Sylvia Plath effect

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…

Similarly, Plath shows the importance that appearances have on individuals as they grow older. Imagery is employed to show the lack of attention the woman had about her appearance when she was younger. The mirror states, “Faces and darkness separate us over and over” (9). The use of the word “darkness” and “over and over” portray the image of lights getting turned off frequently leaving the mirror to reflect the dark. Children spend most of their day playing outside or watching cartoons. They…

Both “Daddy,” by Sylvia Plath, and “My Papa’s Waltz,” by Theodore Roethke are poems centering around the parent-child relationship between the authors and their fathers. At first glance, Plath’s “Daddy” pivots around an abusive father, and Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” revolves around the joy filled evening of play that the narrator and his father participate in. While Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” parent-child relationships are seemingly quite different, once one…

Although not an inmate himself, he had breakfast first, in the "normal" world and then goes to work. The doctor is the one who takes control, who has a viewpoint, who is composed, sane, and in disciplined. The speaker, on the other hand, is portrayed by differences with Doctor Martin. The speaker is not given a name. "Her motion is ‘speeds' a word that connects, by means of internal rhyme with ‘queen' in line six and ‘bee' in line seven, to suggest the brittle meaninglessness of her position…

incapacitate patients, worsening their condition. One of the few unlucky people whose life was drastically changed bythe inadequate application of this treatment was Sylvia Plath. Shaping American feminism and contemporary poetry, Sylvia Plath is one of the most renowned and appreciated poets of her time (“Blackberrying” 28). Though 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…

Sylvia Plath’s poem, “The Mirror,” is full of imagery and comparisons. Plath uses these in order to emphasize the point she is trying to make with the poem about beauty, aging, self-image, and the way society views the three. Comparisons are made throughout the poem that convey feelings and ideas that would not have the same affect if they were explicitly stated. The poem is narrated by the mirror itself, which is personified by Plath. According to Aidan Curran, this makes the poem seem both…

strangers. But never the less that fact will not get me out of this essay. So with my expectations low, I started browsing through some poems. Just when I was about to give up on finding an interesting poem that I liked and could understand, I came across Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” (pages 549-551). This is a dark poem about a woman and the things she experienced while in a concentration camp during the Holocaust ultimately ending with the characters death. As for the overall theme I believe…

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…

Esther most significant anxiety is her desire to succeed in various parts of her life professionally and personally, while recognizing that she lives in a world where women rarely venture into success outside of their homes. When Esther thinks of the fig tree she finds it symbolic to host her new opportunities that exist. “From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.” She associates each fig with a different life choice but her desire to branch out…