Sylvia Plath

a Time* - You’re - Piano* Childhood, is the part of life where humans remain innocent and pure, and are distant from corrupted society. ‘Infant joy’ by William Blake, and ‘You’re’ by Sylvia Plath all portray an optimistic view on infancy and childhood. Blake presents infancy in an affirmative tone, whereas Plath conveys positivity in a more obscure way resulting the tone to be more mysterious and perplexing. Furthermore, the poem ‘Once upon a time’ by Gabriel Okara comments on society’s…

very promising path to a bright future. While Esther seems a success, both she and Holden experience traumatic events throughout their youth. Adolescence is both positive and negative experiences in life. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar highlight how one event can lead to downhill cascade. Death, at any place or time, is a very traumatic experience for people of all ages. At a young age however, it can have drastic, life long effects…

The best way to sum up the sixties is that it was an era with a multitude of ideological clashes. Americans were split on issues such as race, gender, and sexual orientation while the world was divided between Capitalism and Communism. These views can be found in American pop culture, especially literature. Themes such as gender equality, racial equality, anti-war sentiment, technological advancements, and religion can be found in literary pieces during the 1960s. On August 18, 1920, the 19th…

society. In both Roman myths and modern day fairy tales, beauty is an advantageous and essential characteristic and trumps even intelligence and independence. The protagonists of Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, Charles Perrault’s Donkeyskin (1695), and Sylvia Plath’s Cinderella (1956) are all expected to successfully catch the eye of their Prince Charming with their…

Sylvia Plath: Questionable Sanity "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it" (Brainy Quote). If I was having a good day, I was having a really good day. If I was having a bad day, it was like a dark cloud was constantly overnight me bringing darkness to every light and making every little thing seem ten times worse. It's like I couldn't control my emotions; I never…

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is not the first novel that would come to mind when thinking of a coming-of-age story. However, when looked at closely, it truly is for quite a few reasons. Esther spent what is normally considered one's formative years locked in a stagnant world, without enough experience to consider questioning the expectations placed upon her and women in general. Even though Esther is not a teenager, The Bell Jar is a coming-of-age novel because it explores her attempts to find…

Over the last 153 years, American culture, society, and history have all been drastically changed. Authors from all over the country and from different time periods kept track of these changes through writing literature about their lives. Many of the poems, stories, and plays were America’s first form of broadcast news. Literature would spark revolutions that could cause change. Three changes that shaped America into what it is known as today were: women gaining independence, the integration of…

Walt Whitman was born in eighteen nineteen in West Hills, New York. The second of nine kids, which would eventually fall to seven, his family suffered tremendous financial difficulties. While his father was a gifted builder and craftsman, their rural location, and their financially struggling neighbors, made it nearly impossible to maintain a steady income. Ultimately, at eleven, Whitman was forced to leave school to work in printing. Often, Whitman described his childhood as ‘miserable’ because…

Famous female author, Joan Didion, wrote “The Santa Ana” to educate readers about the reactions of the LA population to the notorious winds in the area. She writes about how “The winds show us how close to the edge we are” (Didion 47). Every person has a different metaphorical wind that forces him or her to fall off of their own personal cliff, and mine is depression. Depression is a commonly misunderstood mental disorder. Some people even use it as a description or an emotion, for example, “Oh…

past, the Narrator can finally emerge from her experience with madness. 5. Conclusion: Functions of Madness and Liberation In my thesis I analyse three works by North American female writers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Sylvia Plath’s The Bell-Jar and finally Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, because they all deal to some extent with the connection between madness and the subordinate position of women in the patriarchal society. The aim was to demonstrate…