The Bell Jar

stereotypical belief, this behavior does not always die off with childhood, instead sticking with some throughout their entire adulthood, leaving those to choose to act upon it, some through writing. The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are two novels written with the theme of madness. The Bell Jar is written by Sylvia Plath, a woman with a female protagonist. Ken Kesey, a man, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with…

yearning to understand a pain that has no answer. This search can be linked to the human condition to romanticize the unsightly in order to make it an ideal, but mental illness is unfortunately unyielding to easy explanations. 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 and analyze,…

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a classic in American literature. It details a young woman’s summer (Esther Greenwood) in New York working for a lady-like magazine. Later on, Esther falls for Buddy Willard who then becomes her boyfriend. In his time, Buddy Willard had the ideal attributes. He’s good-looking, intelligent, and he graduated from Yale and then went to medical school to become a doctor. Although all those elements make him look like the perfect guy, Buddy Willard is flawed.…

“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…

Sylvia Plath writes to express the things that have happened throughout her life that also affected many young women her age. She also writes to discuss stigmatized or provocative topics. Plath takes to discussing subjects such as depression, double standards, and societal expectations, at length and candidly. Drawing from her own life and battles with depression, Plath herself went through some of the more invasive procedures as described in the novel. For Esther Greenwood, the therapy “took…

control occurs in many aspects of life such as at work, and school. He kept them in a certain space under their power. Throughout this situation, women started to be aware .They begin to resist against this confinement as stated in the novel of The Bell Jar. The novel sheds a light to the way men occupy and control them by power relations, and the way that women resist and break that barrier in the last century. A woman’s femininity was tied to her commitment in the home. The more she was…

author Sylvia Plath definitely impacted American culture by writing about her battle with mental illness, like depression and her views on women's role in society. The roles for women in America at that time were not what Plath wanted. In novel, The Bell Jar, Plath shows her troubles with conflicting identities. Between trying to please her mother, trying to become successful, relationships, and mental illness. She also was considered a feminist because of her work about gender roles for women.…

fit into these preconceived standards society has made. In “The Bell Jar”, impeccably smart college student Esther Greenwood feels conflicted in her life with the combination of her oppressive surroundings and slowly growing madness. Although…

The symbol of the bell jar is clearly an important idea, as the book is titled after it. After reading this novel, the reader understands Esther feels she is trapped in a fishbowl of emotions, an idea Esther explains as a “bell jar, with stifling distortions” (241). Esther fears this bell jar, because she associates it with her depression. This looming jar seems like it should “descend again”, terrifying Esther of the return of depression…

During the 1950s, women and men were under immense pressure to conform to traditional gender roles. Women were expected to stay home and tend to the children, while men were expected to be the breadwinners. Unlike men, women were expected to remain a virgin until they marry, and when they do they must not indulge in any sexual desires outside the marriage, and any sexual act with their husband is for the sole purpose of procreation. The idea of conforming to these gender roles stemmed from the…