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Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar

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According to Oxford Dictionary, bell jar is defined as, “An environment in which someone is protected or cut off from the outside world”. The Bell Jar written by Sylvia Plath is quite the extraordinary book with tantalizing twist and turns. The author, Sylvia Plath, had other books filled with poetry, however The Bell Jar was her only novel. Sylvia’s works were often based off her early life, included the central themes for The Bell Jar. In this glance at the work of Sylvia Plath, the lead up and outcomes will be the highlight. The Bell Jar tells the story of 19-year-old Esther Greenwood living in the year 1953, and the fight she takes to recover from breaking down. The story starts with Esther in New York for a one-month paid internship …show more content…

She stays in the same outfit for several weeks without showering or bathing. Along with that she attempts to accomplish tasks like writing, reading, and sleeping, just to discover she is unable. One appointment with her family doctor to receive more sleeping pills takes an unexpected turn as she is recommend to a psychiatrist by the name of Dr.Gordon. Esther relations with him start off rocky with her feeling as though she is not actually being heard. After a few failed trips to Dr. Gordon, he ends up recommending to Esther’s mother, that she receive electroshock therapy. The electroshock therapy leaves her terrified of the procedure, for it was a harrowingly painful experience. Esthers reasoning scatters, pushing her farther away from recovery as she becomes obsessed with ideas of suicide. Esther makes several unsuccessful or aborted attempts before she successful wedges herself into a crawlspace at her home and swallows dozens of sleeping pills. It's a week later when she wakes up in a hospital and is deemed unfit for society, being moved to a state mental hospital. Esther remains in the state mental hospital for a short period of time before being moved to a private hospital with funds from a novelist that also funded Esther’s scholarships. This brings the reader to the point of following Esther’s recovery process as she fights to be allowed back into society on her …show more content…

The central outcome is whether or not Esther has meant the requirements to be allowed freedom. This freedom is represented by her life choices throughout the book and more notably during the asylum chapters. Since the book ends with Esther being judge for clearance, the reader is left to decide on their own whether the effort she put into get better was enough. The underlying message shown from all this I would say is the emptiness of conventional expectations. All throughout the book Esther is shown observing the gap between what society demands her to experience and what she does experience. As her ideas of filling this gap intensify, she is driven more and more into madness. Which helps show the readers that following the world's conventional expectations can cause some to feel lonely and unaccomplished. Driving this message forward is important, because it reminds people to do what they love without hesitating about fitting in and being led to “madness” with not having their passion in

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But the fact is that she grows sicker inside. She sees a crawling woman arrested in her wall, and she starts writing diaries secretly, which can be understood as “secret resistance” against her husband since her husband John does not allow her to write. By using secret resistance, her husband is not able to realize anything wrong with the narrator because she cooperates apparently, and that is what allows the narrator to lose control successfully. Even though we don’t really know what happens after her husband faints, she still succeeds in getting out of John’s control in a way that she shows her true self under the repressive male-controlled society. At the end of this story, the narrator says to her husband that “I’ve got out at last, and I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back”.

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She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the

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In the earlier segments of the story, the narrator was telling herself, "I meant to be such a help to John, ...and here I am a comparative burden already! Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able" (Gilman 3). Which highlights that her role in society is not viewed as valuable or productive. This sentiment is further emphasized by the fact that her husband and brother, who are both physicians, dismiss her concerns about her own health and well-being. The narrator's struggle to assert herself and be taken seriously reflects the larger societal issue of women being marginalized and silenced.

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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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When she has her first kiss with Buddy, he makes a comment about how she must go out with a lot of men, and she agrees that she does, although this is not the case (Plath 61). To an untrained reader, this may look like simple people-pleasing behaviors, however Plath creatively uses these scenarios to represent Esther’s evolving identity crisis (Perloff 4-5). Because Esther lacks a sense of self, due to her dissociative tendencies, she becomes whoever she thinks others want her to be. Then, she resents the people in her life, because of her own actions. Plath’s use of captivating metaphors, and her aptitude for making simple interactions esoteric, demonstrates her ability to meticulously describe mental illness.

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In the novel, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, the main character tells the readers the story of her life as she deceives others by hiding who she truly is from them. However, Esther’s “lies” make her more trustworthy because she admits to the readers that she is shocked with the truthfulness of her statement. When Jay Cee pulls her aside and asks her what she plans on doing with her life, Esther, as usual, responds with very one-sided answers containing a “hollow flatness” (Chapter 3, pg. 32). Then, without thinking, Esther goes on a tangent about how she believed that she would get a scholarship to study in Europe and then become a professor, admitting that she usually “had these plans on the tip of [her] tongue” (Chapter 3 pg. 32). She does

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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath tells the tale of a young woman struggling with depression in the 1950s. Esther Greenwood believes she will never be able to read or write again, and instead of continuing to chase her dreams she gives up and watches her future wither away. Throughout the novel, readers are able to identify all the points at which Esther could have turned her life around but believed it was hopeless to do so. Esther had multiple chances to become a famous author or journalist, but each time she allowed her past failures, depression, and lack of self-confidence get in her way.

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Madness often occurs when somebody desires something that is not accessible to them. When somebody cannot have what they want most, they can go insane yearning for it. For example, if an individual struggling with alcoholism attempts to go sober, they will likely experience withdrawal symptoms because their body is so used to having alcohol that it has forgotten how to function without it. During this withdrawal period, the individual may crave alcohol to the point that their psychological instincts take over and they will do absolutely anything for a drink. In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator goes insane in her longing for freedom.

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Cornelie Banguid Period 6 1/9/14 The Bell Jar Research Paper. Writing the bell Jar for Sylvia Plath was a hard thing to do but also familiar. Sylvia Plath’s own struggle with her depression made the writing of the Bell Jar “truthful. She did not exaggerate or lie about her experiences with depression, to make her illness look more dramatic.

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There are many aspects of Sylvia Plath’s novel the Bell Jar that make it different from other books you might pick up and read. The first thing I noticed when I was reading the Bell Jar was how the protagonist starts out in wa way of having everything she wants instead of starting with less and having to work her way to greatness. She is in New York working for a magazine company for a month due to the fact that she won the position in a contest. While in New York her life is a complete parallel to her life at home. She has money to spend on whatever she wants, the clothing she gets to wear is so much nicer and a way more expensive and higher quality than what she owns.

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Everything from how her interactions with her family to her perception of her environment and how it evolves throughout the story allow the reader to almost feel what the narrator is feeling as the moves through the story. In the beginning, the only reason the reader knows there may be something wrong with the narrator is because she comes right out and says she may be ill, even though her husband didn’t believe she was (216). As the story moves on, it becomes clear that her illness is not one of a physical nature, but of an emotional or mental one. By telling the story in the narrator’s point of view, the reader can really dive into her mind and almost feel what she’s feeling.

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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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Prior to Esther’s conversation with Hilda she recently broke her leg in two places while skiing with Buddy, a man who does not make her happy, or make her feel less lonely. While Buddy is at the bottom of the mountain and Esther is at the top, he motions for her to come down. After the accident, he mentions how Esther was doing well, “until that man stepped into your path” (98). When she returns home she is called into Hilda’s office and discusses upcoming events.

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What is dystopian literature? Dystopian literature is a genre that has been characterized as fiction, it presents a negative view of the future of society and humankind (Chung, Terri. “Dystopia Literature Primer.” Dystopias: Definitions and Characteristics. No Date is specified.)

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Soon Sara is addicted to the pills and begins to have hallucinations. The hallucinations begin to make her think her refrigerator is attacking her; because of this, she becomes anorexic because she is afraid of food. Her hallucinations even go as far as making her think that she is on the TV show portraying herself as the perfect woman with a perfect family like she has always dreamed of. She even brags about her son and his wife and how successful he

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