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Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar Analysis

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Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes and had two children with him. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life and she died after committing suicide in 1963. She used to openly discuss her depression with the poet Robert Lowell and her suicide attempts with Anne Sexton. Both of them led her to write from a more female perspective. Her death still remains a topic of interest as she had taken a very strange route to die-she had turned on the gas and put her head in the oven. Plath was famous for writing in the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her …show more content…

It chronicles the life of Esther Greenwood who wins a chance to be a guest student editor in a fashion magazine in New York but finally finds herself plunged into a nightmare. It reflects Plath’s own descent to a schizophrenic hell. It may be termed as a critique of psychiatry where shock therapies of Dr. Gordon do nothing more than traumatize her. Esther becomes an alienated being and her sense of alienation from the world comes from the social expectations placed on her as a young woman of 1950s America. Esther dangles between her desire to write and the pressure she feels to settle down and start a family. She longs for adventures that the society denies to her. As a result of these constraints that she feels Esther has a mental breakdown and ends up trying to commit suicide not once but several times and in one instance almost succeeding. Later on she recovers through the help, support and medications of the psychiatrist Dr. …show more content…

The Bluest Eye tells the story of an eleven year old black girl, Pecola Breedlove, desires blue eyes because she sees herself as ugly and believes that by having blue eyes she will represent the white standards of beauty and it will also ensure that she receives love, care and support from others. The Bluest Eye is thus a very powerful study of how African-American families and particularly women are affected by racism and consequent sexual and mental abuse and how these women dwindle into madness. Morrison’s work is powerfully engaged with questions of history, memory and

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The literary phenomenon of The Bell Jar presents readers with a view of the character of Esther and her story through Victoria Lucas and Sylvia Plath. The development and circulation of the publication created a projection of the integrity of the story’s plot that can be seen as being affected by the autobiography of Plath’s life. The publication of the The Bell Jar, through Victoria Lucas, revealed a story of a young woman dealing with depression and a coming of age story of a young woman trying to live in a society where she does not feel she fits into: having to deal with the patriarchal power, to understand the orders of women’s lifestyle, and the destruction of ambition to become a writer. When it was published in the United States, in 1971, five years later, under the name of Sylvia Plath, the narrative began to take another outlook. This impacted the view upon the novel’s identity, the classification of what the novel truly is.

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Distorted Ways of Life “The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I could not stir” (Plath 186). Esther Greenwood the protagonist of the novel The Bell Jar explains her life and how she feels as if she lives underneath a bell jar. Esther also feels as if she can not control her own life not only because of the bell jar illusions, but also because she can not find herself. Sylvia Plath, the author of The Bell Jar, uses Esther, the protagonist as a catharsis to illustrate her desire for control through her use of symbols and women’s roles in the U.S. society.

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Rhetorical Analysis Essay The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison takes place in Ohio in the 1940s. The novel is written from the perspective of African Americans and how they view themselves. Focusing on identity, Morrison uses rhetorical devices such as imagery, dictation, and symbolism to help stress her point of view on identity. In the novel the author argues that society influences an individual 's perception on beauty, which she supports through characters like Pecola and Mrs. Breedlove.

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Pressures from society and those around you can feel like a bell jar hovering over you. In the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, pressures from society and self doubt lead a bright young female college student with loads of opportunity to fall into depression and eventually insanity. The main character, Esther Greenwood, battles with what society wants her to be as a woman and as a person in the 1950’s. When Esther is presented with a prestigious scholarship program for journalism in New York City she is eager to go. She is ambitious and intelligent but the weight of societal expectations, expectations of those close to her, along with her own self doubt cause her to go into the downward spiral of insanity.

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In Dorothy Parker’s poem “Symptom Recital” she states, “My soul is crushed, my spirit sore; I do not like me anymore” (15-16). Dorothy Parker, the wittiest woman in America, captures her audiences with poems expressing her opinion about life’s hardships. Throughout Dorothy’s disordered life, she was married three times, attempted suicide, and had an abortion. Her lifestyle was very influential on her writing.

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“The last thing I wanted was infinite security…I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself” (83). Having the great expectation to do what most other women have done was crushing to Esther and played a great part in her struggle with depression. When she meets Dr. Nolan, a woman who’s gone against those expectations, Esther begins to show signs of fighting back against her psyche. The remainder

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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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Before one understands how Plath's experiences were influential upon her writing, it is crucial to know about her as an individual. Plath, born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, on October 27th of 1932, was the daughter of Aurelia and Otto Plath (“The Bell”). Given her time period, Plath showed great success in comparison to her peers; for example, she received various scholarships for her writing abilities and “won first prize for fiction from Mademoiselle” (Materer). Growing up, she possessed a strong passion for writing poetry, that love became stronger once diagnosed with depression. In college Plath met a guy by the name of Ted Hughes.

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After all, she’s the goddess of wisdom and cleverness, all the things that I value most in my companions and acquaintances. All the things that I have wanted to know. So I asked questions around, to my father and my aunt, to Google and friends. Why are clouds white and cotton-like? What caused Sylvia Plath to commit suicide in such a way?

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How she describes her surroundings and her interactions with her family evolves as her condition worsens. By the end, the reader can truly see just how far gone the narrator has gone. The narrator’s fixation on the yellow wallpaper had gone from a slight obsession to full mental breakdown. As it is with most good stories, the presence of strong symbolism and detailed settings is a very important aspect of the story that helps to draw the reader into the story.

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2015 Words | 9 Pages

Her death is tragic because she was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, and she changed the way people perceive things as a society. She pulled people closer together and essentially made the world a better place while doing

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She thought Esther’s suicide attempt and disappearance were fascinating, and she ended up doing things intentionally so that she would get sent to the same private treatment center Esther was in for a time. Joan ended up dying by suicide shortly before Esther did. Esther’s depression was also shown to affect Buddy Willard. Since both his significant relationships, Joan and Esther, ended in psychiatric stays and worse, Buddy comes to visit Esther one day feeling very guilty. While there, he asks her with complete seriousness: “Do you think there’s something in me that drives women crazy?”

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1542 Words | 7 Pages

Toni Morrison, the first black women Nobel Prize winner, in her first novel, The Bluest Eye depicts the tragic condition of the blacks in racist America. It examines how the ideologies perpetuated by the dominant groups and adopted by the marginal groups influence the identity of the black women. Through the depictions of white beauty icons, Morrison’s black characters lose themselves to self-hatred. They try to obliterate their heritage, and eventually like Pecola Breedlove, the child protagonist, who yearns for blue eyes, has no recourse except madness. This assignment focusses on double consciousness and its devastating effects on Pecola.

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Morrison 's first novel, The Bluest Eye, examines the tragic effects of imposing white, middle-class American ideals of beauty on the developing female identity of a young African American girl during the early 1940s. Inspired by a conversation Morrison once had with an elementary school classmate who wished for blue eyes, the novel poignantly shows the psychological devastation of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who searches for love and acceptance in a world that denies and devalues people of her own race. As her mental state slowly unravels, Pecola hopelessly longs to possess the conventional American standards of feminine beauty—namely, white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes—as presented to her by the popular icons and traditions of white culture. Written as a fragmented narrative from multiple perspectives and with significant typographical deviations, The Bluest Eye juxtaposes passages from the Dick-and-Jane grammar school primer with memories and stories of Pecola 's life alternately told in retrospect by one of Pecola 's now-grown childhood friends and by an omniscient narrator. Published in the midst of the Black Arts movement that flourished during the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Bluest Eye has attracted

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922 Words | 4 Pages

Sylvia Plath is considered to be one of the most significant female poets known not only to Americans but also to the whole world. Her death in 1963, followed by an unfortunate and short life did not end her input and influence inliterature, she became an icon to the female literary society. Sylvia's outstanding style of writing and themes which she portrayed in her works such as death, seeking for an identity or oppression on women in a patriarchal society began the feminist movementin America and changed the role of women. This topic is of a great importance because they way that Sylvia Plath was expressing her feelings and showing her negative view on a patriarchal society and oppression on women was a giant leap in the world of a women's liberation movement.

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