Loss Of Innocence In 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 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.

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

She realizes that hurting her body will not solve her problem. She knows that her brain is the problem. She wants to destroy her brain, but she doesn’t know how to do that without destroying her body. This behavior shows Esther in an almost sane light. She knows what her problem is but she doesn’t know how to fix it. She is able to view suicide as not an irrational measure, but a practical one.

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 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

Because the method was not implemented correctly, Esther is awake the whole time, feeling the electricity course through her. As her condition worsens, she is placed in a privately funded asylum. She once again undergoes electroshock therapy, but this time it is done correctly, lifting the bell jar off of her. She states that it hangs a few feet above her head. Being under the bell jar is a terrifying experience for Esther. It renders her useless of her greatest skill, writing. It makes her hate essentially everyone and everything that had once meant something to her. It turns her into a hollow shell. She makes an attempt to seem normal and portray the talented girl she has always been, up until then. “How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again” (Plath 241)? Even though

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

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.

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.

First and and foremost it is important to acknowledge Esther suffers from a mental illness. No amount of societal pressure or expectation can cause the transmitters in her brain to fire any more or less than they already do. As Esther says “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat,... and I couldn’t write or read”(129) “ I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.” (128) “and it was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything those last few

" The woman she sees is herself but she fails to recognize this due to her loss of identity. Dividing herself from the world Esther

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

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

Sylvia Plath uses many literary devices to convey her purpose in The Bell Jar such as symbolism. The Bell Jar itself is used as symbolic representation of the emotional state Esther is in. The glass jar distorts her image of the world as she feels trapped under the glass. It represents mental illness; a confining jar that descends over her mind and doesn’t allow her to live and think freely. Symbols of life and death pervade The Bell Jar. Esther experiences psychological distress which is a major motif in the novel. The death of Esther’s father and the relationship with her mother is a possible reason for her illness. Sylvia Plath expresses the difficulties Esther faces and parallels her struggle with depression and illustrates it using various symbols such as a fig tree, mirrors, beating heart and a bell jar throughout the novel.