The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath Research Paper

Sylvia Plath: A Powerful American Writer In a time where women were to be seen and not heard, to stay in the kitchen, and do everything their husband told them, there was someone different. Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932 and died in London in 1963. Her father was a german immigrant and her mother was American born. Sylvia Plath was generally considered one of the most powerful American writers to have emerged since the 1940’s. But she didn’t start out that successful. Failing in college and having internal struggles, Sylvia Plath wrote about the topic of her thoughts of depression, women’s rights, and the death of her father and she was praised for having realistic writing only to be criticized for her dark and inappropriate humor. …show more content…
With her depression she had a constant search to find herself. As written in “The Bell Jar”, in Sylvia Plath’s book The Bell Jar her main character Esther is constantly searching for her identity through the novel which put pressure on her to become something greater. Esther ends up losing her sanity because she searches so much which leads her to her depression. (The Bell Jar, 30). Sylvia Plath uses Esther in her writing to show what she went through as a way to deal with her depression. As Helene Henderson writes, The Bell Jar is about a college student in New York who got everything handed to her. The main character Esther lives a good life until she goes to college and gets rejected by Harvard. Esther eventually is led to be put in an asylum after her attempt at suicide due to all of her failures. Her failures include her dropping out of college because of an overwhelming amount of pressure and activities (“Sylvia Plath”, 167-168). In her poem “Daddy” it is totally dedicated to her father. In it she writes “Daddy, I have had to kill