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The Bell Jar Plath

767 Words4 Pages

The voice of humanity echoes throughout the presence of time, reminding all of the concrete societal standards of the past, which have eroded away into dust. Each grain of dust resembles a moral inequality, uniform requirement of acceptance, or a means of ultimate conformity of the past time. The hands of humanity are able to manipulate this dust of the past mistakes into a future community that promotes equality in every aspect of light, which is a life that women of the 1950s were foreign to. “The Bell Jar”, written by a renowned author, Sylvia Plath reveals the harsh truth of society that many people tend to neglect and many have failed to correct. The narrator in this novella, Esther Greenwood, acts as an archetype, taking her last breath …show more content…

Plath’s demonstrates a cognitive pattern of isolating women in this very world as she does isolating Esther in her novel, which is where the seed of depression begins to sprout into a flower. Plath’s syntax consisted of many metaphors comparing the presence of flowers to her life. Throughout history, analogous writers have had the tendency of comparing the delicacy of women to the beauty of flower. Even though flowers seem to occupy the human eye and bring about grace in this somber world, flowers do not hold any significant value to society. Society seems to unconsciously categorize all flowers together as one commonality of life, which is similar to how society assigns all women one prevailing role, giving each the same identity and no purpose. When constricted by the chains of tradition, women began replicating each other, and as a result, each female member of society begins to resemble a mannequin just like Esther visually interpreted in the hospital waiting room that was full of soulless bodies who did not have a whim to live. It is in these ways that the society forces Esther to fit into the mold of a perfect woman, yet while attempting complete the feminine tasks under the societal pressures, she lost her will to live altogether, and “when they asked [her] what she wanted to be [she] said that [she] didn’t know” (Plath,

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