The Survival of Depression
Depression is often referred to the “common cold” of mental illness because it effects more than nineteen million Americans with in a single year (Cervoij). Although the symptoms of depression usually don't entirely go away, about eighty percent of Americans agree that treatment has helped them (Goldberg). In Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, the protagonist Esther Greenwood, experiences what it is like to go through depression. Sylvia Plath’s novel not only expresses the profound effect depression had on Esther, but proves that she was able to regain her strength back through care and recovery. Sylvia Plath was a novelist, and an American poet. She was born on October 27th, 1932 in Jamaica plain, Massachusetts.
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Greenwood and many other characters in the novel had a considerable amount of influence on Esther. She was very malice towards her mother due to her lack of sympathy. Esther states, “ She was always on me to learn shorthand after college, so I'd have a practical skill as well as a college degree” (Plath 40). This is explaining that Mrs. Greenwood wants Esther to be able to support herself, but she doesn't have very much hope in Esther's visions for her future. Buddy Willard is a medical student that Esther was in a relationship with. After learning that he was not a pure virgin, Esther felt disgusted and inexperienced. To Esther it was a competition. Buddy desired to marry Esther, but she explains,“…I knew I would never marry him if he was the last man on earth” (Plath 52). Esther was relieved that Buddy caught tuberculosis, because she knew she would not have to see …show more content…
Mrs. Greenwood rushed Esther to the hospital after finding her lying on the floor with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. As a result, Mrs. Greenwood moves Esther to a city hospital telling Esther that, “They want you to be in a special ward..” (Plath 175). They move her to an insane asylum called Caplan. Esther meets Dr. Nolan, who will be her new female psychiatrist. Esther begins to slowly build a sense of trust with Dr. Nolan overtime. Esther explains, “I had given her my trust on a platter and told her everything, and she had promised, faithfully, to warn me ahead of time…” (Plath 211). Esther is referring to when Dr. Nolan betrayed Esther by failing to give her a heads up before her shock therapy. At the same time, Dr. Nolan was still close by Esther's side, which comforted Esther and made her feel loved. Dr. Nolan represented a mother figure to Esther, which meant that she was starting to become emotionally stable again. With time, Esther moves out of Caplan, and gets transferred to Belsize; an asylum that meant she was close to being released.
Esther is ready to go back to college, and start living her normal life again. She is able to put her downhearted self behind her, but knows she will never forget the agonizing pain she went through. Dr. Nolan and other doctors have a board meeting agreeing to Esther's release. Esther describes her freedom as, “.. being born twice—patched
Mostly everyone is aware of Mrs. Esther's mental condition but they're not sympathetic towards her. They labeled her as a "certified nut" because she preaches at the ocean waves on the beach. Still, Peter decides to get to know her better that he
While at home, Esther becomes into a deep depression when thinking about her experience in New York. She doesn’t want to read, write, or sleep and she stops bathing herself. Her mother sends her to see Dr. Gordon who is her first psychiatrist whom she doesn’t like and doesn’t trust. He is the man with a good looking family, and to Esther he is conceited. He doesn’t help Esther, but only hurts her more. He prescribes her with shock treatment. After this horrifying experience, she decides to kill herself. She tries to slit her wrists, but can only bring herself to slicing her calf. She tries to hang herself but can’t find a place to tie the rope, she tries to drown herself at the beach, but cannot keep herself under water, and then she crawls into a space in the basement and takes a lot of sleeping pills. “Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” (Plath pg. 117) This quote shows how she felt trapped in the bell jar, and her suicidal urges began. She awakes in the hospital to find that her attempt at suicide wasn’t successful. She is sent to another psychological ward where she still wants to end her life. Esther becomes very paranoid and uncooperative. She gets moves to a private hospital paid for by Philomena Guinea a famous novelist. Esther improves and gets a new
Another common aspect of both the women’s lives is that they both dated Buddy Willard. When Esther began to have a relationship with Buddy, she thought that her relationship with him could go somewhere, that he could possibly be her husband one day. When she is in his room one night, they are talking and having wine, and Esther asks Buddy if he has ever had an “affair”. She expects him to say “no”, but he says, “Well, yes I have” (70). This is shocking to Esther. She thought Buddy was innocent, but he had been pretending the whole time. She tells Buddy to tell her about it, so he doesn’t think it bothered her that he said “yes”. He tells her that while working at this hotel in Cape Cod for the summer, one of the waitresses seduced him, and that’s how he lost his virginity. Esther and Buddy eventually part, but she doesn’t break up with him because he had slept with the waitress, it was the fact that he didn’t
Three days later, she is found and placed in a mental hospital. First assigned to a rich psychiatrist named Dr. Gordon, Esther feels harassed by the doctors surrounding her. She feels that they do not really care about her; in a sense, they don’t. After seeing Esther three times, he states that she is not improving due to the fact that she has not been able to sleep, read, eat, or write in three weeks. She is moved to his mental asylum, where she suffers through electroshock therapy for the first time. The procedure is done incorrectly and she is shocked, literally.
Esther experiences a sexual encounter with a professor from Cambridge during a visit out of the institution which results in a hemorrhage. Joan, who is living in Cambridge, assists Esther to the hospital resulting in her returning back to the institution the next day. Joan returns with Esther and commits suicide soon after. With all of this happening, Esther's depression improves ironically. Finally, at the end of the book, winter of 1954, Esther enters her interview, which determines if she is ready to leave the institution or not, but we are left with the ending scene of her entering the room and the rest is up to our
This is what society saw as their ‘mental illness,’ but the real suffering they experienced is reflected the same way their mentalities are. Esther’s breakdown, for example, is “precipitated by the discovery of an inner deathliness concealed under the glossy surface of New York and her own compulsive drive to achievement” (Harris). The process of this is lengthy, whereas with Sylvia it seems to happen all at once, which is the only difference between them. Plath’s discovery of her inner deathliness being concealed under a perfect New York life happened in May of 1953, where she wrote “New York: Pain, parties, work… Carol vomiting outside the door all over the floor- and interviews for TV shows, and competition, and beautiful models…” (Hughes 87). She began to realize how her high expectations had ruined her trip, and how her mental illness was feeding off of the life she was living, which, like Esther, causes her to go back home in July more depressed than when she left.
Although she was able to fall in love with Dos and become pregnant by another, nameless man, that does not prevent her from leaving with her husband when he finally arrives. Indeed, admits to her husband that she did love Dos at one time, but no longer, assuring him that, “If I did love another man and was told that you were about to arrive, do you think I would still be here?” (Coelho 295). This is an important subversion of gender constructs in that not only was her husband permitted to sleep around without that affecting his love for Esther, but Esther was
The relationship gains the approval of both of the individuals parents and many expect them to settle down and start a family. While finding a life partner is what society of the time deemed a success for a woman, Esther resented Buddy's expectation of her to simply distance herself from her desire to be a poet and become a mother. “I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.” (Plath The Bell Jar). Buddy’s views become clear to Esther and lead her to finally decide that she is not willing to subside to them. Esther isn’t willing to let go of her creativity in exchange for motherhood, however she feels that she in unable to proclaim this as Buddy’s views correlate with those of her society. Her first escape from alienation, her first feelings of liberation from Buddy Willard and his views are illustrated when Esther asks her trusty doctor, Dr. Nolan to go for a ‘’fitting’’. Esther feels free as she climbs up onto the examination table: she feels both mentally and physically prepared to take on Buddy. Unfortunately, “Ever since I’d learned about
Esther refuses to allow society to control her life. Esther has a completely different approach to life than the rest of her peers do. The average woman during this time is supposed to be happy and full of joy. Esther, on the other hand, attempts to repress her natural gloom, cynicism, and dark humor. This eventually becomes too hard for her and causes her emotions to go crazy. She begins to have ideas
The events in New York introduce us to the beginning of Esther’s psychological transformation. The story first inaugurates with the
Throughout the novel, Esther struggled with what she felt how a woman in her society should act. At times, she feels as if there is no point to college because most women only become secretaries anyway. She feels as if she should be learning short hand and other techniques she should be learning for the secretary roll, however she does not want to. Esther wants to be a writer, however, during the time of the novel, society gave women the role as housewife. Esther felt pressure to settle down and start a family. No matter what accomplishments Esther achieves in her life, it doesn’t matter too much because they will not do her much in her later life. Everyone expects Esther to marry buddy and start a family. Once she becomes a mother, it would be assumed that she would give up her passion for writing. This discourages Esther because she is not sure that is what she wants with her life.
To Esther, the world seems quite unfriendly, and the novel documents her desperate search for identity and reassurance. Nevertheless, Esther is intrigued by the world around her, and at the start of the book she is seen with a wondrous outlook on life that is reflected in the metaphors throughout the novel (Coyle). In the first half of the book, Esther is fascinated by the medical practices of her boyfriend, Buddy, as well as by current events in the newspapers and the thought of her own future family. As the story progresses, however, Esther becomes indifferent about life, and she develops bitterness toward everything that appears to prevent her from achieving things she wants (Huf). As Esther’s mental state worsens, the metaphors and similes presented to the reader begin to have negative connotations
The treatment worsens her depression leading to two unsuccessful suicides and a third attempt, by overdosing on sleeping pills, which lands her in a psychological ward. Upon discovering the news of her hospitalization, Philomena Guinea, Esther’s benefactress who provides her with a college scholarship, moves Esther to a luxurious mental facility. At this facility, Esther rapidly improves and the novel closes as she enters an interview that will decide whether or not she will be released from the facility. Throughout the novel, Esther grapples with everyone’s desire for her to be a pure virgin wife for her college sweetheart and her own desire to lose her virginity as a way of contesting society’s double standards for men and
Esther evidently feels as if she is constantly being judged and tested, although in fact she is not. Her magnified sense of distrust is illustrated repeatedly throughout the course of the book, at once involving the reader and developing her own characteristic response to unique situations. Finally, one who views occurrences which can only be categorized as coincidental as being planned often experiences a suspicious response. When she finds out that an acquaintance from high school is at the same hospital, her first reaction is wariness: "It occurred to me that Joan, hearing where I was, had engaged the room at the asylum on pretence, simply as a joke." (Plath 207). Although the reader is incredulous of the protagonist's manner of thought, it is also possible to feel a connection to the situation. Such a
Esther’s mother and society’s expectation as a woman, which is to be a good wife and a mother, suffocate and demoralize Esther’s dream as a professional writer. Esther’s mother wants her to “...learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a college degree” (Plath 40). Her mother believes that Esther cannot further advance her education as a writer and simply wants her to be a secretary since professional career for women was uncommon and discouraged because it disturbs the role as a married woman. These pressures often obliged her to fall into the societal expectations, to give up her higher education, and to marry somebody. However, she knew that the marriage and the babies were not for her, “because cook and clean and wash were just about