Mary Bell

Working in an office, specifically in the front desk, to many is a mundane, straight forward, pretty repetitive job. What could be so awful about working in an office, right? I unfortunately work at a taxicab company and let me start of by saying that there is nothing mundane about this place. On a day to day basis, I find myself struggling to remain positive, stress-free and most of the time end up failing at keeping my spirits up. After viewing the movie, What the Bleep Do We Know?, I saw a…

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…

A very prominent theme throughout the book, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was that thoughts haunt people which creates a bell jar around people, trapping them in the vortex of madness which is their mind. In the beginning of the book Esther contemplates what it would be like to be “burned alive” through electrocution (1). This thought essentially comes back to haunt Esther when she talks to Hilda who is “glad [the Rosenbergs are] going to die (99),” which contributes to the accumulation of…

“Ariel”, and “The Bell Jar”. Despite all of her brilliance, she was plagued with a sea of mental illnesses. “The Bell Jar” was written to chronicle the events that occurred before and after her first suicide attempt. Her most famous poem, “Daddy”, mentions how she tried to join her father in death. There is even a psychological phenomenon named after her. Her life, though successful, was unhappy, as evidenced in The Bell Jar, Daddy, and the Sylvia Plath phenomenon. “The Bell Jar” is thought to…

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath relies heavily on shift in tone and topic to portray the ongoing descent into depression that is the basic story arch for the main character Esther Greenwood. Plath employs a large arsenal of techniques to convey the necessary shifts in the novel. One of the most obvious methods is a direct statement of shift by a character. The direct shift is combined with hints through typical behavior, such as crying. Plath also uses contrasting statements both through Esther…

Plath was largely recognized for her poetry, she also wrote a novel. The Bell Jar, published in January 1963, was not only reflective of Plath’s life, but also focused on the limitations…

Dr. Seuss once asked: “Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”, a question still relevant today. Why should we conform to society’s expectations when we were born to escape them? In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Esther Greenwood suffered from depression but suppressed how she really felt in hopes of fitting in, which caused her to sink into a further depression. Only when Esther grew out of her desire to fit in was she able to find a way out of her depression. This brought on a valuable…

person, just as Esther does. “Esther’s father was the patriarch of the family; in confronting his grave she confronts all of the different pressures she feels from life and the patriarchy.” The domesticated wilderness: Patriarchal Oppression in The Bell Jar by Allison Wilkins. Without a father figure she felt empty and it prevented her from finding happiness which she tortures herself with suicidal attempts. When she underwent her first electro shock session with Doctor Gordon she had a…

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…

Ariel, a collection of Sylvia Plath’s poems released in 1965 after her suicidal death, transmit melancholy and agony to anyone who reads it. This depression in her poems was caused after her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, left her for another woman. Plath’s writing style has always been criticized for being excessively autobiographical and because of her continuous suicidal suspicion. However, Plath has never been criticized for the irony of the poem “The Applicant” compared to the rest of her…