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The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath Analysis

1828 Words8 Pages

Sylvia Plath, born October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, was a poet, and short-story writer (Hobsbaum, 2003). As part of the Confessionalist movement, she commonly wrote about topics such as death, depression and victimization. She has published a series of poems and a semi-autobiographical memoir that depicts her life, with the names of people and places changed. Her semi-autobiographical memoir, The Bell Jar, depicts Esther Greenwood’s slow downward spiral to madness. Plath was deeply affected by the premature death of her father, her mental instability being worsened by the absence of her mother. The lacking of two parental figures served as a serious detriment to Plath’s overall health and made an impact on her writing. Her personal …show more content…

Villanelles are a type of fixed verse poetry with a strict and demanding structure. It is a six stanza poem, the first five stanzas containing three lines, a tercet (Michno, 2000). The concluding stanza, contains four lines, also called a quatrain. The first and third lines of the first tercet are repeated in the last lines of the remaining stanzas. The quatrain at the end of the poem contains both lines repeated. These repeated lines are referred to as the refrain. The refrains and fourth line in the last stanza all rhyme with each other. The key aspect of repetition in villanelles is very important to the overall meaning and interpretation of the …show more content…

Thunderbirds are from Native American mythology, they are powerful spirits in the form of birds (Britannica). They are described to die in the winter but return return during the spring. Plath’s choice of this mythological creature introduces idea of love that she so desires, one that comes back rather than being fleeting. This in essence, captures her desire for consistency. Plath titles her poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” which can be interpreted as her referring to herself as mentally unstable. Typically, love songs are usually about romantic love, and the experiences that love and heartbreak bring. Rather than this love song being about a sexual relationship, Plath writes about her deceased father. The death of Plath’s father when she was only 8 years old made a significant impact on her. The structural form of the villanelle and its overall rhyme scheme also contributes to Plath’s presentation of her feelings as a love

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Sylvia Plath was an American author and poet born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. She is most recognised for her only novel The Bell Jar, and became the first person to receive a post-mortem Pulitzer Prize. Plath began writing by keeping a journal at a young age, after publishing several entries she won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950 (“Sylvia Plath Biography”). While studying, Sylvia Plath was accepted as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York.

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1. Introduction Published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, The Bell Jar has aroused the interest of scholars all over the world. One of the most often discussed characteristics of The Bell Jar is its use of similes, metaphors, and symbols. Throughout The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath employs rhetorical devices to paint a vivid picture of its protagonist Esther. This essay will discuss how Sylvia Plath uses figurative language to represent Esther’s feelings of insanity, anxiety, and freedom.

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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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Sylvia Plath was a troubled poet that wrote many poems and prose. All of her poetry was from her own personal experiences and she let her readers in on her personal life more than most poets do. Plath suffered from mental illnesses and wrote many poems to let her feelings out. Unfortunately, Sylvia Plath’s poetry and mental illnesses cannot be separated, when readers think of Sylvia Plath the tragic end of her life is also remembered.

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Critical Analysis Of The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

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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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The collective body of Sylvia Plath 's poetry demonstrates definitively her mastery of her craft. Plath has been criticized for her overtly autobiographical work and her suicidal pessimism, however, close study reveals that her poetry transcends categorization and has a voice uniquely her own. As Katha Pollit concluded in a 1982 Nation review, "by the time she came to write her last seventy or eighty poems, there was no other voice like hers on earth" (Wagner 1). In works such as "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy," and "Morning Song," Plath relates her own painfully experiences in the form of dramatic monologues using a persona who eventually triumphs over adversity by regaining the self that had been lost before the struggle of the poem. According to Plath, the narrator of "Lady Lazarus" has "the great and terrible gift of being reborn . . .

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