McLean Hospital

Esther’s madness begins to feed on her surrender to societal norms by losing her fight to be a writer and losing herself. This other half of Esther believes that she should give into the sexist culture around her so that she can be accepted. It feeds on her doubt and weakens, while she tries to remain strong, even through her breakdown: “Thus, Sylvia Plath’s story of her breakdown and recovery in The Bell Jar is simultaneously a pre-feminist exposé of the adverse effects of sexist culture on American

Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, shows that the mores of America contribute to the mental deterioration of some of the most creative and introspective of people. The novel is basically an autobiography-one which is a strange mix of mundanity, grotesqueness, barbarity, nature, and glamour. Something dark and insidious perturbs the author’s stand in protagonist, Esther Greenwood, in both traumatizing and prosaic circumstances. The novel remains iconic in American culture due to its resonance with

“Pretend you are drowning,” the woman-hater hissed to Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, who did not have to pretend (Plath 107). Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel follows nineteen-year-old Esther through her descent into suicidal schizophrenia as well as through her supposed recovery. When sent on a blind date in Chapter 9 with Marco, an affluent and handsome Peruvian man, Esther catches her first sight of a diamond, which Marco presents to her. He bruises Esther’s

It is exceedingly common for humans to use fictional writing in order to express their hardships in life. It is clear to researchers that Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar for this sole purpose. Plath faced many struggles in her short life, all of which were explained in her novel. There are a plethora of studies that easily show the similarities between The Bell Jar’s Esther Greenwood and Sylvia Plath.They both faced trauma, depression, and issues with self worth. The unrelenting pressure of the two

mental illness. In her novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses the bell jar to symbolize Esther’s mental illness and the feelings of confinement it causes. The symbol of the bell jar is first used when Esther is on the way to a private psychiatric hospital. Plath writes, “Wherever I sat – on the deck of a ship or at a street

The Bell Jar was written by Sylvia Plath and published in Britain under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in January 1963, merely a few weeks before her suicide. In summer of 1953, Plath was awarded a summer as a guest editor at the women’s magazine Mademoiselle, and her internship in New York City would ultimately inspire Plath to write The Bell Jar. The novel lightly fictionalized Plath’s life under the facade of Esther Greenwood, right down to the method of her failed suicide attempt and extensive

The Bell Jar The novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath centers around a college-aged woman living in the eccentric city of New York, New York. Esther Greenwood won a scholarship contest which earned her a spot as a summer intern at a women’s fashion magazine. Although Esther was grateful for her opportunity to become a famous writer, her struggle with the death of her father over ten years ago, and lacking desire to fill the role of womanhood causes Esther’s mental health to deteriorate. Upon returning

A semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar is a story of depression and mental illness. Esther is a student from Massachusetts, in New York on scholarship for a fashion magazine. Her time in the city leads from memories of her past, to her shattering image of reality, and her demise to her mental illness. Institutionalization, shock therapy, and suicide attempts, all reflect Plath's own personal history. Plath's language in both the novel and her poem's such as "Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", and "The

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

After only a few phrases expressed in The Bell Jar, the thought of suicide and death seem to express itself among Plath’s storyline. The novel beguines with talk of cadavers and the death of the Rosenbergs for being Communist spies and the protagonist, Esther, continues to express thoughts of identity struggle, lack of personal expression in society, and feeling out of place through the first several chapters—thoughts suicidal individuals contemplate. Ironically, for a novel about death, The Bell