Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar

Esther’s judgmental attitude is not just reserved for her peers. She also makes decisions about the adults she encounters –including her superiors and mentors- based upon their physical attractiveness. When Esther first brings up Jay Cee, her boss at the magazine, she describes her as “plug-ugly” (6), and then goes on to describe her accomplishments as if they were much less significant than they really were. Simply because she was unattractive by Esther’s standards, her value as a person was diminished. Esther says, “Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted

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

Moreover, living as a woman in the mid-1900s, Esther was expected to get espoused, notwithstanding what she wanted. To continue, Esther was raised with the mentality that women get married and that their one aspiration should be to become a homemaker. Thus, when she finds that getting married is not something she is longing to achieve, it alters into something she needs to restore in order to be accepted, rather than just a part of her personality. After turning down a marriage proposal from her boyfriend during a skiing trip, Esther explains her reasons. After explaining that she will never get married, Buddy responded, “‘You’re crazy’ Buddy brightened.

The themes in The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, are portrayed through Esther’s unique characteristics. Sylvia’s life experiences and personality contribute to these themes: growth through pain, the emptiness of conventional expectations, and the restricted role of women during the 1950’s. Esther must battle through several obstacles in order to move on with her life. She also feels like she does not fit in with society. Women’s role in society during this time also contributes to Esther’s qualities. In order to understand the themes of the novel, one must learn who Sylvia Plath is.

Esther feels limited by society everywhere she goes. Even before she enters mental institutions, she feels trapped by societal norms.

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.

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

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

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

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

For example, when Buddy undresses in front of her, she is rather “depressed” and only thinks of “turkey neck and turkey gizzards” (Plath, 69). Esther thought that she would react differently, leading her to conclude that her emotions are wrong and she is not a normal human being. One must remember that Plath strategically utilize the object, the bell jar, in this novel because a bell jar is a jar shaped like an upside-down bell. However, peculiar detail about the bell jar is that it keep everything inside of it cealed around the surround swirling world found at its brim, so everything trapped inside is static, irrevocable, and aloof, which magnifies Esther’s secluded feeling eve more. Esther claimed that she all of her wants would be

Perhaps the most famous work of Sylvia Plath’s is The Bell Jar -- a book that follows the mental deterioration of a nineteen-year-old girl named Esther through the narration of Esther herself. Although Sylvia Plath hated life in general and committed suicide at the age of 32 after her husband left her, the myriad autobiographical elements, metaphors, and motifs that appear throughout her works produce a beautifully vivid representation of people, the world, and life itself (“Sylvia Plath”).

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.

The first time I picked up The Bell Jar, I was sixteen and had finally found enough strength to leave my abusive relationship. Struggling with my own psychological turmoil, I turned to Plath almost to indulge in my own anger; not yet identifying my “bell jar” as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder but solely as the boy who decided that asserting his superiority meant breaking bones and bloodying faces. I remember reading the back of the fiftieth anniversary edition and feeling so comforted by the description of an eye of a tornado “moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo” because I connected with that feeling of stillness and emptiness. I connected with the contradiction that was Esther Greenwood, a college student from Massachusetts whose harrowing descent into mental illness existed as both chaotic and systematic at the same time. When considering the “semi-autobiographical” classification of The Bell Jar, the similarities between Plath and Esther support the argument that this novel may be the only existing account of Sylvia’s own troubling summer in New York, revealing a therapeutic significance of this work. I believe that Plath’s return to that summer, almost ten years later, to make sense of her own mental state is directly related to how this novel is most impactful if its readers return to its pages at a later point in their own life.