Mental Illness In The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

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

The accounting of where Esther is staying shows the normalcy and what the woman's role was in this era. For instance while Esther is describing her hotel she explains, “This hotel--the Amazon--was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents...and they were all going to posh secretarial schools...where they had to wear hats and

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

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.

(PBS) but like stated before, Esther did not want to get married because it would ruin her plans. She wanted to do more than what was expected of women, like Jay Cee did, because "these girls looked awfully bored to [her]" (Plath 4), which is in opposition to what the media believed women wanted: "The mostly male-dominated and -operated mass media tended to represent career women as unhappy and unsatisfied, removing traces of women as independent, intellectual individuals" (Mendes). She tried to learn languages but they would not stick. She tricked her professors into removing a class from her grades, even though she still needed to attend each class. Everything she did was to better her future, but she had done so much she was not sure what her future would look like.

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

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 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

The events in New York introduce us to the beginning of Esther’s psychological transformation. The story first inaugurates with the

The thoughts of Buddy continued, and eventually Esther thought back to when she went to see Buddy at Yale Medical School. He showed her fetuses and cadavers in jars which did not upset her. What did upset her was the medicine given to the woman receiving a C-section in order to make her “forget” her pain. Esther remarked how only a man could make such a medicine. She was upset that the woman should have to forget such a thing. I think this shows her respect for women. During this time period, the 1950s, women did not necessarily stand up for themselves. Women were not seen as they are today as strong and independant. They were not thought of as critical thinkers or ones to think for themselves. Esther is way ahead of her time, and can see past

Ultimately however these experiences and the pressures they put on Esther break and permanently stunt her, as even when made sane at the end of the novel Esther’s madness is an ever present worry. At the beginning of the novel, Esther has just moved to New York City for a month long stint as a guest editor at a fashion magazine. Esther

What caused the sudden upsurge in Esther’s depression? That was what I asked myself as I read chapters nine to twelve in Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” The real mystery isn’t how her depression progressed but what events during the course of the book caused it. Throughout the book our protagonist Esther showed signs of depression, including sorrow and drowsiness, but in this section of the novel their was a sudden increase in Esther’s symptoms. Depression is a life long phenomenon caused by a chemical reaction in the brain, which explains why Esther already had her symptoms at the start of the book but depression can increase after experiencing stressful or traumatic events, which I believe must have occurred for Esther to have a sudden rise

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

Esther reaches the individually radical form of resistance during her journey to become no one. Unlike in New York where she killed herself figuratively, here, she attempts suicide. Esther tries to kill herself using pills, while trying to hide away; she “crouched at the mouth of the darkness” with “bent head, crawled to the farthest wall” (169). Her death in New York was beautiful and extravagant, because at that point, she was still someone, her mother had not told her about the writing course yet, so Esther still had hopes.

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