The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was an inspiring and gifted young author who used her life experiences as muses for her writings. In the novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath portrays mental illness and feminism through Esther. During the 1950’s in America, women were not educated and not expected to go to college. They were not prepared to support themselves and could rely on marriage and children as a predestined fate. Plath and Esther defied these stereotypical views when Plath attended Smith College and exceeded expectations(“Bell”). In The Bell Jar, Esther also pursues her writing career at college as she endures mental illness, has to work against societal views of women, and tries to find a man who she can love(Johnson). Although Sylvia Plath was intelligent and thriving she suffered from great depression and mental illness since she was a child. As she grew older, her depression became severe and altered her attitude and her writing. After she returned home from Smith College for a summer and learned she had not been accepted into a summer writing course, she tried to rebuild herself and her writing, and in the process she became miserable. With a downfall in her writing career, she attempted suicide and was hospitalized. Later she was sent to an asylum where she was given electroshock therapies which are shown in the second half of The Bell Jar. Plath describes the shock therapy in The Bell Jar as, “Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world… and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done”(Plath 118). In this time period people were not aware how to treat depression, and that it was an illness. As Esther is describing herself getting the shock therapy, she describes how much she hates it and afterwards her mind is foggy. Scientists used electroshock therapy as a form of solving and fixing depression and other illnesses in the 1940’s to 1950’s(“Bell”). Esther gets multiple shock therapies as she stays in the asylum after her attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills(Plath). Medicine and technology has advanced since that time period and scientists have learned how to properly treat depression and use electroshock therapy to our advantage. When Plath was released from the asylum after her attempted suicide she met and married a poet, Ted Hughes. Together they had two children and lived in England until Hughes left her. When Hughes left, he abandoned her alone with two children to care for and she spiraled into depression once more. Plath was faced with the difficulty of becoming a free-spirited poet and a wife/mother since she was in college and this caused her much resentment to have to choose between the two. Sylvia Plath felt like she was stuck between choosing what she loved to do or what society thought she should do and the only way out was death. She killed herself in her home on February 11, 1963 after a brutal winter and poor health(“Bell”). In The Bell Jar, Esther is an intelligent, beautiful witty young girl but she can not seem to find a guy to satisfy her typical need of marriage(“Bell”). …show more content…
Esther goes through a handful of men to find one she thinks is worthy enough to entice her when she states, “It was only after seeing Irwin’s study that I decided to seduce him”(Plath 185). Esther loses interest of marriage and uses her energy to find a man worthwhile to lose her virginity too and and has done just that. It was typical and anticipated for a women to get married, as Esther’s mother wants her too. Plath on the other hand followed the terms of exemplary behavior of a women and it led her to desperation, and loneliness(“Bell”). Esther alienates herself from the other characters and contains her own prospects to be a subject of speculation in a bell jar(Martin). She describes not being able to breath in the bell jar and one time she states, “The bell jar hung suspended, a few