Smith College

on theme such as restricted roles of women in the 50’s in America and with sub-themes like success equals career. Esther Greenwood is from the suburbs of Boston that won a summer internship at a magazine called Ladies Day. Her and eleven other college ladies had specific schedules that include work, fashion events and parties. There she meets good girl Betsy, reckless and careless Doreen and Jay Cee Greenwoods hardworking manager. I think each of these characters…

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…

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…

Causes and Impact of Depression in The Bell Jar “The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft white hotel bath towels I felt pure and sweet as a new baby” (Plath 49). The aforementioned “purity” is attributed to transformation, the washing away of the dirt as she descends into a cleaner self. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar morphs this idea of sanity and purity twisting it to make us all question if a glass…

Daddy and Lady Lazarus are poems written in 1963, by Sylvia Plath and were shortly released after her death. Sylvia Plath is a famous American poet born in October 27, 1932. Plath was really depressed since at the age of 10 after her Father's death. She tried to commit suicide multiple times and failed.Plath's famous Poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” are mainly influenced on her depression and her complex relationship with her Dad and her husband Ted Hughes. Ted hughes leaving Plath left her…

Sylvia Plath was an admired American poet during the 20th century, known for her confessional poems. Plath's poems had a common theme of morality and death. Plath excelled as a child and won many scholarships and contests, but faced difficulties in her home life after her father died. These difficulties affected Plath's mental state and her work greatly. In Plath's poem, “Daddy”, readers can see how her relationship with her father and other life experiences influenced the topics and themes of…

freshman year of high school. My results were as follows: 51 percent openness, 95 percent conscientiousness, 32.5 percent extroversion, 54 percent agreeableness, and 75 percent neuroticism. However, when I took the same test during my first semester of college, I got 63 percent openness, 95 percent conscientiousness, 55 percent extraversion, 63 percent agreeableness, and 38 percent neuroticism. While my conscientiousness and agreeableness are rather consistent, every other factor has changed…

Patrick Amy Writing about Literature Dr. Lavelle Midterm March 6, 2015 Sylvia Plath: the Writer, the Pioneer, the Idol. In her brief and productive life, Sylvia Plath produced some of the more notable and controversial work than that of any of her contemporaries. Plath’s distinctive themes ubiquitous in her work enables her to broach a body of material that many other writers are incapable of: her dedication to exploring certain themes that others did not left an ineradicable mark on American…

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…