The Collection Biographical Connections 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

Majority of her poems dealt with depression, anxiety and death. Plath has dealt with many

The novel, The Bell Jar, is a half autobiography and half fictional story written by Sylvia Plath. It follows the main character, Esther Greenwood, in first person point of view through the comforts of high society in college all the way to the asylum for the insane. While the setting is in the 1950's, the book has stood the test of time by not only being a story that discusses difficult issues but also challenges the social pressures of that time.

Sylvia Plath was an American Poet who was renowned for poetry mostly in the United States. She, however lived a difficult and depressing life which led to a few futile suicide attempts, but ultimately led to a successful suicide attempt leaving her children to live on without a mother. This end result was due to a multitude of issues in her life from Sylvia’s sanity. She wasn’t the most stable child. Her marriage also played a role in her suicide. Her successes weren’t acclaimed until after her death, when a majority of her work was released. There were two major aspects to her life: her poetry and her sanity. These three combined make up a majority of Sylvia’s life.

Sylvia Plath was an American author and poet. Her death at the age of 30 by suicide was the end of her long struggle with mental illness throughout her life, chronicled in her most famous work, her fictional, but inspired by her life novel, The Bell Jar, cited for its feminist themes and exploration of mental illness. Plath is considered one of the greatest poets and novelists of the 20th century, whose works were influenced by her mental illnesses, and still have relevance today.

Plath’s only book, The Bell Jar, revolves around Esther Greenwood, a typical teenage girl aspiring to be an English teacher. The plot, however, is atypical; instead of Greenwood coming of age with normal, positive scenarios, Greenwood descends into madness and graduates not from college, but from a mental institution. Greenwood reactions to daily life differ from normal girls her age. She becomes obsessed with oddities like pickled fetuses, dead bodies, and the execution of the Rosenburgs.

Sylvia Plath is one of the most popular poets during her time of living. She wrote many poems and even wrote one single novel. She was able to take events in her life to influence the way she wrote. Sylvia Plath even based the main character of the only novel she got to write The Bell Jar on herself and her own experiences. Sylvia Plath suffered through many events that had to do with her health, but she was able to recover from those and it inspired her writing. Much of her writing reflects the suffering that she went through emotionally, physically, and definitely mentally. With her writing and personal life the author of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, is able to develop the theme of being successful and overcoming the hard parts of life no matter what the obstacles are.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath is a novel in which the main character, Esther Greenwood, constantly struggles with psychological issues and the metaphorical suffocation of a symbolic bell jar. In the novel, Esther grapples with depression. There are a number of pivotal moments that contribute to the worsening of Esther’s psychological state; however the single moment that most likely placed her on this path of deteriorating mental health was the premature death of her father.

Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar was composed as a semi- auto biographical novel yet it dealt with many of the contemporary issues of the time such as women emancipation in a psychological sphere. Plath’s actual psyche is reflected in her work which she struggled to continue as a female writer. As an American writer she faced plentyof criticism which over-powered her mental faculty as a clinically depressed author. Sadly, she ended her life shortly after finishing this novel and her prolific writing career was cut short. Plath was presented with many obstacles after her traumatic break down which was mirrored in her work which depicted a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowing any scope for personal freedom. The novel was partly based

Sylvia Plath’s emotional turmoil began at a fairly early age; from the time of her father’s death, to her inability to form a meaningful relationship. Sylvia Plath was born the eldest child of Otto and Aurelia Schoeber Plath on October 27, 1932. When Plath was eight-years-old her father, a professor of Entomology and German at Boston University, died. “...I adored and despised him, and I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him” (Steiner 45). Plath’s work was heavily influenced on the passing of her father, the grief that consumed the pages of The Bell Jar and many of Plath’s other works was the pent-up heartache that Plath felt for the loss of her father. Plath felt that her “...guilty love...may have caused the loss” and was deeply burdened by it (Ramazani 5). She wrote many different kinds of works; including but not all, The Bell Jar, The Colossus and Other Poems, and Ariel. The Bell Jar was

Many have thought her taking her life would have been her husbands fault from running away or the many thought was the case which is poems. Sylvia Plath had wrote a letter to her mother a little before her death explaining her view on see life and how it’s different from other others view of it (Plath, 1962). Plath had focused on other differences as others want her to be the same. Plath goes in to saying “The core of life has fallen apart”( Plath, 1962). When Plath wrote this the world she was describing was how people judge others based on personal experience of what they have seen as a normal life. The main character from the Bell Jar Esther wasn’t really able to notice those problems and would have resulted in her loving her self for who she wanted to be which was a poet. Stated in the back of the Bell Jar, “to the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream”( Plath, 264). Plath had said this quote to base it on what she has written in the novel. When she describes a person she relates to herself, she relates life to being a “bad dream” (Plath, 264). Also, shown in the book was how only Plath was to understand the problems that she had to overcome but, also how dark the world could be in trying to surpass those struggles (Plath,

Sylvia Plath’s, “The Bell Jar” follows the story of Esther Greenwood. The novel starts out with Esther in New York City as an intern for a magazine. Esther has this numbness throughout her time in New York. Her downfall starts when she gets rejected from the writing course she applied to at Harvard.. Esther loses the ability to read, write, even sleep. She hovers over several ideas of suicide and fails and finally decides to hide away and overdose on sleeping pills. This final attempt lands her in a mental asylum. In the asylum she meets a proper psychologist and receives proper treatment. She finally feels like she is free from the depression she felt, the bell jar she was trapped in. This depression or madness did not fall upon Esther suddenly. She felt the pressure to conform to society's expectations but also had ideas about her own future that did not satisfy those expectations. Esther may have been mad but society drove her to this madness.

Sylvia Plath was a writer with mental illnesses and fears. Her feelings of alienation and her depression came from when she was a child. Her father died when she was eight and her emotions spiraled leaving her feeling abandoned (Ghasemi). Sylvia Plath’s life is reflected in her works; in her novel, The Bell Jar, the main character undergoes mental breakdowns and depression. The poem “Daddy” is filled with rage and emotions that are directed at her father and male figures. Her short story “Initiation” is based on coming of age and realization. Plath’s fear of electroshock therapy is shown multiple times in The Bell Jar through her main character Esther.

The Bell Jar "place[s] [the] turbulent months[of an adolescent’s life] in[to] mature perspective" (Hall, 30). In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses parallelism, stream of consciousness, the motif of renewal and rebirth, symbolism of the boundary-driven entrapped mentally ill, and auto-biographical details to epitomize the mental downfall of protagonist, Esther Greenwood. Plath also explores the idea of how grave these timeless and poignant issues can affect a fragile, aspiring woman during an unforgiving period for women.

In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Plath depicts the various aspects of Esther Greenwood’s life in a way that shows her slow descent into madness. This book is closely based upon Plath’s real life experiences. She lost her father at age eight, and was thrown into an upper class lifestyle for her remaining childhood years with her grandparents and mother. After attending the University of Cambridge, Plath became a writer. Plath generally addressed darker themes in her works such as mental illness and suicide. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her life and underwent shock therapy multiple times, as was common during her lifetime. She married another poet named Ted Hughes, but they ultimately separated a few years before her death, leaving her to take care of their children. In the late 1950’s, Plath began to write The Bell Jar. By 1961, she had twelve chapters written and in 1963, the book was finished. That same year, on February 11th, 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide at age thirty (Lois, A). The Bell Jar took place in the same time period as when Plath was alive, and Esther is based on Plath herself. Esther Greenwood is an upper middle class woman in her 20s who is staying in New York for a writing program in which she is partaking. Esther, despite having a life that others may envy, cannot seem to find happiness or satisfaction with her life. She feels numb to the things going on around her and trapped in a life she doesn’t want. Esther is caught between the man who wants to marry her and a desire to write, a desire to travel, and so many other things she can see herself doing in her future. Esther absolutely does not want to marry Buddy, the man wanting to marry her, and avoids him as much as she can. When her writing program ends, she goes back home to her mother. Esther learns she did not make it into the next writing program, and she feels any future career in writing fall apart. This further affects her already unstable mental health, and she eventually acts upon her feelings and attempts to kill herself multiple times. She finds that her body has a strong desire for her to live, despite her mind not wanting to. She takes sleeping pills to “trick” her body so that it will be unable to save