The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath’s poor mental health, which subsequently lead to her suicide on February 11th 1963, may be seen to be reflected in her novel, ‘The Bell Jar’. Death may be deemed to have a lack of meaning throughout her novel due to the casual manner in which the protagonist and narrator, Esther Greenwood, deals with death. Esther’s father passed away when she was nine years old, and she feels that his death marked the point at which she changed, resulting in her mental health becoming unstable. However, along with her mother, she ‘had never cried for [her] father’s death’ (p.159). This clearly demonstrates how Esther deals with death; it is a necessary part of life, and to Esther, as aforementioned, her mental health has caused her to view death as more desirable than ‘sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [her] own sour air’ (p. 178). Moreover, Esther’s numerous attempts at suicide remind the reader that Esther believes the only ‘way out’ is death. For example, in Chapter Thirteen, Esther asks her friend Cal, how he would kill

Sylvia Plath was a troubled writer to say the least, not only did she endure the loss of her father a young age but she later on “attempted suicide at her home and was hospitalized, where she underwent psychiatric treatment” for her depression (Dunn). Writing primarily as a poet, she only ever wrote a single novel, The Bell Jar. This fictional autobiography “[chronicles] the circumstances of her mental collapse and subsequent suicide attempt” but from the viewpoint of the fictional protagonist, Esther Greenwood, who suffers the same loss and challenges as Plath (Allen 890). Due to the novel’s strong resemblance to Plath’s own history it was published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath expresses the

Sylvia Plath is known as a profound writer, depicted by her lasting works of literature and her suicide which put her poems and novel of debilitating depression into a new perspective. In her poem “Lady Lazarus,” written in 1962, her mental illness is portrayed in a means to convey to her readers the everyday struggle of depression, and how it affects her view of her world, herself, and even those who attempt to tackle her battle with her. This poem, among other poetry pieces and her novel The Bell Jar, identify her multiple suicide attempts, and how the art of dying is something she has become a master of. Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” about her trap of depression and suicide attempts, is effective and thought provoking because of her allusions to WWII Nazi Germany and the feelings of oppression and Nazism that the recurring images evoke.

Everyone deserves the freedom to be who they are without prejudice, without repugnance, and without the fear of not being accepted. In the book The Bell Jar, the author, Sylvia Plath took the reader into the mind of a suicidal woman named Esther Greenwood. The novel was set in the 1950s, a time period in which an ordinary woman is only seen as the person that stays at home as a mother and wife. Howbeit, Esther did not want to become one of the cliched women. In lieu she wanted to be an independent writer that did not get pressured into marriage. The Bell Jar opens the readers up to the ideas of what stereotypes and expectations can do to a person’s self-esteem along with their mental condition. That being said, the theme of The Bell Jar is, the pressure to follow certain stereotypes can lead to a corrupt mental state.

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

own, Plath had dealt with years of depression, deeply rooted in her strong ambition to be perfect and successful. This part of her character is not something she tried to hide, and one friend even described Sylvia as having had “a sort of natural excellence at whatever she turned her hand to. If she wrote an essay it was effortlessly good… her very remarkable efficiency was also very natural to her and was never accompanied by any sense of strain” (Wagner-Martin 141). Plath strived to seem naturally perfect, and this description easily translated into the character of Esther Greenwood, who is the main character of the novel and whom readers follow along on her journey to insanity.

Of the two readings we were given to select from for our Midterm Assignment, I chose to conduct my initial psychosocial and diagnostic assessment on the character, Esther, from the semi-autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar”, by Sylvia Plath. The protagonist in the novel is a 19-year-old girl from the suburbs of Boston growing up in the 1950’s who has accepted a summer internship working at a prominent magazine in New York City. It is made clear from the beginning of the novel that Esther’s move has resulted in a possible adjustment disorder as she narrates her feelings of sadness, misplacement, and disconnectedness from reality.

The Bell Jar is a novel written in, 1963 written by Sylvia Plath. It is a story about a girl who under goes many traumatic life events that had the destiny to make or break her. The things she used to enjoy in life are no longer bringing joy to her life. She can’t find anything that gives her the will to go on. The Bell Jar is a story that will take reader on a journey with a girl who lets the gender roles of 1950s get the best of her. She lets people tell her what she can and cannot do and loses what it means to become your own person. The Bell Jar teaches the audience about the expectations, opportunities or restrictions on American Women in the 1950’s. As gender roles have become more diverse between a man and a woman, it is still more

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end” (Goodreads). In Sylvia Plath’s final days, the things she desired, did in fact annihilate her. Sylvia Plath desired perfectionism and the need to feel like she acquired a meaning. As interpreted in the novel, The Bell Jar, and her other works; Sylvia Plath parallels her own traumatic path throughout her life and her downward spiral during the 1950s, explaining her struggle with her mental suffocation and the inexorable depression that contaminated her mind.

In the novel The Bell Jar, Plath represents a great theme of a myth of death and rebirth. The main character, Esther, in the beginning of the novel is represented as a clever nineteen year old who gets an internship at a famous women’s magazine in New York City. Regardless of her aspiration and bright future, she finds herself feeling disconnected from society, and not being able to fit the time period’s social expectations. This leads her to find herself hopeless to be constantly happy and face dealing with depression throughout the novel in the 1950’s. Esther goes through many suffering experiences, some in which she almost faces death by attempting suicide, yet, in all those events she shortly after emerges a new.

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”).

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the definition of the word “bell jar” is, “a bell-shaped usually glass vessel designed to contain objects or preserve gases and or a vacuum”. Sylvia Plath’s title, The Bell Jar, symbolically represents her feeling towards the seclusion and inferiority women endured trapped by societes glass vessel during the 1950’s. The Bell Jar, follows the life of Esther Greenwood, the protagonist and narrator of the story, during her desperate attempt to become a woman. For the most part, Esther begins her life at college with lots of success, earning a scholarship and an internship to a fashion magazine corporation. However, Esther’s success is short lived and it begins to fade as she faces increasing pressures from the outside world. Eventually, Esther loses her internship and scholarship money pursuing relationships rather than focusing on her career and studies. Enthusiastically, Esther decides to move back in with her mother, but is then notified that she has been denied entry into her dream summer writing program. Losing her opportunity to participate in the writing program drives Esther into a deep depression, where she attempts suicide via overdose on her mother’s sleeping pills. In light of Esther’s cleverness to hide her body away, the police still find Esther in time and admit her into a psychiatric ward for rehabilitation. After a couple of months with insulin-electroshock therapy sessions administered by Doctor Nolan, Esther

Sylvia Plath, the author of The Bell Jar, writes in a very simple and ordinary but exceptionally unique way. She put her whole young genuine heart and soul into this semi-autobiography. Her first person point of view allows the reader to really engage with the characters thoughts, specifically Esther Greenwood and her perspective on everything. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood encounters the coming of many things, including age and mental illness. While the coming of age is normal for the majority of society, the coming of mental illness is abnormal. With that being said, many may classify Esther Greenwood as abnormal and deviant but in all reality,

Sylvia Plath is one of the greatest poets of all time- the queen of confessional poetry. Her writing is thick with figurative language that cannot be interpreted only one way. Sylvia Plath herself was complicated, and she struggled with her own personal hardships up until the day she took her own life. Plath’s father passed when she was only eight, and she struggled with his absence not only though the rest of her childhood but also into adult hood. Many critics believe her famous poems, such as The Colossus and Daddy, were confessional poems Sylvia wrote about her father. Although there are many ties within her poetry to her real father, her writing cannot only be interpreted this way. Sylvia had many demons she likely tried to tackle or even understand through her writing- her pain channeling through the speaker. The Colossus, a poem widely believed to stem from her own experiences with death and depression, is a beautiful poem rich with imagery that exposes the pain of living forever in the shadows.