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On The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

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In Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, the readers learn of a young women adventures and everyday life in a male-dominated society.The book has been banned on many different occasions due to the contents of the book. The Bell Jar was suppressed for not only its profanity and sexuality but for its overt rejection of the woman’s role as wife and mother. It isn’t just the character Esther Greenwood that encounters a male-dominated society, Sylvia Plath did herself growing up. Feminism was a big impact on women's life during the nineteen fifties. Feminism is a strong theme in The Bell Jar since Feminism had a huge part in the nineteen fifties, Ted Hughes is a huge feminist in Sylvia Plath's life, Esther doesn’t want to marry or …show more content…

After Sylvia committed suicide, Hughes refused to publish any of her finished work. According to Janet McCann, who wrote an essay named “On The Bell Jar”, Ted destroyed her journals, so we know very little about her reception of her novel(McCann 3). Hughes claims he destroyed one of the journals to protect his children and the rest was “lost”. Many feminists have accused Hughes of man-handling and manipulating her work. Some even claimed he was messing with her legacy and silencing her voice. After Plath committed suicide, many critics blamed Hughes for Sylvia's actions. The critics don’t just blame for Plath's death but also his other partner. Not only do the critics blame Hughes but doesn’t their daughter Frieda Hughes. Feminism and Ted Hughes share powerful concerns with each other about relationships between men and women(Brain 1). After Sylvia passed away, there were a lot of theories going around in the media about Ted and manipulating Sylvia's writing. In Sylvia's work feminism is not just in The Bell Jar but also her some of her poems she …show more content…

Between the two of them, they have a lot of similarities and differences. Like Sylvia, Esther attended a summer internship in New York City, and suffered from a mental breakdown and was hospitalized. The book was based in the nineteen fifties and Esther had to decide if she wanted a family or career just like Sylvia had to. In the book Esther attended college on a scholarship and earned top grades and majored in English just like Sylvia did. One thing that is different between the two is that Esther never married or had children unlike Sylvia

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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical novel in which Plath relays her own experiences through protagonist Esther Greenwood by highlighting the struggles she faced in navigating societal expectations, depression, and her own desires. Having spent time in college and later in multiple mental health institutions, Plath tells her story through Esther in a way that blends fiction and reality. Through Esther, we see Plath’s own interpretations of her triumphs, failures, values, and the slow but seemingly inevitable diminishment of her mental health. The story starts with Esther Greenwood in New York City, where she is spending a month working at a magazine because she won a scholarship to a special summer program for female writers.

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In the novel, The Bell Jar, the protagonist Esther Greenwood, struggles to reach her own personal goals in a male-dominant society. The main character, Esther was expected to marry a man to become a housewife that will clean the house, support him, and nurture him. Esther has always nurtured her goals of her own and has never wanted to simply help a husband. In the novel, The Bell Jar, Mrs. Willard educates his son Buddy the way society views femininity and the roles of women. As Mrs. Willard explains to Buddy, “What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is the place the arrow shoots off from” (Plath 67).

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She illuminates the conflict of motherhood and barriers women go through in the present and past. It begins as an innocent act – a free child playing with plastic letters od the alphabet, it then transmutes into an oppressed and dispirited woman,

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