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Compare And Contrast The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

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The Lives of Sylvia Plath and Esther Greenwood: Convergence and Contrast “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath is a thrilling story of a young 19 year old girl named Esther Greenwood. Through the literary piece, the readers are taken through the breakdown Esther experiences, as well as the road to her recovery. One of the first issues that confronts readers is classifying the book. While it is presented in the form of a fictional work, parallels between Greenwood and Plath are undeniably present. The events that unfolded in Plath’s life makes it clear that in “The Bell Jar,” originally published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, Plath was writing about much of her personal experience. Being aware of the analogous relationship between Plath’s …show more content…

In fact, this is one of the most important themes within the novel and is strictly drawn from Sylvia Plath’s biography. After her time in New York working at the Mademoiselle office, Plath suffered a mental breakdown and attempted suicide by swallowing pills then hiding in a crawlspace. She survived, and was administered shock treatment. This series of events is tremendously similar to the experience of Esther within the Bell Jar. By the end of the story Esther is improving, yet she still asks “How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” A reader knowledgeable of Plath’s true life story can easily grasp the foreshadowing at play. The bell jar did descend again and pushed her to take her life in the same house-just a short distance away- from her children. The last three lines of Plath’s “Sheep in Fog” show the poet’s increasing fragility as she approached the date she took her own life. In January 1963, just two weeks before her death, Sylvia wrote “They threaten to let me through to a heaven starless and fatherless, a dark water.” This is an obvious anticipation of her death. It was not uncharacteristic for Plath to express her mental instability and distress through her art, and The Bell Jar was no

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In her novel, The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses diction and tone to juxtapose the internal strife a character may experience with an an external normalcy. Protagonist Esther Greenwood exemplifies the tear that can occur between society and one of its members. The repetition of the word and idea of death is prevalent throughout the novel, found a majority of the time within Esther’s internal dialogue, portraying that she is obsessed with death, but contains it in her mind to avoid others knowing. Her reason for her secrecy reveals itself to be fear of appearing outside society’s realms. She proves this when each attempted suicide takes places far from the presence of others, such as her basement or any empty beach.

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Later on, Esther Greenwood had developed depression, and even talks about suicide. Sylvia Plath is exactly like Esther Greenwood as she suffered with depression, and talked/attempted suicide. They both took sleeping pills to try to end their life (The Bell Jar). Sylvia Plath used her own mental illness to create a character in a novel describing her

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She compares these people to the “peanut crunching crowd,” much like in an audience watching circus performers defy death through amazing stunts. The audience “shoves in to see” Plath’s retaliation against life and towards death, as if it's amusement for them (Levine et al. 634-636). She is able to compare her mental health and its struggle to a performance that the audience is watching, as if they consider these aspects of her personality to be part of a performance of a tortured artist. Furthermore, Plath recognizes the fetishization of her mental health others place on her through these comparisons, as if her suicidality is merely a quality of her character that adds dimension and draws to men, ignoring its implications for her well-being.

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At the mere age of 8, her father died. Thus the famous poet’s journey began. Otto Plath’s death greatly impacted Sylvia, leaving her in a defenseless position against her mental health. A piece of text from an article states, “Plath later said that the first nine years of her life "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle. "

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During her undergraduate time at Smith, Plath began experiencing symptoms of intense depression. Plath cites during this time in one of her journals, "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative- whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it ("Sylvia Plath"). In summer of 1952, Plath won a contest that gave her the opportunity to receive a month's employment in New York, but Plath's depression was not alleviated ("The Bell Jar" 22). At the age of nineteen, after not being accepted into a summer writing program, Plath attempted suicide by ingesting sleeping pills. She survived the attempt, but received electroshock therapy that greatly influenced the latter half of The Bell

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When Plath was eight years old, her father died of diabetes, even though, it was a curable disease during the time period they lived in. Otto had been a strict father with his authoritarian attitude, his death and attitude is what changed Sylvia’s poems, notably in her infamous poem, “Daddy”, an elegiac and dark poem written on October 12, 1962, with multiple different metaphors to describe the relationship she had with him (“Sylvia Plath”). Everything about Sylvia Plath screamed potential as when she was young, she was ambitious and driven to succeed and when she was eleven, she had kept a diary throughout her

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Have you ever hated someone and feel that if you have the opportunity you could kill him/her? Did you ever fell that if he/she dies you will be happy or get redemption? Well our author “Sylvia Plath” feels that way in her poem Daddy, when she was trying to kill her father that she was see him as an evil monster, and tried to show us her life that she pictured it like hell, even when she lived with her husband that she was seeing him as an evil monster, so she wrote this poem and expressed her desire for death, which is the main theme in the poem, by using various types of literary devices like: repetition, allusion and hyperbole….. Plath uses the repetition device to develop and emphasize the theme of “death”, when she tries to kill her father

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Plath has gotten worse over the years; “Plath suffered periods of extreme mental instability…” (Matthews). Her mind was not in the right place throughout her life, and has made it difficult to live a normal life. Another life struggle that Plath went through is, she was not wealthy, and neither was her family (“The Bell Jar”). She struggled to pay for college but luckily got a scholarship, but with her depression, she still was very stressed out and worried.

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1021 Words | 5 Pages

The Bell Jar Interpretations of Esther’s True Feelings While reading The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel written by Sylvia Plath, interpretations towards the main character, Esther, were made. Although Esther is diagnosed with depression, she does not seek help. Esther does not want a normal life. The life Esther lives is controlled by her mind, and her mind refuses to believe that there is happiness in the world. Esther does not renege on her beliefs and continues to believe that there is no good left in the world without any will to change that Everything seemed upsetting in Esther’s eyes.

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Unlike most coming-of-age stories, Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell jar,” has a surprisingly dark plot. Throughout the story we witness, the main character, Esther’s descent into madness. Esther has her entire life ahead of her, and every opportunity any women at this time could want. Unfortunately, she feels immensely overwhelmed and unfulfilled with these given circumstances.

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‘Unwrap me hand and foot, the big strip tease’ conveys the idea that Plath is being de-clothed, which, contextually, could be a metaphor for being stripped of any passion due to the intensity of her depression, an illness which Plath experienced all her life and ultimately led to her death. This image could be Plath emulating the feeling close to death, having nothing and being exposed. This idea of being exposed could then be linked back to the concept of a performance, where her actions are completely open, unprotected, free to be scrutinised by the public and her peers. The title ‘Lazy Lazarus’, is a biblical reference to a figure whom Jesus raised from the dead, and at the end of the poem, shown in the line ‘Out of the ash’, Plath compares herself to a Phoenix, a mythological bird typically linked with the concept of rebirth. This could suggest that her previous suicide attempts were always attempted with the knowledge that she would return, and be reborn.

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Throughout this treatment, she becomes much more interested in suicide and seems completely focused on coming up with a plan that will work. In one introspective moment, she explains that “Lately I had considered going into the Catholic Church myself. I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it” (Plath, 1971, p. 164).

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Everyday Plath wakes up during what is called “the Blue Hour,” which gets its name from being the time of day she is most depressed (Alexander 332). During

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