Sylvia Plath effect

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 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 parallel Sylvia’s first attempt at suicide. It is an atypical coming of…

eventually will begin to feel alone. Poet, Sylvia Plath was far too familiar with this feeling. In many of her writings, such as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Plath wrote about her depressing feelings, especially towards her husband. In the story, she explains looking at the disgusting wallpaper and the feeling of being lonely. Towards the ending, it goes to explain her happiness began to develop through her children. Many of her writings include emotional aspects such as sadness, loneliness, and…

Sylvia Plath: Why She Wrote What She Wrote What is literature? Literature is around us everyday: it is the basics like reading and writing in school. It is the way that we think. Literature is exploring and putting our new experiences into our own life. Why study literature? Literature is a way of finding yourself, often times at your most vulnerable: your youth. What value does it have? Literature a way to know more about what’s going on around you, and also what you think on the inside. Most…

A parent’s word or actions leave behind an astounding effect on a child. Whether positive or negative, those are moments that shape and alter the child’s life. In Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy, the story tells how the narrator copes and continues her life after her father dies. Even after his harsh treatment and rude demeanor while he was alive, he is still an entity that she herself lives her life by. Plath conveys the narrator’s feeling of confinement with the use of metaphors, repetition, and…

Throughout Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” The tone is found to be childishly innocent, kind of close to a lullaby, and extremely deranged and menacing. As it progresses the tone ranges from like a childlike adoration, where she puts the parent whose not there on a pedestal to a blunt like a disrespectful, distant and fearful adult. Even though Plath excels in tones, Plath keeps a deep and heavy dark style throughout the poem with her use of diction. “Daddy” is a confessional poem, put in a harsh,…

Greenwood the protagonist of the novel experienced breakdowns in her life which led her at many times to suicide. 3.1 .The Protagonist’s Madness and the Woman initiate mental Illness Sylvia Plath describes her long term depression that blocks her mind her scope of writing. Most of her work depicts her life. Her troubled psyche also becomes apparent in her writing. Thus, madness becomes an important factor in Plath's work. This actually reflects how much she suffered from her mental…

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…

An Ouija board is a “game board” that is used to communicate with spirits. Why would someone want to communicate with spirits? In Sylvia Plath’s case, to connect with her dead father and ultimately with herself. Sylvia wrote the poem, Ouija, after getting involved with dark magic through her husband. In the end, dark magic is what killed her, although her death is viewed as suicide. She was once innocent but then dark spirits and her husband changed her. Darkness was what Sylvia sought and due…

In the literary works of Chopin, Gilman and Plath, marriage remains the predominant motif of the plot, all of which put forth the idea that marriage is a device of “entrapment” of the female sex. Arguably, all three authors adopt “feminist bias”. They are presented from the viewpoint of the female protagonists without any true male interjections; the protagonists struggle to express themselves within restrictive conventions of the patriarchal society which they live in. Finally, the protagonists…

Many poets and other artists tend to experience melancholy more than the average person. The Sylvia Plath Effect coined by famous psychologist James C. Kaufman in 2001 explores the idea that poets are often more susceptible to mental illness than other writers (Bailey). Many say that poets are more susceptible to depression due to their more realistic outlook on life however, it is more likely that creative people are more depressed due to how much time they spend ruminating on their thoughts.…