The Bell Jar

“Shoot the Damn Dog” is written by Sally Brampton, a successful magazine editor and prize-winning journalist; who would have thought that behind a very successful and glamorous career, as the editor of Elle and then of Red, was a story that many (of her friends and colleagues) knew nothing about “Depression”. She struggled with ongoing, severe depression and alcoholism. It was the hardest thing for her as she described the struggle in her book “I found that a steady stream of alcohol together…

drienne Rich (1929-2012) was by many regarded as the voice of her generation. Her work was often political, and her poetry explored themes such as change, feminism and sex. In the earlier years, having a family, she often wrote her poems in between chores. Perhaps it was her traditional lifestyle gave her work a “neat and orderly” (Rich, as cited in Mays 912) tint. “Aunt Jennifer's tigers” was published at the mere age of 21. As times changed, so did her poetry, growing more social and political…

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 4 ANALYTICAL ESSAY ”Everything she had dreamed for herself faded away, like fine mist on a breeze”. This strong quote incapsulates the feeling of a failed dream, though in its original context, the quote also tells a story of 1970’s America and society’s gender roles. The quote comes from Celeste Ng’s 2014 novel ‘Everything I never told you’, which deals with the suicide of a mixed-race child. However, this is hardly the story that Celeste is trying to tell with her novel,…

.2. Sylvia Plath and Esther Greenwood The novel is the story of a young woman struggling with her mental health. As such, it is a complex account of schizophrenic psychosis in a young woman (Garrido,1). The Bell Jar does not follow the usual trajectory of the Bildungs roman. The protagonist is nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood. Instead of passing the usual developmental milestones leading to adulthood, young Esther regresses into madness. Being a student at renowned Smith College, she…

tormented and thoughtful mind. The Bell Jar is a perniciously brutal story of a young woman struggling to handle the pressures of academia, sexism, career uncertainty, insomnia, depression. These factors had a synergetic effect on her ability to get through life. Essentially, the events in the book are autobiographical. Truly, one would be incapable of creating such a gruesomely emotional novel without experiencing the same internal despair as its protagonist. The Bell Jar is a strange mix of…

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath follows the mind of Esther Greenwood, a bright young woman with academic promise and ambition. Esther’s ambition is much too excessive to suit a woman in her society because she dreams beyond the expected life of a woman, which is limited to the docile life of a wife and mother. Esther builds a sense of alienation and craze deriving from the expectations placed upon her in the American popular culture surroundings because of social expectations, her self-critical…

Mariah Inghram ENG 3060J Katherine Berta September 20, 2016 Reader’s Response Two In Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, Plath examines the conventional role of American women during the 1950s through the perspective of the story’s main character, Esther Greenwood. Esther is the epitome of an unconventional American woman during the 1950s; thus she cannot identify with the pressures of conventional expectations of women during this time (Plath). Esther’s lack of identity to women of this time…

The Bell Jar exemplifies how violence is almost an inevitable consequence of any sexual relationships between men and women in a patriarchal society where men hold the puppet strings and dangle them in their favor. While it's considered natural for men to have sexual desires and to indulge these desires outside marriage, women are expected to remain chaste until they marry, and when they do marry, sex is all about having babies – it has nothing to do with romance or intimacy. Concern towards…

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…

Fig 2, Rodin, A, 1882, The Kiss Fig 3, Parker, C, The Distance Similar to the idea of boundaries is concealment. Sculpture artist Judith Scott had Down syndrome and was severely deaf; she used yarn, wool, and other fibres, which may suggest a way of communicating to the public themes of loss, separations, relationships and new beginnings. Her practice consisted of abstract cocoons whereby objects are wrapped up in colourful threads, from crimson red, blues, cream, purple and black. Seeking…