Jar

Sylvia Plath; Along with authors such as Virginia Woolf, Simone de Bauvoir and Marguerite Duras, is one of the biggest female authors of 20th century. The Bell Jar shares more characteristics with Sylvia Plath’s life than just a semi-autobiographical novel. The main character of the book, Esther travels to New York to work as an intern in a fashion magazine, just like Sylvia Plath did. They are both poets, who lost their fathers at the age of 8 and both Esther and Sylvia Plath slowly falls into…

a. Jeffrey Eugenides and Sylvia Plath both carefully create characters that exist to exhibit the lives of teenage girls, and their inherit suffering during adolescent. The lives of these teenage girls in The Virgin Suicides and The Bell Jar are shaped by mental illness and isolation, stemming from a withdrawal from society and any kind of community thereafter. The Lisbon Sisters and Esther Greenwood are more often than not, forced to interact with communities and families that prove to be…

In Sylvia Plath 's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, the text takes the reader through the struggles of a young woman Esther, Sylvia Plath’s alter ego, who faces unruly patriarchal oppression which limits her ability to succeed within her community. This drives Esther to attempt suicide in a multitude of ways. Esther is aware of a female 's oppression within the 1950’s and relates imbalance between men and women to the battle between nature and technology. Esther is subject to patriarchal…

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Sylvia Plath’s novel, ‘The Bell Jar’, scrutinises how both women, the unnamed narrator and Esther, become mentally unstable. Both protagonists exploit their real life situations in their story and novel to emphasise how being a woman living in a patriarchal society has caused mental breakdowns. Moreover, they make attempts to explore and understand their suffering of depression and the possible ways to overcome it. The short…

yearning to understand a pain that has no answer. This search can be linked to the human condition to romanticize the unsightly in order to make it an ideal, but mental illness is unfortunately unyielding to easy explanations. In Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” protagonist Esther Greenwood struggles with her mental illness in many ways, most of all in finding the strength to understand it. While wrestling with her separation from the world, she explores the ways in which to represent and analyze,…

A Bell Jar with a tight lid As easy as it is for some individuals to go their lives knowing exactly who they are, some people go their whole life trying to find themselves. The journey to self-discovery is present in The Bell Jar, for the novel focuses on the narrator, Esther Greenwood as she struggles to find herself. Through the skillful use of various literary devices, the author, Sylvia Plath, presents the theme of identity in the novel. The first introduction of Esther’s lack of…

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…

into adulthood is hard for any gender but it was especially difficult during the 1950s, a socially conservative time. As a woman in the 1950s, transitioning to adulthood was difficult and for Esther it was nearly impossible. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar provides the opportunity to view a young woman's journey into early adulthood during a period where gender roles, double standards, and social norms severely restricted the options and opportunities available to women. Further, when brief moments…

The Bell Jar is about a story of a young, brilliant and enormously talented woman and her struggles as she grows up in a foreign country, America. This short autobiographical novel details six months in the life of its protagonist, Esther Greenwood and the events of Sylvia Plath's twentieth year; about how she tried to die, and how they stuck her together with glue. In the narrative's opening chapter, Esther, an over-achieving college student, is spending an unhappy summer as a guest editor for…

if her depression was neurotic or psychotic.” The main character from “The Bell Jar” is similar to her in this way, often falling into fits of depression, even breaking into tears when a photographer asks her what she imagines herself doing in the future. Is there a young woman in this world who hasn’t experienced this mental stress? In a social environment with tremendous pressure placed on women, Esther (The Bell Jar) has a tumultuous relationship with food. She consumes luxurious foods but…