McLean Hospital

attempted suicide twice. After her first attempt, she was hospitalized and received electro-shock treatment. Her time in the hospital can be described as a “time of darkness, despair, disillusion- so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be- symbolic death, and numb shock- then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration” (Scott). Plath’s time in the hospital psych ward helped her become better, and during that time she wrote the novel The Bell Jar but not long later she…

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath is about a girl named Esther who is a young women from the suburbs in Boston. She is working for an editor in New York interning at a magazine during the summer. She feels like she doesn’t fit in or belong with society and this is leading to depression. After many suicide attempts, her mother sends her to a psychiatric institution where she meets a female doctor named Doctor Nolan who eventually helps her overcome her problems and depression. I chose the signpost…

institution and treated with electroshock therapy. Because the scene is so similar to the one that the author faces it gives the book a more macabre feel to it. The blanks thoughts the character feels before swallowing those pills and then waking up in a hospital could be the very same thing that Plath felt. And we know this because in the foreword written by Frances McCullough, he describes how during the last years of her life she was…

off, and they would give up hope. They would grow old. They would forget me. They would be poor, too. They would want me to have the best care at first, so they would sink all their money in a private hospital like Doctor Gordon's. Finally, when the money was used up, I would be moved to a state hospital, with hundred of people like me, in a big cage in the basement. The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.” (160) d. Throughout the novel, Sylvia Plath emphasizes the curious…

Sylvia Plath can very easily be considered one of the brightest minds in all of confessional poetry. She wrote hundreds of poems in her lifetime and three books: “The Colossus”, “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…

Elements of Voice: The Bell Jar The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a timeless literary classic. One reason that this novel has transcended the ages since the 1960s is Plath’s expert use of the elements of voice. Few novels may stand the test of time. A vast knowledge of author’s craft is necessary to create a story that is intricate and detail-oriented without becoming overly specific and unrelateable. Sylvia Plath suffered from depression throughout her life, which led to her poetry and novels…

Often described as a perfectionist, Sylvia Plath was an enviable, popular, academically successful college student when her losing battle with depression began. Having published her first poem at eight years old, Plath was a writer at her core, and her journey with mental illness can be revealed and analyzed in her writing which gave Plath a method of coping with and externalizing her many debilitating anxieties. In her many published poems, stories, and essays Plath covers topics on identity,…

The Story of an Hour is a short story by author Kate Chopin, that was published in 1984. The story was originally published in Vogue, on December 6th, titled "The Dream of an Hour”. Louise Mallard, the main character, has heart problems. Therefore, at the beginning of the text we are told that she must be informed of her husband’s death in a careful manner. Her sister Josephine delivers the news. The reader is also told that Louise’s husband’s friend, named Richards, had learned about his…

Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel “The Bell Jar”, briefs the story of an amazing, gifted poet, Esther Greenwood, whose falling apart piece by piece due to the pressure of society. Throughout the novel Esther gave many signs on how she's slowly falling apart. When working for the Ladies’ Day magazine in New York, Esther develops a mental illness. An illness that makes her unable to sleep then leads to her not being able to read and write. She then tries to commit suicide multiple times due to the lack of…

while she slits her wrists, as if the mirror is only a picture and not real. The symbol of a mirror is used to demonstrate that to Esther, the mirror is nothing but the physical representation of her own mental decay. When Esther wakes up in the hospital after another suicide attempt she asks the nurse for a mirror. After seeing her reflection Esther is shocked to see how far she has fallen into her illness and own physical deterioration and drops the mirror to the ground only to have it…