Metamorphos Plath's 'The Bell Jar'
1. Esther’s descends into depression gradually all through The Bell Jar. Chapter three exposes that her dad passed away when she was young, which makes the introduction of mental illness in her adulthood far more likely in it’s probable traumatic effect on her youthful mind. Also established early is Esther feeling jealousy towards Doreen’s livelihood. Her want is quickly diminished though, and the truth of her friend’s monetary inclinations as well as her sexual promiscuity are brought to light. Esther is filled with sadness and discomfort as the alcohol and city life progress. She reveals her lack of forward thinking and drive wo Jay, beginning a flood of tell tale signs of depression. By admitting her hopelessness, Esther establishes Platt’s theme of mental illness in the novel. Esther’s suitor Buddy
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continues this theme equally as effectively by revealing his engagement in sexual divergence despite his seemingly innocent persona. He inadvertently places pressure on Esther by making her feel lacking in her unwillingness to perform sexual acts with him, but also embarasses her by impplying that she might or should be willing to. This inequality also begins showing the reader Esther’s out of placeness in her unprogressive society.
2.
When Plath describes the atmosphere of the bell jar as being rarified, one is almost led to belief that she views the air as exclusive, premiere, or even possibly the image of tasting well. The jar described in the novel however entirely counteracts this idea in the connotation switching to negative, spoiled, or discomforting. Esther describes herself as almost cooking in this jar full of bitter lonesomeness, or rotting in a forgotten storage container, slowly becoming worse and less appealing, while going unnoticed by the outside world, only compounding upon itself when trying to escape. This leads the reader to believe that this confinement is not only gross and horrifying, but also insightful of hatred and anger. Because she is trapped, and has no way of contacting the people just out of reach, she has grown in her frustration, and begins directing her aggression outward.. Plath makes it almost too clear that the story aligns in more than one way with her own life. Her own feelings of entrapment and displeasure in her own experiences of society and marriage shine through in Esther’s disgust and isolation, as well as her sexual and emotional
suppression.
3. The contradiction of her mother doing her best to be supportive and kind, and it’s resulting harsh effect on her mental state is almost laughable. Mrs. Greenwood is the perfect model of a woman for that time period, and her attitude toward her daughter in her eyes seems only appropriate. However, Esther’s progressive mindset and lack of coexistence with her society make the way her mom treats her brutal and diminishing. Her mom is incapable of understanding and addressing Esther’s mental shortcomings, and handles them as though her daughter is deciding to do these things for attention or some oddly driven reason, not as a breakdown or need of escape. Mrs. Greenwood’s acting as a civil and well mannered woman of the time hurts her image in the eyes of her daughter, because Esther wants to be a free and unconfined woman, but the woman her mom wishes her to be insults her, despite her mother being unaware. Essentially, Esther’s treatment of Mrs. Greenwood is merited because of both the daughter's mental state and her mother’s inability to comprehend the way she is feeling and needs to express her hidden emotion and instability. This also builds and compounds in her mother’s domestic marriage that utterly lacks love, and her failure to support her daughter after the death of the father.
4. Buddy, Doreen, and Buddy are her closest, or most impactful relationships in the social aspects of her life. Doreen is originally almost a role model, or a person that Esther aspired to be like, and it hurts her to see she can’t be that sort of woman. Chapter four describes Doreen as being sculpted and spawned from a magazine, created by the very people that made women an object and a possession in that time. Esther’s lack of smooth coexistence with the rest of society, alchohol, and sex, prove that she is from another society and will not fit in well where she desires to. The division between Joan and her conceives itself in their relatable emotion leading to the revelation of one vital and unforgivable difference. Their both attending the same school, being in a relationship with the same suitor, experiencing depression and suicidal tendencies make them seem like perfectly compatible friends. This changes when at the asylum, they are treated and handled in differing manners, which allows Joan to find success in killing herself. While this seems to promote Esther’s spiraling out of control, Buddy helps her to bring into focus her thoughts and emotions towards the society they live in and it’s standards. This is not because he is relatable as Joan, or idolized as Doreen, but rather in his manifestation of the sexist, oppressive, patriarchal society which dominates their time. Platt uses each character as a vehicle for a statement of the society of the time, ranging from the materialism and ignorance of high class, to the poor treatment and misunderstanding of mental turmoil especially amongst women, to a hatred and imbalance of the sex roles in place at that time..
5. In order to express how useless and separated she feels, Esther says she is a walking corpse, without feeling, without reaction to the world around her. Even in seemingly stimulating or even exciting scenarios, as when she gets a sight of Buddy disrobed, Esther always describes her state as depressed and unhappy. Her feelings of shortcoming and constant failure come from a place of self loathing, because the novel expresses that she had the distinct ability to be a very successful author and attend higher education with ease. Her expression of lacking hope all the time and being unable to pursue goals or feel accomplished when she does anything meritable helps to convey that she is suffering moderate to severe depression, and that her inability to convey these feeling to anyone without being viewed as weak and even lazy help to compound these emotions in her mind and drive her to a more aggressive state of hatred for both self and others. In her own ability to see the disconnect between society's expectation and her personal abilities, she sees she has little chance of ever rallying and finding happiness again.
6. Her first consideration of death is when Esther encounters the possibility of skiing the most deadly hill on her very first attempt. Stated directly in chapter eight is her clear understanding that this feat has a distinct possibility of causing her death, and she still goes directly against her natural instinct and powers through her fear in order to take this acute risk. She had no other drive or expectation from this plunge other than the possibility of her own death. These suicidal tendencies are brought about by the exertion her emotions are going through at the offer to take on the role of a housewife and abandon her dreams to surrender to the domestic life. The fear of having to abandon her passion drives her to understand death will take away the possibility of a life of unhappiness. She also samples death by hanging, unsuccessfully using a robe, and either exhaustion or drowning by swimming out into the sea as far as she can muster with no intent of returning. She comes closest to ending her own life when she consumes a deadly amount of sedatives she was prescribed for insomnia in hopes of slumbering in death as the blind women in society are asleep to the oppression they are enduring. The appeal of abandoning all worldly, and especially societal expectation, pressure, and confinement make death wildly appealing for her, and combined with crippling depression verging on manic insanity, attempted suicide was inevitable, and it is almost surprising she was never able to carry out the task to completion.
7. The doctor’s suite, the shock seat, and of course the ‘bell jar’ are the three most prominent images of supression and confinement used by Plath besides the prison. The shock therapy always brings about expression of feeling helplessly incapacitated, as well as the electric chair used for execution of the Rosenbergs mentioned in chapter one. Both causing detrimental effect, death in the case of the accused soviet spies, and general physical and mental anguish in her own case, both situations cause her loss of confidence and safety in her chances at living freely and happily. These terrible happenings also accelerate and guide her already well established depression into an almost manic mental state. These conditions are the core of the story’s link to feminism in that she suppresses this turmoil and keeps to herself as a quiet, meek, good woman was supposed to. The belief that women were to be compliant and serve, not express discontent in any way, and simply decide when to feel well allowed her state of depression to spiral out of control, leading to her decision that the best option was to escape the suppressive life and face death. When considered, the result of her poorly treated mental instability was, while extremely saddening, only to be expected for a woman in her time. the jar is a clear and obvious metaphor in it’s expression of her feeling her environment was a prison and while not solitary, inescapable in her inability to connect with any other person. The office being shut in and having only a door connecting it to the world give it a pillow room-like feel due to it’s prevention of natural light and air.
8. The general concept and belief of what it was right for a woman to do with her life in Esther’s time was to abandon the possibility of career or strength and to simply take a man and raise their children. It was viewed as the only right option for a woman to be a mother, and any other path was silly or selfish. It was also thought that a woman who were to have sex before becoming married, or without the intent of having a child, was impure and nothing short of a disgusting whore. There was no acceptance of premarital sex for women, whereas it was only to be expected of men, that’s just ‘how they were’. The fact that Platt’s protagonist felt an urge to shatter these barriers and avoid following most of them outright was telling of how she felt writing the novel. Esther’s sexual repressment and expectation to submit to a domestic life also contributed heavily to her mental decay. She also grows more severely bitter and repulsed by the concept of marriage as her depression and madness grow with her constant being forced into situations of living that are miserable in her mind. The patriarchy generally disturbs her morally, and this hatred manifests itself throughout Platt’s novel.
9. How do Ester and Edna of Chopin’s The Awakening compare? How do they contrast?
Both Esther of The Bell Jar and Edna of The Awakening are similar in many ideologies and thought processes, however are situationally a little different. Both women develop a strong sense of hatred towards the expectations of women by their society, however both women develop this hatred from different sources: Edna with Leonce and the other women in the Grand Isle and Esther with her mother and Buddy and his parents. Furthermore, both come to the realization that they could only choose a path of motherhood and subservience or the path of independence with a life of shame and scrutiny. Edna comes to this conclusion too late in life after she had already married and had children, therefore her successful suicide was just a clear indicator of her realization after choosing the wrong path for her own well-being. Esther on the other hand realizes this with her “fig tree” metaphor before she committed to anything, however her suicide attempts were rooted in the fact that she couldn't deal with the pressures placed upon her to choose marriage while her internal desire was to earn a career independently.
continues this theme equally as effectively by revealing his engagement in sexual divergence despite his seemingly innocent persona. He inadvertently places pressure on Esther by making her feel lacking in her unwillingness to perform sexual acts with him, but also embarasses her by impplying that she might or should be willing to. This inequality also begins showing the reader Esther’s out of placeness in her unprogressive society.
2.
When Plath describes the atmosphere of the bell jar as being rarified, one is almost led to belief that she views the air as exclusive, premiere, or even possibly the image of tasting well. The jar described in the novel however entirely counteracts this idea in the connotation switching to negative, spoiled, or discomforting. Esther describes herself as almost cooking in this jar full of bitter lonesomeness, or rotting in a forgotten storage container, slowly becoming worse and less appealing, while going unnoticed by the outside world, only compounding upon itself when trying to escape. This leads the reader to believe that this confinement is not only gross and horrifying, but also insightful of hatred and anger. Because she is trapped, and has no way of contacting the people just out of reach, she has grown in her frustration, and begins directing her aggression outward.. Plath makes it almost too clear that the story aligns in more than one way with her own life. Her own feelings of entrapment and displeasure in her own experiences of society and marriage shine through in Esther’s disgust and isolation, as well as her sexual and emotional
suppression.
3. The contradiction of her mother doing her best to be supportive and kind, and it’s resulting harsh effect on her mental state is almost laughable. Mrs. Greenwood is the perfect model of a woman for that time period, and her attitude toward her daughter in her eyes seems only appropriate. However, Esther’s progressive mindset and lack of coexistence with her society make the way her mom treats her brutal and diminishing. Her mom is incapable of understanding and addressing Esther’s mental shortcomings, and handles them as though her daughter is deciding to do these things for attention or some oddly driven reason, not as a breakdown or need of escape. Mrs. Greenwood’s acting as a civil and well mannered woman of the time hurts her image in the eyes of her daughter, because Esther wants to be a free and unconfined woman, but the woman her mom wishes her to be insults her, despite her mother being unaware. Essentially, Esther’s treatment of Mrs. Greenwood is merited because of both the daughter's mental state and her mother’s inability to comprehend the way she is feeling and needs to express her hidden emotion and instability. This also builds and compounds in her mother’s domestic marriage that utterly lacks love, and her failure to support her daughter after the death of the father.
4. Buddy, Doreen, and Buddy are her closest, or most impactful relationships in the social aspects of her life. Doreen is originally almost a role model, or a person that Esther aspired to be like, and it hurts her to see she can’t be that sort of woman. Chapter four describes Doreen as being sculpted and spawned from a magazine, created by the very people that made women an object and a possession in that time. Esther’s lack of smooth coexistence with the rest of society, alchohol, and sex, prove that she is from another society and will not fit in well where she desires to. The division between Joan and her conceives itself in their relatable emotion leading to the revelation of one vital and unforgivable difference. Their both attending the same school, being in a relationship with the same suitor, experiencing depression and suicidal tendencies make them seem like perfectly compatible friends. This changes when at the asylum, they are treated and handled in differing manners, which allows Joan to find success in killing herself. While this seems to promote Esther’s spiraling out of control, Buddy helps her to bring into focus her thoughts and emotions towards the society they live in and it’s standards. This is not because he is relatable as Joan, or idolized as Doreen, but rather in his manifestation of the sexist, oppressive, patriarchal society which dominates their time. Platt uses each character as a vehicle for a statement of the society of the time, ranging from the materialism and ignorance of high class, to the poor treatment and misunderstanding of mental turmoil especially amongst women, to a hatred and imbalance of the sex roles in place at that time..
5. In order to express how useless and separated she feels, Esther says she is a walking corpse, without feeling, without reaction to the world around her. Even in seemingly stimulating or even exciting scenarios, as when she gets a sight of Buddy disrobed, Esther always describes her state as depressed and unhappy. Her feelings of shortcoming and constant failure come from a place of self loathing, because the novel expresses that she had the distinct ability to be a very successful author and attend higher education with ease. Her expression of lacking hope all the time and being unable to pursue goals or feel accomplished when she does anything meritable helps to convey that she is suffering moderate to severe depression, and that her inability to convey these feeling to anyone without being viewed as weak and even lazy help to compound these emotions in her mind and drive her to a more aggressive state of hatred for both self and others. In her own ability to see the disconnect between society's expectation and her personal abilities, she sees she has little chance of ever rallying and finding happiness again.
6. Her first consideration of death is when Esther encounters the possibility of skiing the most deadly hill on her very first attempt. Stated directly in chapter eight is her clear understanding that this feat has a distinct possibility of causing her death, and she still goes directly against her natural instinct and powers through her fear in order to take this acute risk. She had no other drive or expectation from this plunge other than the possibility of her own death. These suicidal tendencies are brought about by the exertion her emotions are going through at the offer to take on the role of a housewife and abandon her dreams to surrender to the domestic life. The fear of having to abandon her passion drives her to understand death will take away the possibility of a life of unhappiness. She also samples death by hanging, unsuccessfully using a robe, and either exhaustion or drowning by swimming out into the sea as far as she can muster with no intent of returning. She comes closest to ending her own life when she consumes a deadly amount of sedatives she was prescribed for insomnia in hopes of slumbering in death as the blind women in society are asleep to the oppression they are enduring. The appeal of abandoning all worldly, and especially societal expectation, pressure, and confinement make death wildly appealing for her, and combined with crippling depression verging on manic insanity, attempted suicide was inevitable, and it is almost surprising she was never able to carry out the task to completion.
7. The doctor’s suite, the shock seat, and of course the ‘bell jar’ are the three most prominent images of supression and confinement used by Plath besides the prison. The shock therapy always brings about expression of feeling helplessly incapacitated, as well as the electric chair used for execution of the Rosenbergs mentioned in chapter one. Both causing detrimental effect, death in the case of the accused soviet spies, and general physical and mental anguish in her own case, both situations cause her loss of confidence and safety in her chances at living freely and happily. These terrible happenings also accelerate and guide her already well established depression into an almost manic mental state. These conditions are the core of the story’s link to feminism in that she suppresses this turmoil and keeps to herself as a quiet, meek, good woman was supposed to. The belief that women were to be compliant and serve, not express discontent in any way, and simply decide when to feel well allowed her state of depression to spiral out of control, leading to her decision that the best option was to escape the suppressive life and face death. When considered, the result of her poorly treated mental instability was, while extremely saddening, only to be expected for a woman in her time. the jar is a clear and obvious metaphor in it’s expression of her feeling her environment was a prison and while not solitary, inescapable in her inability to connect with any other person. The office being shut in and having only a door connecting it to the world give it a pillow room-like feel due to it’s prevention of natural light and air.
8. The general concept and belief of what it was right for a woman to do with her life in Esther’s time was to abandon the possibility of career or strength and to simply take a man and raise their children. It was viewed as the only right option for a woman to be a mother, and any other path was silly or selfish. It was also thought that a woman who were to have sex before becoming married, or without the intent of having a child, was impure and nothing short of a disgusting whore. There was no acceptance of premarital sex for women, whereas it was only to be expected of men, that’s just ‘how they were’. The fact that Platt’s protagonist felt an urge to shatter these barriers and avoid following most of them outright was telling of how she felt writing the novel. Esther’s sexual repressment and expectation to submit to a domestic life also contributed heavily to her mental decay. She also grows more severely bitter and repulsed by the concept of marriage as her depression and madness grow with her constant being forced into situations of living that are miserable in her mind. The patriarchy generally disturbs her morally, and this hatred manifests itself throughout Platt’s novel.
9. How do Ester and Edna of Chopin’s The Awakening compare? How do they contrast?
Both Esther of The Bell Jar and Edna of The Awakening are similar in many ideologies and thought processes, however are situationally a little different. Both women develop a strong sense of hatred towards the expectations of women by their society, however both women develop this hatred from different sources: Edna with Leonce and the other women in the Grand Isle and Esther with her mother and Buddy and his parents. Furthermore, both come to the realization that they could only choose a path of motherhood and subservience or the path of independence with a life of shame and scrutiny. Edna comes to this conclusion too late in life after she had already married and had children, therefore her successful suicide was just a clear indicator of her realization after choosing the wrong path for her own well-being. Esther on the other hand realizes this with her “fig tree” metaphor before she committed to anything, however her suicide attempts were rooted in the fact that she couldn't deal with the pressures placed upon her to choose marriage while her internal desire was to earn a career independently.