Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar (1963)

Who was Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)?

-Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. She had already earned a popularity in the literary community by the time she took her life at age 30. Over the years, her work drew the interest of numerous readers, who recognized in her unique poetry, an effort to document despair, intense feelings, and a concern with mortality and death. In addition to this obsession with death, in her literature, Sylvia Plath is characterized for her representation of a very painful mother-daughter relationship and husband-wife relationship.

·She had the capacity to give voice to her own anger and rage, and also to give voice to the anger and range of other women. With courage and honesty, she expresses in her poetry and in her novel, violent emotions and emotional pain. She expresses her distress, her anxiety, and her despair in the novel The Bell Jar. She also fascinates the readers because she transmits in her poetry and In The Bell Jar, a sense of female victimization and a sense that women are victims in a male-dominated world.

Important quotes from The Bell Jar:

· "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out". (Path, 40): The fig tree is a metaphor for the paths open to the protagonist, Esther Greenwood. Every branch symbolizes a distinct possible future—one is of having conventional roles such as marriage and parenthood, while others point toward more aspirational endeavors like becoming a poet or a professor. The struggles Esther faces in making choices are highlighted by the imagery of “wonderful futures.” However, there is the pressure of expectations that comes with every fig, which is what overhelms her throughout her life, and make her feel as if trapped in a Bell Jar. 

· "I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, 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, 98)

· "I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded. I thought if they left me alone I might have some peace. My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong. She said she was sure the doctors thought she had done something wrong because they asked her a lot of questions about my toilet training, and I had been perfectly trained at a very early age and given her no trouble whatsoever" (Plath, 107).

·"We'll take up where we left off, Esther," she had said, with her sweet, martyr's smile. "Well act as if all this were a bad dream." A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything. (Plath, 124)

·These three quotes represent the metaphor of the Bell Jar: The Bell Jar metaphor represents her feelings of being trapped and suffocated. We see her isolation and mental illness, and how she feels terrible no matter what surrounds her. In addition, the bell jar not only represents the expectations, life pressures and feeling of being trapped, but also the fact that she is always judged by others, looking at her from outside her bell jar.  

 

Beautiful poem written by Sylvia Plath:

MAD GIRL'S LOVE SONG A VILLANELLE

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;   

I lift my lids and all is born again.  

(I think I made you up inside my head.) 

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, 

And arbitrary blackness gallops in: 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.  

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed 

And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.  

(I think I made you up inside my head.)  

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: 

Exit seraphim and Satan's men: 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.  

I fancied you'd return the way you said, 

But I grow old and I forget your name. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.)  

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; 

At least when spring comes they roar back again. 

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.)