrown into the real world Esther had been very successful academically: `I had already taken a course in botany and done very well. I never answered one test question wrong all year.` Because of her perfectionist attitude, Esther was surprised to hear herself say that she didn't know what her career plans were: `Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.

She is a disappointment to her husband, and a failure in the eyes of her father. Edna feels that since everything else up to this point in her life is bad, she has to start anew. Her awakening is her depressive fears taking manifestation. Edna has finally realized that it is now or never for her to change her life. However, following her awakening is not the way to help her

“The story examines one woman’s descent into madness due to inactivity.” She also states that it examines the struggles between marriage and career, social expectations and personal goals. The story is about a woman being trapped in her marriage, she’s trying free herself. The narrator ends up going insane because she’s forbidden to write the only thing she can do is rest. The struggle between marriage and career is that John is her husband and her doctor. During the story he’s trying to cure her depression and doesn’t act much like her husband as he does her doctor.

This caused all of her blocked out thoughts to swarm her mind and turn her completely insane. When the doctor found her, he tried to go in and help her. When the doctor finally got in he fainted because he had made so many positive changes with her and was utterly distressed when he found out that it was all for naught. This woman had made a safety net within her mind so that she would not have to deal with the reality of being in an insane asylum, but in the end everything failed and it seems that what she had been protecting herself from finally conquered her. She was then forced to succumb to her breakdown and realize that she was in the insane asylum for the long run.