The Psychological Interpretation Of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

As the author of the book The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s writing can be associated with her real-life struggles. Living as a woman in the 50’s, Sylvia’s realities helped her paint a truthful picture of what it was like to be a woman with depression during this time. Although her openness to express her real-life struggle through text was remarkable, this topic of mental health and depression was unheard of at the time. Esther Greenwood, the main focus throughout The Bell Jar, resembled the life of Plath for her unsteady and rebellious characteristics that often break the social conceptions of what it meant to be a woman with depression. On page 96, Esther stands on top of a mountain with a colorful stream of consciousness that is detailed and fervent as she considers skiing down the mountain. Plath uses imagery and figurative language to convey her feelings of being out of control and absolutely isolated, revealing how women during this time period were forced to keep their true thoughts and emotions to themselves regardless of their mental condition.

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is rich with an array of motifs, all which serve to sustain the novel’s primary themes. A motif particularly prevalent within the first half of the novel involves food, specifically Esther Greenwood’s relationship with food. This peculiar relationship corroborates the book’s themes of Esther’s continuous rebirthing rituals, and of her extreme dissatisfaction. The interrelation with food functions in two distinct manners: literally and figuratively. This analysis will concentrate on the figurative role of food in The Bell Jar, and how it denotes Esther’s overall state.

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn 't know what I was doing in New York" (1; ch. 1), the opening line of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, effectively sets the tone for both the life of Plath and the remainder of the novel. Plath 's depression and cynical outlook on life fueled the creation of many of her poems and novels, and particularly The Bell Jar in its autobiographical fictional genre. In this way, Sylvia Plath is able to more clearly display the disillusionment of the Modernist era in The Bell Jar as she showcases the harshly conforming expectations placed on women in the 1950s and their negative consequences on the psyches of these women.

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.

The postwar 1950s launched the modernist period in English Literature, which suggested a more pessimistic perception of society through societal nonconformity, decay, and alienation. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, a parallel to her life, expresses Esther Greenwood’s character in pursuit of morality in the reality she faces in the modern society. Esther discovers that the society is not as pure as it seems and has underlying truths behind its deceptive appearance. To emphasize her realization, she mentions the color white two hundred-fourteen times in the novel. Although the color white often symbolizes purity, goodness, and innocence, Esther gives white a negative connotation in the novel. Esther depicts the reality of the society as fabricated through the recurring motif of the color white, which symbolizes hopelessness and a stigma in the optimistic society.

One is often enticed to read a novel because of the way in which the characters are viewed and the way in which characters view their surroundings. In the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Esther Greenwood is a character whose "heightened and highly emotional response to events, actions and sentiments" (Assignment sheet) intrigue the reader. One of her character traits is extreme paranoia that is shown in different situations throughout the novel. As a result of this, she allows herself to be easily let down, as she believes that all events that are unsatisfactory are directed towards her. Finally, it is clear that she attempts to escape this notion by imagining an idyllic yet impossible life that she

Depression can be defined as part of a psychological state of mind that a person might encounter. Most famously recognized psychiatrist Sigmund Freud is known for his Psychodynamic theory. His psychoanalysis theory is known to be successful for treating patients with mental illness. Sylvia Plath, the author of the Bell Jar, makes the main character Esther go through a psychological transformation. Esther’s transformation can be realized through Freud’s psychoanalysis theory as the story unfolds from the beginning to end. The influences of people and events around Esther have affected her transformation.

In The Bell Jar, author Sylvia Plath explores the aloof sexism of the 1950s generation by elucidating main character Esther Greenwood’s inherent discontentment with the misogyny-consumed era that inevitably leads to her psychological demise. A rare insight to the despairing fate of a young woman who doesn’t fit within the cookie-cutter lifestyle American society was laid out to be in the mid-20th century American Dream. Just as the novel is title The Bell Jar, Esther’s journey in entering adulthood was narrated in the shape of a bell jar, starting out well, then entering a massive curve shape of hysteria and gloom, and concluding with determination and perseverance to rectify her mental state. Esther’s obsession with attempting to comprehend the

Sylvia Plath’s writing chronicled a wide variety of subjects; from a descent into mental illness in The Bell Jar to doomed hospitals in the titular short story Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. She was married to Ted Hughes and had two children with him before he left her and she committed suicide in 1963. Her works shared some common elements that were based on experiences from her own life. Discussions of depression, sexuality, and feminism were prevalent in her writing and were directly inspired by her own experiences both during and post-college. Her characters illustrate how she viewed her life during the 1950s, exploring details such as how women were not allowed to pursue a multitude of careers and were seen as inferior to men. Sylvia

Depression is a part of mental illness that can lead to major decisions in life. Very often depression needs to be treated. Usually there are many negative instances that lead to that difficult time in life. In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the narrator is at war with herself as she moves to the city because of a fashion scholarship she receives. While in the city she experiences life outside her world and that's when her life begins to change. She questions her dreams for writing and herself as a person. Esther's life begins to downfall when we are let known that Esther’s father died while she was nine and she wants to be a poet. Moreover, the people Esther has surrounded herself with are not encouraging her passion for writing: her mother wants her her to do shorthand and Buddy her boyfriend doesn't even pay any mind to her writing. Through imagery, Plath displays that depression is lead to by isolation, and the ability to disconnect oneself to the things of the world, using various parts of Esther’s downward journey.

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.

Throughout literature, authors have used stories to tell personal experiences and address public issues. Sylvia Plath conveyed her suicidal thoughts with her poetry and novel The Bell Jar. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle described the gruesome working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. Today, storytelling has expanded to include oral stories and art, using visual cues and sound to convey the author’s emotions. Lynda Barry and Kevin Kling use their novels One Hundred Demons! and The Dog Says How to remediate their internal battles with depression and disabilities.

In Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, Plath expresses her opposition to the idea of men having complete control over every aspect of women’s lives by utilizing the narrator Esther; a radical feminist, to speak out against conformity in a society run by men. Esther represents everything controversial about domesticity in the twentieth century. Throughout the novel she touches on taboo subjects such as radical feminism, rape, and resistance of patriarchal dictates, all of which were touchy topics to speak out about for women of this time period. From the beginning of the novel Esther is constantly torn between what defines her as an individual and what she should conform to because that is what society expects of her as a woman. Esther has a pessimistic outlook on domesticity and despises the idea of playing the role of a helpless puppet that a man holds the strings to. She is not completely against the patriarchal dictates placed on her gender but instead wants to put her own twist on the part she will inevitability be forced to play one day.

Compare and Contrast: “The Bell Jar” and “Daddy” Literature and art, in general, can convey very strong, powerful feelings and provide emotional relief for the artist. Although Sylvia Plath likely meant for her works to be interpreted as simple fiction they are littered with autobiographical details. The characters are not meant to be herself, still, what she writes about the mental condition and feelings of the narrators are proven to be her personal thoughts, evidenced by the events of her life, namely her depression and suicide. Through her poems, in this case her poem titled “Daddy”, and her only novel, “The Bell Jar”, we can have a vivid, personal retelling of the issues she faced throughout her life such as the loss of her father, feelings of

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, a novel of literary merit, is a complex novel read under the psychological and biographical lense to understand the main character’s bleak struggle with mental insanity, which is shown throughout the novel through comparisons and contrasts the author makes with the character and herself leading to show the relevance of the novel as the importance of the individual and simultaneously gives the author the ending she wanted.