Essays on The Bell Jar

An overarching theme in The Bell Jar is society’s belittling of women’s roles in the 1950s. Esther, the main character, faces many obstacles as a woman in the 1950s. However, she does not always adhere to the social norms of the time. For example, Esther...

Author of The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter, suggests that ‘women have been labelled mad because mental illness has been defined and codified by male psychiatrists’. Depictions of female ‘hysteria’ in texts such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper...

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salliger and “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath are both coming of age stories that talk about the difficulties of growing up, looking at the issues of Identity Problems, Sex and Depression. As adolescents, both characters struggle...

The effects of forcing societal conformity and restraints upon an individual can truly be damaging. Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, tells the story of a nineteen-year-old females journey from sanity to madness. Throughout the novel the main protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is overcome by mental illness...

In Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” the characters such as Doreen and Jay Cee are opposites, they both embody each of their respective stereotypes. Doreen is introduced in the first half of the book, she’s one of the interns Esther meets at the amazon hotel...

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar provides the dramatic tale of Esther Greenwoods’ inner turmoil of conforming to the society around her by living a simplistic, domesticated life or deciding to expand upon her ambitions as an extraordinary young woman. The novel provides the intricate story...

This article aimed to show devastating social roles that have a huge impact on Esther’s psychology and leads her to be alienated from the rest. The Bell Jar is more than a semi-autobiographical novel that displays Plath’s inner world in a very realistic way. Throughout...