Essays on Sylvia Plath

h Bell Jar EssaysMental Illness in The Bell Jar Mental illness and madness is a theme often explored in literature and the range of texts exploring these is tremendously varied. Various factors can threaten a character’s sanity, ranging from traumatic events which trigger a decline to pressure from more vast, impersonal sources. Generally speaking, writers…

"The Role Models of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar;quot;;#9;Throughout the novel Esther Greenwood has trouble deciding who she wants to be. Her search for an identity leads her to look at her female role models. These women are not ideal in her eyes. Although they represent a part of what she herself wants to be,…

It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the…

The Bell Jar is about a young reporter, Esther Greenwood, and her life during anall expenses paid trip to New York in the 1950s. Esther won the month longtrip in a fashion magazine, one of only twelve winners. She is jealous of allthe rich girls staying at the all female hotel, especially since it is…

In Sylvia Plaths poem, “Metaphors,” the speaker describes a negativeevent in which she is experiencing pregnancy. Her choice of words and phrasesexpress her feelings about the pregnancy as well as the structure of the poem. In her poem, Plath chooses many metaphors to describe her pregnancy. I felt thatthese metaphors were describing something that she…

The Bell Jar and Catcher In The RyeIn the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, a young adult by the name of Esther Greenwood tells her story of her everyday struggle with life. Her coming of age is very difficult, and she does not know where she fits in society. In The Catcher and…

The Bell JarThe Bell Jar Essay submitted by Jen People’s lives are shaped through their success and failure in their personal relationships with each other. The author Sylvia Plath demonstrates this in the novel, The Bell Jar. This is the direct result of the loss of support from a loved one, the lack of support…

ation with sex, madness, morbidity and obscurity. Discuss. There seem to be a number of common themes running through all of Plath’s poems, which encapsulate her personal attitudes and feelings of life at the time she wrote them. Of these themes, the most prevalent are: sex, madness, morbidity and obscurity. The whole concept of sex…

There is a noticeable comparison between the poem “The Mirror” By Sylvia Plath & the article “Barbie” that appeared in the Newsday Tuesday November 18, 1997. The comparison is about how people look, and how society could reflect how you may feel about your looks. In the poem “The Mirror” it tells about a lady…

“And the language obscene / An engine, and engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew’ (lines 30-32)This quote depicts the relationship that Plath had with her father. In Daddy, Plath depicts herself as a victim, as she compares herself to a Jew and her father as a Nazi. She uses this train metaphor to…