Jar

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream". “The Bell Jar”, by Sylvia Plath illustrates the feeling of being trapped mentally and physically. Esther’s sense of confinement is the manifestation of her mental illness. The heroin addict in The Bell Jar, is a talented young woman who has several issues to deal with before continuing with her life. The majority of Esther’s issues seem centered around her mother; the resentment she has…

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is not the first novel that would come to mind when thinking of a coming-of-age story. However, when looked at closely, it truly is for quite a few reasons. Esther spent what is normally considered one's formative years locked in a stagnant world, without enough experience to consider questioning the expectations placed upon her and women in general. Even though Esther is not a teenager, The Bell Jar is a coming-of-age novel because it explores her attempts to find…

Repressive Sexuality: The Bell Jar depicts Esther’s relationship with herself, to be a “surveyed self” (Gentry, 47). It shows how self can operate in relation to body image and sexuality through idioms of “the fashioned self” (Pelt, 15) and Esther’s confrontations with sexual orientation in The Bell Jar. It links Esther’s identity process with that of the broader organizations of patriarchal power within American society. Esther seems to be in conflict with the idea of sexuality. She…

"The Bazaar of Bad Dreams" is a collection of short horror stories. Before each story there's a little note from Stephen King, explaining why, how, and when he created the story. There are twenty short stories and two poems{I counted}, the first story is a highway rest stop where an abandoned car sits, good people, come to the cars aid, thinking something bad has happened to someone, only when they touch the car with anything touching them the car eats them. The next story is about a couple who…

Sylvia Plath clearly embeds the story of Esther Greenwood into the political situation of the time. The Bell Jar introduces its setting by referring to the execution of the Rosenbergs. In the summer of 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of and electrocuted for espionage. It was believed that they had passed secret US military information on nuclear weapons on to Soviet Intelligence. The fear of the so-called “red scare” was omnipresent, and it was believed that more and more people…

The Bell Jar is a famous novel written by Sylvia Plath during the 1960’s. This novel is about a character named Esther Greenwood, who struggles with who she is and how she wants to live her life. Esther faces many problems, especially inside her head that leads her to depression and difficulties throughout the novel. Sylvia Plath has lived a complicated life that is much similar to Esther Greenwood's character. Her life is described in The Bell Jar through events, characters, and her written…

Plath’s poetry here, could be related to image of the “bell jar” by her contemporary researcher. The same stifling environment. Esther Greenwood, another of Plath’s heroines in her autobiographical novel , that narrates Plath’s twentieth year of her life, feels as though she is trapped “blank and stopped as a dead baby” (1972; 265). This image reminds one of the bottled foetus preserved in the laboratories. By the end of the poem, the mother is stripped of all humanity, when the speaker…

equipped to deal with the loss, which can cause it to spiral out of control. In both the The Bell Jar and The Catcher in the Rye, each author creates a protagonist who loses a family member at an early age which results in a mental illness for each protagonist. The authors want the reader to understand that mental illness stems from exposure to traumatic experiences in early childhood. Throughout The Bell Jar and The Catcher in the Rye, Plath and Salinger use their protagonists’ to demonstrate…

mind is ill-equipped to deal with the loss, which can cause it to spiral out of control. In both the The Bell Jar and The Catcher in the Rye, each author creates a protagonist who loses a family member at an early age which results in a mental illness for each of them. Both authors expose how mental illness can stem from traumatic events occurring in early childhood. Throughout The Bell Jar and The Catcher in the Rye, Plath and Salinger use their protagonists’ to demonstrate the motif of loss of…

Truth is in the Ear of the Beholder Understanding and making sense of the diverse inner psych that resides in each of us, is a daunting task. One thing is for certain, as long as humans have been able to communicate; they have had the ability to create stories and rumors. The deeper question is why? Why do people start rumors to begin with and then exactly who is spreading them? Gregory Rodriguez, a columnist with the Los Angeles Times examines these questions in his article written in 2009,…