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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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How Did Sylvia Plath Write The Bell Jar

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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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An Explication Of Sylvia Plath's Daddy

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Sylvia Plath then reveals through her narrator, “And then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look” (63-65), which illustrates that she grieves for her father so much that she marries a man that is an emulation of him. The narrator of the poem is obsessed with her father without knowing such at the moment, she later realizes that the men she has been given and that she has chosen are only diminishing her life. The lead character moves on to explain, “The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” (72-74), furthering her realization that she is not living through herself.

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Research Paper On Sylvia Plath

1117 Words | 5 Pages

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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How Did Sylvia Plath Write The Bell Jar

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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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Sylvia Plath Literary Devices

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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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As a result of all the heart wrenching events that occured in her life, her self esteem continued to descend. She felt vulnerable and dislikes living the life she lives, Sylvia Plath was emotionally distraught, angry, and hostile her whole life (Reiff 20). Sadly, Plath attempted suicide multiple times throughout her lifetime. A few of the many trials consisted of, “I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one” (Plath 189). Sylvia Plath is an amazing woman, but her depression took over and left her to nothing.

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Who Is Lady Lazarus According To Plath's Argument?

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In a 1974 New York Times Book Review article, Rosalyn Drexler describes Sylvia Plath’s poetry as “incisive, bright, intelligent.” I question that judgment. Through analyzing Plath’s 1962 poem “Lady Lazarus,” I ask if her poetry is as intelligent and analytical as Drexler—and conventional wisdom generally—believes. To initiate this debate, I put forth my chief criticism of Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”: incoherence and inconsistency. I argue that “Lady Lazarus” is internally inconsistent for two independent reasons—first because the character of Lady Lazarus assumes severely incompatible forms, and second because Lady Lazarus’ main argument (that she can elude death) is, as her own narration shows, untrue—and in so arguing, I attempt to show that the poem is also incoherent.

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Analysis Of The Bell Jar

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(Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar). She sees death as a beautiful thing therefore, she is blinded by the beauty of death, to see the beauty of life. She had failed in life, because she stopped trying, or she never tried at

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An Explication Of Sylvia Plath's Daddy

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" She also uses the phase marble heavy” to set up an image of her father as a statue and that she looks to him as a possible role model. Further on in the poem, Plath uses various Nazi-related metaphors to describe her father. She even goes so far as to draw bodily counterparts between her father and for a lack of better words that comes to mine Hitler; she writes in the 9th stanza, "your neat mustache, And your Aryan eye, bright blue, Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You" and "Every woman adores a Fascist" in the tenth stanza.

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The Bell Jar Plath

755 Words | 4 Pages

Everywhere she goes, suicide is on her mind. A few times, Esther actually attempted to kill herself, to no avail of course. She becomes desperate and says, “...I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and time again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left…” (130). Esther feels, not only isolated from society and the real world, but detached from her own physical being as well.

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Death In Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'

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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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Fun Home And Sylvia Plath's Daddy

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The speaker’s suicide attempts because of her rejection of the life she lived were noticeable by the signs leading up to them. She clearly exhibited emotional instability. One can see this through her writings, including “Daddy,” leading up to her suicide attempts. She hates the doctors that “put her back together” (Plath l. 62) after her attempt because she couldn’t see the opportunities a writer as capable as herself could embrace in the future.

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Critical Analysis Of The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

1755 Words | 8 Pages

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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Traumatic Events In Sylvia Plath's Life

2095 Words | 9 Pages

From the age of eight until her death, Sylvia Plath struggled with mental illness. Along with frequent therapy visits, she wrote poetry to reflect the many events in her life. She wrote about everything, from the things that brought her great joy to the things that drove her to attempt suicide. One recurring topic of her poems is her father, Otto Plath, who she adored until he died of undiagnosed diabetes when she was eight. This event sparked a lifetime of depression and anger towards her father.

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