Bell Jar Essay, Research Paper

In The Bell Jar, originally published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas,

Sylvia Plath was recording much of her personal experience. Plath was born on

October 27, 1932. Her brother, Warren Joseph Plath, was born in 1935. When Plath

was five years old, her family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, where she was a

model student. However, in 1940, her father Otto Plath died of pneumonia and

complications from diabetes. Plath won many awards, both local and national, for

her writing in the years after her father’s death. During her teens, she met a

classmate named Richard Willard. Later, she dated his older brother, Buddy. In

1950, Sylvia Plath entered Smith College in Nothampton, Massachusetts. While she

was there, Buddy Willard asked her to the Yale prom. When Sylvia was twenty

years old, she won the Mademoiselle fiction contest, and during the summer of

1953, she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle. Later that summer, Plath attempted

suicide with sleeping pills. She was found and taken to Newton-Wellesley

Hospital. For the remaining part of that year, she resided at McLean Hospital in

Belmont, Massachusetts, and was treated with insulin and electro-shock therapy.

In The Bell Jar, Plath does not write about her life after this point. Plath

returned to Smith and graduated in 1955. She moved to London, where she met Ted

Hughes. She married him, and they returned to the U.S. in 1957. In the next two

years, Ms. Plath held a hospital clerical position after she quit her instructor

job at Smith. She did this in order to devote more time to writing. The last few

years of Sylvia Plath’s life were very busy. She moved back to England with her

husband and had a girl in the spring of 1960. The following year was difficult

because she had both a miscarriage and an appendectomy. In early 1962, she gave

birth to a baby boy, but a few months later, her husband left her. She then

moved to London and wrote The Bell Jar. On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath

committed suicide in her London home by turning on the gas jets. Sylvia suffered

from a lack of helpful support. There were no good support systems in her life.

Her mother did not understand her, and her father was dead. She had no

attractive role models to follow, in her opinion. In the book, Esther does not

want to be like her mother and teach shorthand. Ms. Plath did not get much help

from the professional world. In her journal, she wrote that she was unable to

sleep during the last winter that she lived in London. Her British doctor

prescribed sleeping pills, "the cure-all for everything". Sylvia Plath

could have well been a victim of multiple failures created by the historical era

in which she lived. Until the 1970’s, American literature did not have a great

many female heroines in its fiction works, and even fewer had been created by

female authors. In short, there were no woman writers creating women characters

who spoke their minds. The main year of Esther’s life in the story is 1953,

before the popularity of the birth control pill, women’s liberation, and other

social movements in the 1960’s. Esther reached maturity in the early 1950’s when

Women’s roles were rigidly assigned. American women fell into two groups: the

good girls and the bad girls. The good girls married well and had two or three

children. They cooked proper and nutritious meals while keeping the house

spotless, and in their spare time, they would attend PTA meetings. The good

girls made dutiful wives. The bad girls, on the other hand, were sexy, bosomy,

and blonde. They did not marry the proper men (doctors, lawyers, etc.). There

was also a group of women who were not really considered women. They often held

low-paying jobs, such as librarians and social workers. These women were bright,

yet doomed in society because they did not try to get the attention of men. The

Bell Jar also gives the audience a quite moving and probably very accurate

account of mental health treatment in the 1950’s. Electro-shock therapy was very

common during that decade, but nowadays, it is only rarely used. In conclusion,

during the time of the novel, there is clearly not much encouragement for women

to be individual, to be different, and to be brave and daring. For this reason,

Esther Greenwood was pushed to insanity, for society could not accept her.