“I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air” (Plath) Esther Greenwood is a character that goes through a journey of mental illness. Towards the end of the book in chapter eighteen, Esther is still in the psychiatric hospital, and she was just woken with her doctor, Dr. Nolan by her side. Dr. Nolan then led Esther outside to get some air. The theme of innocence in Esther’s life is what keeps her young and full of life, and when she is no longer innocent it leads her to be open to new things that she hasn’t previously seen. From the beginning of The Bell Jar, Esther uses a positive and inviting tone to welcome us into her world. Throughout this specific passage, the …show more content…
She speaks about how she has been stuck in the bell jar for a long time and now that she is finally starting to feel better, the world is starting to become clearer. A second source of evidence for Esther’s newly found freedom is, “his fantasy of idealistic childhood and his role as a protector of innocence” from The Catcher and the Rye (Salinger). This relates and backs up Esther’s feeling of being stuck in a bell jar, because the bell jar for Esther was the protector of her innocence. As Holden protected the children’s innocence by catching them before they fell off the cliff (the cliff representing the children’s innocence), the bell jar protects Esther by not letting her think freely or let others into her mind. The bell jar to Esther means the figurative concaving walls around her. Esther feels as if she is in her own space and can’t escape as well as no one being able to get in. Esther uses quite a depressed and dark tone in this section of the passage to entice the readers into knowing how she once was, to how she is …show more content…
This relates back to innocence, because Esther is just now finding this out, compared to others who find this out early in their life. She states that she was open to the circulating air, which to Esther means that the ideas and words have built up inside of her and they can now move freely about her mind and life. A second piece of evidence is the quote “He is no longer speaking only for himself” from the article, He’s no phony: How fighting in World War II changed J.D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. This source backs up Esther’s feeling of freedom, in the context of her being able to speak beyond herself. Esther is beginning to realize that she has been unknowing and that it is just the beginning of her finding out the world around her. Esther’s way of showing her innocence, isn’t specifically by showing us that she was pure and hadn’t been touched by the world, but by telling us that she is new to all components of the adult
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
Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell Jar”, tells a story of a young woman’s descent into mental illness. Esther Greenwood, a 19 year old girl, struggles to find meaning within her life as she sees a distorted version of the world. In Plath’s novel, different elements and themes of symbolism are used to explain the mental downfall of the book’s main character and narrator such as cutting her off from others, forcing her to delve further into her own mind, and casting an air of negativity around her. Plath uses images of rotting fig trees and veils of mist to convey the desperation she feels when confronted with issues of her future. Esther Greenwood feels that she is trapped under a bell jar, which distorts her view of the world around her.
Esther is experiencing internal conflict. This is a book about mental illness, so majority of the conflicts will be within her own mind. Esther in unable to understand why she is not taking advantage of her trip more. She knows many other girls would have done anything to be like her. She lacks the excitement she thinks she should have and doesn’t understand why she does not have it. At this point in the book Esther is just seeing the tip of the iceberg. She thinks the feeling of not belonging will go away and doesn’t treat the feeling as a major problem.
Insecurity is a major part of The Bell Jar. You can see Esther minimizing herself based on what men and society thinks. This is a hot topic especially for teen girls. There is always going to be something wrong with your appearance, we are truly never fulfilled with what we have. And for Esther it is not just her that brings herself down it is men. All of her failed relationships led her to believe she was not
One of the major symbols Esther’s story is the namesake of the novel -- the bell jar. As a real life object, a bell jar is a scientific tool often used to create a vacuum by removing air from within the jar. Along with being used for scientific purposes, it can also be used for decorative purposes to act as a display case. As a symbol in the book, on the other hand, Plath uses the bell jar as a danger to Esther’s sanity; it threatens to send her into a hellish mental state. All throughout the novel, it is looming over Esther’s mind, threatening to trap her inside of hell and disconnect her from everything she knows and loves. At one point in the novel, the bell jar
The Bell Jar, a coming of age, semi-autobiographical novel, by Sylvia Plath follows the life of a troubled young girl named Esther Greenwood, her slow descent into mental illness and then her subsequent recovery. The second half of the book details Esther's mental breakdown, her incarceration and stumbling recovery whilst the first half uncovers the protagonists, narrators day to day struggles which go on to contribute to her eventual breakdown . Throughout the novel, the reader comes to understand that Esther feels there are few choices; in character a woman must be either the virgin or the whore, both of which are demonstrated by Esther's friends, Betsy and Doreen. This presents one of the key internal conflicts the protagonist, Esther battles.
In the beginning of "The Bell Jar" it explains that although this girl named Esther shows great promise and is very ambitious, she also shows great doubt in her abilities to achieve her goals. The doubt she feels in her abilities isn't made much better, as cultural pressure and popular belief of what character for all women must be takes its toll on her. After her boss scolds her for not knowing what she wants to do, Esther goes on a few dates. The last date she goes on ends with her date trying to rape her while she's drunk. Fortunately for her, she was able to get away from the assailant and walk quite a way to her home.
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
When Esther first arrives in New York, she doesn't have the same reaction that most of the other girls around her have. She enforces this reaction when she says “I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react.” From a psychological perspective we could tell that something is deeply wrong with her. She is isolating herself from others. According to Saul McLeod, the author of the article called “Psycho dynamic Approach” states that “our behaviors and feelings as adults are powerfully affected by the unconscious thoughts” . This means that unconscious are a product of behaviors and feelings. She is unable to think in a rational way because of her inability to control the balance between her conscious and unconscious thoughts.
" The woman she sees is herself but she fails to recognize this due to her loss of identity. Dividing herself from the world Esther
In The Bell Jar, Esther finds it extremely difficult to put her thoughts into words. She loses friends as she is unable to communicate with them. She lacks relationships due to her silent behaviour. “The silence depresses me. It isn’t the silence of silence. It’s my own silence,” (Plath 18) she says. Although at first Esther feels upset by the lack of connections she has, she loses motivation to even try and explain herself to others. Unlike Mr. Chance in The Cloud Chamber, and Deborah in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Esther’s mental state does not improve, and she is unable to resolve lost connections. Esther’s mother tells her, “the cure for thinking too much about yourself is helping somebody who is worse off than you” (Plath 161). However, in her case, she’s so disconnected from the people who were once a big part of her life, that she doesn’t know who to reach out to. She doesn’t see herself being capable of maintaining stable and happy relationships with others when she can’t even maintain her own happiness.
It is evident that she is painfully aware of her approaching melancholic depression as evidenced by her opening statement, “I knew something was wrong with me that summer” and later, "I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo" (Plath, 1971). Throughout the novel, Esther holds the wits and self-awareness to know something is or has been stewing within, while simultaneously having a skewed perception of the world around her. Feelings of helplessness and entrapment are illustrated by the metaphor Esther has created “The bell jar” that suggests she has lost control of herself. Esther describes the bell jar as a symbolic meaning of the lenses in which she see’s life through; a trapped space where she lives in “her own sour air”, separated from the world
Esther never really had a place with religion. She never had to think about it, never needed a label. When Esther went to live with her Aunt and Uncle she didn’t have a choice. People were there to tell her what was right and what was wrong, but she had to decide for herself. She taught me to decide for myself. I am not Esther really helped me realize that I didn’t need to believe one specific thing. People can’t tell you what to believe in, that's up to you. Esther really lost herself in the world full of religion, but she found herself by learning that she would have to fight in order to believe in what she wanted too.
The title Girl, Interrupted “Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen... What life could recover from that?” refers to the painting as she sees it as a distillation of her own experience. Just like the girl in the painting was interrupted so was Susanna and for two years she was unable to live the life that she wanted to. The Bell Jar is a metaphor used by Sylvia Plath to show that Esther is trapped inside her own head and is unable to escape the doubtful and insecure thoughts she has. It is also used as a metaphor for society as people are unable to escape from the expectation which society puts upon them.
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