Esther's social inadequacy is furthered, due to Plath's self-critical presentation of the character. Esther does not fit into the definition of an American like Betsy a “Pollyanna cowgirl,” patriotic and optimistic. This could be caused by Esther's German background. The common thread of disillusion is apparent in The Bell Jar due to Esther's increasing lack of identity and unfamiliarity with herself. This is manifested when she sees a disembodied version of herself "a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman", feeling as though she is “melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life." The woman she sees is herself but she fails to recognize this due to her loss of identity. Dividing herself from the world Esther …show more content…
I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.” Her deflated expectations are representative of ‘Buddy,’ causing her to create 'hate’ and dislike towards a man she once loved. Esther loathes ‘serving’ men as she believes that it causes her own marginalisation; men can reinvent themselves and women can’t. This can also be seen in The Lady of the House of Love, “the beastly forebears on the walls condemn her to perpetual repetition of their passions,” social oppression is illustrated within her natural drives and “passions.” The male sadist whom saves her can only see her as a “mechanism” making it apparent that the Countess’ gender is her own weakness, condemning her to be seen as a …show more content…
Sade’s satirist work articulates unconventional moral beliefs turning sexuality into violent exploitation; seemingly rejoicing in the torture of women. As a result Carter’s work seeks to portray two female stereotypes; predators or victims. The female narrator in The Erl King does not fit the archetypes of an innocent victim or an evil predator. She can be classified as a victim as the Erl King traps her and aims to keep her in his "wall of cages”, however in subversion of the 'helpless' perceived view of women, she approaches him willingly. Being conscious of the "skirts of women have lost themselves in the wood", knowing she could be placed into a situation of "grievous harm". This can be explained by the 'death instinct theory' developed by Freud, stating that all 'individuals have a drive to return to the inorganic state from which they emerged’ (Kastenbaum) illustrating why the narrator shows no signs of fear on embarking on murdering the King. The death instinct empowers a sense of love to any concept or form of death available, rejecting any aspects of life. Drawing Esther's attraction towards death, as she has a fear of life. This can be seen when Buddy presents himself in the nude, Esther refers to his genitals as "turkey necks and turkey gizzards," applying humour to this metaphor of death referring genitalia to be dead pieces of birds. Contrasting life giving
While at home, Esther becomes into a deep depression when thinking about her experience in New York. She doesn’t want to read, write, or sleep and she stops bathing herself. Her mother sends her to see Dr. Gordon who is her first psychiatrist whom she doesn’t like and doesn’t trust. He is the man with a good looking family, and to Esther he is conceited. He doesn’t help Esther, but only hurts her more. He prescribes her with shock treatment. After this horrifying experience, she decides to kill herself. She tries to slit her wrists, but can only bring herself to slicing her calf. She tries to hang herself but can’t find a place to tie the rope, she tries to drown herself at the beach, but cannot keep herself under water, and then she crawls into a space in the basement and takes a lot of sleeping pills. “Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” (Plath pg. 117) This quote shows how she felt trapped in the bell jar, and her suicidal urges began. She awakes in the hospital to find that her attempt at suicide wasn’t successful. She is sent to another psychological ward where she still wants to end her life. Esther becomes very paranoid and uncooperative. She gets moves to a private hospital paid for by Philomena Guinea a famous novelist. Esther improves and gets a new
This is represented here when the king, “…entered the queen’s apartments and when she saw him, she complained aloud, fell at his feet, cried for mercy and said that Lanval had shamed her” (77). After the queen offers herself and attempts to throw herself at Lanval, he denies her because of his new fairy like lover. Once the king walks in the queen victimizes herself as soon as she sets eyes on him. Her ability to completely transform herself at the sight of her husband and manipulate his thoughts to her favor shows the power of women. In showing her weakness by falling to her feet and putting herself in a vulnerable position, she is ultimately taking the power into her own hands. With his wife in this state, the king feels an obligation to protect her by punishing whoever did her wrong. In reaction to the queen’s account of what Lanval has done, “The king grew very angry and swore on oath that, if Lanval could not defend himself in court, he would have him burned or hanged” (77). This is a significant act because it displays the control a woman has in a relationship, It also demonstrates how a dominant feminist character influences her male counterpart’s masculinity and gives it purpose within a
Because the method was not implemented correctly, Esther is awake the whole time, feeling the electricity course through her. As her condition worsens, she is placed in a privately funded asylum. She once again undergoes electroshock therapy, but this time it is done correctly, lifting the bell jar off of her. She states that it hangs a few feet above her head. Being under the bell jar is a terrifying experience for Esther. It renders her useless of her greatest skill, writing. It makes her hate essentially everyone and everything that had once meant something to her. It turns her into a hollow shell. She makes an attempt to seem normal and portray the talented girl she has always been, up until then. “How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again” (Plath 241)? Even though
This feeling originates from the fact that she is unable to conform to one of the ways in which to pursue her life. All throughout the novel Esther battles the pressure put on her and women generally by society to bear children and focus on family life with her wish to dedicate herself to her writing hence going in a more academic direction. This oppression by society feeds her feelings of alienation: “...it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” (Plath The Bell Jar) Plath uses the symbol of the bell jar in order to illustrate Esther’s personal prison. Esther is held captive beneath the bell jar. She is trapped beneath it and unable to escape just like she is trapped beneath the expectations of society. The bell jar is Esther’s own metaphor used to illustrate what she’s feeling in her day-to-day life, and the descent into mental illness. Regardless of what she’s doing or where she is, she sits alienated “under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” Although her personal prison, the bell jar, is transparent, allowing her to view the world around her, the image she’s met with is distorted. This subsequently leads to
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 and encouragement, and lack of self confidence and insecurity in Esther's life in the The Bell Jar. It was shaped through her success and failures in her personal relationships between others and herself.
When Esther first arrives in New York, she doesn't have the same reaction that most of the other girls around her have. She enforces this reaction when she says “I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react.” From a psychological perspective we could tell that something is deeply wrong with her. She is isolating herself from others. According to Saul McLeod, the author of the article called “Psycho dynamic Approach” states that “our behaviors and feelings as adults are powerfully affected by the unconscious thoughts” . This means that unconscious are a product of behaviors and feelings. She is unable to think in a rational way because of her inability to control the balance between her conscious and unconscious thoughts.
Esther quickly mentions the makeup compact in passing while listing what is in her bag. She states that she “felt in my pocketbook among the paper scraps and the compact and the peanut shells and the dimes and nickels and the blue jiffy box containing nineteen Gillette blades, till I unearthed the snapshot I'd had taken that afternoon in the orange-and-white striped booth” (77). This is the final time that cosmetics is mentioned, and she only uses the word compact to symbolize covering one’s emotions. Makeup is mentioned almost right before Esther’s suicide attempt where she sheds her skin completely and shows her depression to the world. The use of the word “compact” reminds the reader of other moments in the Bell Jar when the word symbolizes people believing that concealing themselves is necessary.
Shakespeare’s society was strongly patriarchal .Women were expected to behave passively obediently and submissively toward their husbands ,who were considered the superior sex and were given the responsibility of governing the household .This is a topic undoubtedly critical to our understanding both of the role of women and the traditional concepts of gender and sexuality.Tarub explains that even domestic households were structured in accordance with patriarchal values ; the man ruled whilst his wife managed it .Traub sums up the repression and confinements of women within the domestic households as ‘’the body enclosed’’ to refer to their ‘closed genitals ,closed mouths and closure within the home ‘’ .Weakness and ‘the body enclosed’’ may have been synonymous with women at the time , but certainly not with the heroic and overbearing Rosalind who shows a reckless disregard for social conventions in donning on the disguise of Ganymede ,mocking the principles of love and bringing Orlando under her sway .She is ‘’a woman .When {she} thinks , {she} must speak ‘’ .To arrive at a tentative argument as to whether Rosalind acts as an ‘agent of change ‘ (Todd 1 ) and a challenge to the ‘body enclosed’ or a reflection of traditional gender roles , we must first of all define ‘heroine’ and look at how the its sense has changed over time , and how it may be applied to her as a ; cousin : daughter : man and boy .
It is evident that she is painfully aware of her approaching melancholic depression as evidenced by her opening statement, “I knew something was wrong with me that summer” and later, "I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo" (Plath, 1971). Throughout the novel, Esther holds the wits and self-awareness to know something is or has been stewing within, while simultaneously having a skewed perception of the world around her. Feelings of helplessness and entrapment are illustrated by the metaphor Esther has created “The bell jar” that suggests she has lost control of herself. Esther describes the bell jar as a symbolic meaning of the lenses in which she see’s life through; a trapped space where she lives in “her own sour air”, separated from the world
Sylvia Plath, the author of The Bell Jar, writes in a very simple and ordinary but exceptionally unique way. She put her whole young genuine heart and soul into this semi-autobiography. Her first person point of view allows the reader to really engage with the characters thoughts, specifically Esther Greenwood and her perspective on everything. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood encounters the coming of many things, including age and mental illness. While the coming of age is normal for the majority of society, the coming of mental illness is abnormal. With that being said, many may classify Esther Greenwood as abnormal and deviant but in all reality,
The book of Esther takes us to a historical time in the Bible in the land of Persia, at a time when heroic acts of beauty take a stand for the people of her country. The loyalty and dedication wins the hearts of many that fear the power of royalty. As we read into the book of Esther we will venture through the Literary, Historical, and Contemporary worlds, and learn how life was lived through our eyes of the Persian ways. The book of Esther is about God’s work being done without his presence, nevertheless giving grace to his people and the power to those who do right by the word of God.
Esther’s abrupt shift in mood thoroughly captures how the tiniest conditions can have a lasting effect. In The Bell Jar, Plath consistently writes Esther’s character and being as independent, hence, leading Esther to be more on her own with tasks. She does not believe in having other people in her life, solving or controlling anything. Esther’s constant independent characteristic resulted in different desires, passions, and arrangements for her future, than most other people in her life. As Buddy attempted to talk to her about marriage and love, the two always had opposing viewpoints on the matter. “I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a fourth of July rocket”. Plath portrays Esther as wanting trepidation, solely by herself. Not married, or looking after a child. The achievement of having an eternal response on the readers part was high, because the comparison of a fierce independence woman to a rocket made an
First of all, through the inaccurate representation and stereotypes of both empowered and oppressed women, Shakespeare and Steinbeck explore the destruction of relationships. In Shakespeare’s play King Lear, the dominant female roles are given to Goneril and Regan who manipulate others through their empowerment to get what they desire, yet in the end of the play lead to each other’s demise – tragic ending. Neither Goneril, nor Regan have the decency to honor or remain loyal to their own husbands. They usurp their father’s authority and disrespect their marriage. However, in the beginning of the play, they remain loyal to one another. Through a feminist lens, this portrayal of women is demeaning and erroneous, but illustrates how even the most horrific character’s loyalty to one other is worthless. The lustful desires of both women for Edmund results in Goneril poisoning Regan and then committing suicide – tragic demise of both women. In similar fashion, Steinbeck depicts the disloyalty in an oppressed woman. The only female character in Of Mice and Men is Curley’s wife whose identification is known through her husband. She is considered to be the reason for the downfall of men and a distraction. Throughout the novel she is described in derogatory
In Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood seems incapable of healthy relationships with other women. She is trapped in a patriarchal society with rigid expectations of womanhood. The cost of transgressing social norms is isolation, institutionalization and a lost identity as woman. The struggle for an individual identity under this regime is enough to drive a person to the verge of suicide. Given the oppressive system under which she must operate, Esther Greenwood's problems with women stem from her conflict between individuality and conformity.
Esther’s mother and society’s expectation as a woman, which is to be a good wife and a mother, suffocate and demoralize Esther’s dream as a professional writer. Esther’s mother wants her to “...learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a college degree” (Plath 40). Her mother believes that Esther cannot further advance her education as a writer and simply wants her to be a secretary since professional career for women was uncommon and discouraged because it disturbs the role as a married woman. These pressures often obliged her to fall into the societal expectations, to give up her higher education, and to marry somebody. However, she knew that the marriage and the babies were not for her, “because cook and clean and wash were just about