“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” - Laurell K. Hamilton. The novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is effective when it comes to covering the critical approaches. Esther Greenwood is an extremely depressed character who is working for a magazine, and spends her timing trying to be perfect to earn scholarships who created a “bell jar” that traps her in her own mind and distances herself from everyone else including society and her own mind (Baig 1) , very similar to the life of author Sylvia Plath, making the connection with the biographical approach the best fit, and because of Esther 's’ mental illness, it also makes her a good choice to show the psychoanalytical approach.
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Similarly, Esther Greenwood also suffered from depression since the early part of her life, from the time her father died at age nine (Plath 39). An additional connection can be made between Esther and Sylvia when they both self-harmed their calves, as if they were to scared to cut the skin on their wrists, in fear of it actually ending their lives. “Then I lifted my right hand with the razor and let it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, onto the calf of my leg”(Plath 78). Here Esther is cutting her calf the same way Plath did, solidifying that both women were trying a ritualistic “practice cut”, to see if they could go truly through with killing themselves. On the other hand, a small difference between the two is, Plath had two major suicide attempts, while Esther had attempted one. The first attempt Plath tried, was taking her sleeping tablets from her mother and hiding in a crawl space because she was rejected from a Harvard writing course (Kirk, C), this was similar to Esther who wanted to kill herself for not making the summer writing program, took her mothers sleeping pills and hid in a crawl space as well. “I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one. At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue …show more content…
With the biographical approach, it can be show how the author has transferred exact moments of her life into the novel, creating a fictional biography. Likewise, Esther’s psyche can be broken down from her descend into mental instability, and her rise back to sanity, lastly to how she goes from having a more prominent Superego to becoming more ID
Similarly, Esther Greenwood also suffered from depression since the early part of her life, from the time her father died at age nine (Plath 39). An additional connection can be made between Esther and Sylvia when they both self-harmed their calves, as if they were to scared to cut the skin on their wrists, in fear of it actually ending their lives. “Then I lifted my right hand with the razor and let it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, onto the calf of my leg”(Plath 78). Here Esther is cutting her calf the same way Plath did, solidifying that both women were trying a ritualistic “practice cut”, to see if they could go truly through with killing themselves. On the other hand, a small difference between the two is, Plath had two major suicide attempts, while Esther had attempted one. The first attempt Plath tried, was taking her sleeping tablets from her mother and hiding in a crawl space because she was rejected from a Harvard writing course (Kirk, C), this was similar to Esther who wanted to kill herself for not making the summer writing program, took her mothers sleeping pills and hid in a crawl space as well. “I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one by one. At first nothing happened, but as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue …show more content…
With the biographical approach, it can be show how the author has transferred exact moments of her life into the novel, creating a fictional biography. Likewise, Esther’s psyche can be broken down from her descend into mental instability, and her rise back to sanity, lastly to how she goes from having a more prominent Superego to becoming more ID