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Treatment of Madness in The Bell Jar and The Yellow Wallpaper   Mental illness and madness is a theme often explored in literature and the range of texts exploring these is tremendously varied. Various factors can threaten a character's sanity, ranging from traumatic events which trigger a decline to pressure from more vast, impersonal sources. Generally speaking, writers have tried to show that most threats to sanity comprise a combination of long-term and short-term factors - the burning

The Bell Jar 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

The bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a bildungsroman fictional novel, and documents a first person account of Esther Greenwood’s struggle with depression from her late teens to early twenty’s. During Esther’s final path of destruction, her encounter with Marco leads her to one of many revelations about societies expectations for women and this reality along with many other factors sends Esther to her near demise. Before Esther’s encounter with Marco she was experiencing life in New York through

Sethe, the mother of four is tormented everyday by the attempt to make her children safe. Her two boys left home long ago and now she resides in her home at I24 with her only living daughter Denver. In the novel Beloved, written by Toni Morrison the character Beloved seeks to gain power over a her family, and those around her. Sethe is always in a constant power struggle with the ghost baby the haunts her house. “Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years

Retreat and Recovery in The Bell Jar: A Stylistic Analysis of Fragmentation and Characterization Mahmoud Reza Ghorban Sabbagh Assistant Professor in English Literature Fahimeh Bozorgian M.A. Student in English Literature Department of English Literature and Languages Ferdowsi University of Mashhad Abstract In a story, the particular way a character uses language sheds light on her understanding of herself and the world around her because language is the vessel for meaning making and the

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath also addresses the tensions between expectations regarding traditional female roles and the increasing demands and opportunities of paid labor. In the summer of 1953, The Bell Jar opens. Esther Greenwood, a brilliant young woman, is functioning as an editorial intern at a famous women’s magazine in New York city. Although Esther has an academic promise and aspiration, she feels demoralized about her future and disconnected from society. In addition to her early symptoms

The book the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and the short story the yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman are both about two women who have severe mental issues. On top of that Both females also fall under many stereotypes during the time of the 1950s. Esther falls under the stereotype of a young american girl who goes to New York. Esther is expected to marry a rich young man, and what she calls a home wife. A wife that cooks,cleans, and does whatever the husband tells her to do. THe female in the yellow

Sylvia Plath suggests that in certain cases there are gaps in what people expect of a person and what that person actually experiences; add that with depression and the expectations of women in the 1950s, and there will be certain distortions in individual thoughts. Esther, the narrator of the The Bell Jar, contradicts every aspect of what is expected of a women in this time period. Society and the way it works seems to drive Esther mad, possibly claiming what is expected of certain groups can ,perhaps

Sylvia Plath, a very talented writer and poet, focuses on two very prominent themes in her works: death, specifically suicide, and suffering. In her only novel, The Bell Jar, the protagonist, Esther Greenwood, takes the reader on a journey that explores the life and struggles of a young female poet and a tragic heroine. Esther's experiences reflect those of Sylvia Plath's. Plath describes her life as she saw it, confessing her thoughts and feelings to her audience. In her poems, "Perseus", "Lorelei"

Sylvia Plath’s wit, sarcasm, and myriad of emotions in The Bell Jar are all shown throughout. Esther Greenwood, whom represents Plath in the novel, feels trapped in a bell jar that is society. Esther never truly learned how to be an independent individual herself, so she is simply dependent on others and follows their way of life being that she is highly indecisive. Esther Greenwood’s insanity is influenced by her role within the society of the 1950s and by the dominance of males which she had to