Sylvia Plath

and spiraled downward into a continuous cycle of denial and depression. During the 1950s, a typical family consisted of a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and respectful children, all living together in a safe, suburban neighborhood. Author Sylvia Plath questions these family structures, with…

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…

Plath Updike Comparison Draft 3 By denying change, one lives only in the past. Comparing Plath's “Sylvia Plath at Seventeen” and Updike's, “Ex-Basketball Player” reveals both authors create speakers who live in their past out of fear for their future. For this, the authors use similar thematic and stylistic elements, which both Plath and Updike employ to display humanity's resistance towards change and moving on. The thematic ideas in Plath and Updike's work, while slightly different, revolve…

Plath’s poetry here, could be related to image of the “bell jar” by her contemporary researcher. The same stifling environment. Esther Greenwood, another of Plath’s heroines in her autobiographical novel , that narrates Plath’s twentieth year of her life, feels as though she is trapped “blank and stopped as a dead baby” (1972; 265). This image reminds one of the bottled foetus preserved in the laboratories. By the end of the poem, the mother is stripped of all humanity, when the speaker…

Sylvia Plath has written poetry that fully explores the profound depth of the human psyche. Through her use of confessional poetry and psychic landscape, her poetry delves into the multifaceted layers of the human condition. Plath herself came across as a very complicated and perplexing individual, and in her style of writing, she conveys the inner state of her mind. To read her poetry without the context of her mental state, few readers could comprehend the intensity and compelling suffering…

intellectual capacities of the mind to kindle the fire, an ardent desire for self expression and independent ideas within society. These ideas are seen in the two modern texts, Everything Bad is Good For You by Steven Johnson and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. In Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson explores the development of the human mind as popular culture…

"I 'm desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I 'm a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?". The women of the 1960’s lived to serve their husbands and children but women wanted more beyond domestic tasks, inspiring a second wave of feminism that demanded more than just the vote. At the time women were oppressed in almost every way the expectation was that a girl should marry by her early 20s, start…

Plath explores society’s strict standards for women, examining how such standards effectually dismantle an individual’s psyche. For one, Esther strongly disagrees with the societal double standard on sex. Esther opines, “I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not” (Plath, 81). Esther experiences the extent to which masculine exceptionalism — the male gaze — has influenced women’s roles in society.…

The Representation of the Bell Jar As long as suffering exists, so too does the search for its explanation. The human urge to romanticize pain explains this pursuit, but mental illness is unfortunately unyielding to simple justifications. In Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” protagonist Esther Greenwood struggles with her mental illness in many ways, most of all in finding the strength to understand it. While wrestling with her separation from the world, she explores the ways in which to represent…

Kylin Munger Intro to Literature Poetry Analysis Due: 2-23-18 Poetry Analysis: “Daddy” and “How Do I Love Thee” Sylvia Plath was an author in the Modern Era in which she wrote her poem entitled “Daddy” (Plath). In her poem, Plath reflects the Modern Era in which her attitude and words convey the relationship she had with her father. The second author, Elizabeth Barrett Browning with her poem, “How Do I Love Thee” (Barrett Browning) was a poet in the Victorian Era. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s…