A Comparison of Joan Gilling and Esther Greenwoods in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar Have you ever heard of the term “doppelgănger”? If not, it means “double” in German. To say that the character, Joan Gilling, is Esther Greenwoods “double” in the novel “The Bell Jar”, by Sylvia Plath, would be an understatement. Esther and Joan are one in the same. Joan and Esther endure many of the same obstacles throughout the novel. Joan’s actions to these struggles ultimately make Esther come to terms with reality. Either change her ways, and move on with her life, or end up like Joan, dead. In the novel, Esther Greenwood, the main character, is a young woman, from a small town, who wins a writing competition, and is sent to New York for a month to work for a magazine. Esther struggles throughout the story to discover who she truly is. She is very pessimistic about life and has many insecurities about how people perceive her. Esther is never genuinely happy about anything that goes on through the course of the novel. When she first arrives at her hotel in New York, the first thing she thinks people will assume about her is, “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car”(Plath 2). Like Esther, Joan Gilling grew up in the same small town; she also won the writing competition and was sent to New York to work for the same magazine. Joan was also very conscious about how the world identified her as an individual. She didn’t want to conform to what society sa... ... middle of paper ... ...she would end up if she didn’t change her ways. By losing Joan, Esther was able to release her old self and be reborn again. In the end of the novel, Esther at last, comes to terms with reality. She has got to stop living her life according to what others expect of her. She needs to start living her life for “her”. After Joan commits suicide, Esther believes that unless she turns her life around, she will also commit suicide. Esther saw so much of herself in Joan, that when Joan ended her life she was frightened that she would follow in her footsteps, due to the fact that she had throughout the entire novel. Once Joan was gone, Esther was truly free. The part of Joan that was reflected in Esther vanished. The “bell jar” that had been suffocating her was finally lifted. Works Cited Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper and Row, 1998. Print.
...es these primitive standards, she becomes melancholy because she does not attune into the gender roles of women, which particularly focus on marriage, maternity, and domesticity. Like other nineteen year old women, Esther has many goals and ambitions in her life. Nevertheless, Esther is disparaged by society’s blunt roles created for women. Although she experiences a tremendous psychological journey, she is able to liberate herself from society’s suffocating constraints. Esther is an excellent inspiration for women who are also currently battling with society’s degrading stereotypes. She is a persistent woman who perseveres to accomplish more than being a stay at home mother. Thus, Esther is a voice for women who are trying to abolish the airless conformism that is prevalent in 1950’s society.
Sylvia Plath wrote the semi autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, in which the main character, Esther, struggles with depression as she attempts to make herself known as a writer in the 1950’s. She is getting the opportunity to apprentice under a well-known fashion magazine editor, but still cannot find true happiness. She crumbles under her depression due to feeling that she doesn’t fit in, and eventually ends up being put into a mental hospital undergoing electroshock therapy. Still, she describes the depth of her depression as “Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street a cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (Plath 178). The pressure to assimilate to society’s standards from her mother, friends, and romantic interests, almost pushes her over the edge and causes her to attempt suicide multiple times throughout her life. Buddy Willard, Esther’s boyfriend at a time, asks her to marry him repeatedly in which she declines. Her mother tries to get her to marry and makes her go to therapy eventually, which leads to the mental hospital. Esther resents the way of settling down and making a family, as well as going out and partying all night. She just wants to work to become a journalist or publisher. Though, part of her longs for these other lives that she imagines livings, if she were a different person or if different things happened in her life. That’s how Elly Higgenbottom came about. Elly is Esther when Esther doesn’t want to be herself to new people. Esther’s story portrays the role of women in society in the 1950’s through Esther’s family and friends pushing her to conform to the gender roles of the time.
Bernard, Lauren. "TAKING ON A MOURNING HER MOTHER NEVER BOTHERED WITH: ESTHER’S ANGUISHED MEMORY AND HER RESISTANCE TO A DOMESTIC LIFE IN SYLVIA PLATH’S THE BELL JAR." Ed. Steven Axelrod.Department of English University of California, Riverside, 2009. Web. 5 Dec. 2013.
Through life, we often lose someone we loved and cared deeply for and supported us through life. This is demonstrated by the loss of a loved one when Esther's father died when she was nine. "My German speaking father, dead since I was nine came from some manic-depressive hamlet in the Prussia." (Sylvia Plath page 27.) Esther's father's death had showed that she was in need of a father figure for love, support and to act as a model for her life. Esther grew up with only the one influence of a parent, her
On the eve of her freedom from the asylum, Esther laments, “I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead- after all, I had been ‘analyzed.’ Instead, all I could see were question marks” (243). The novel is left open-ended, with a slightly optimistic tone but no details to help the reader fully understand the final step of her healing process. Esther desired to be free of social conventions and double standards, but consistently imposed them upon herself and on the people around her. Her evolution in understanding never reaches a satisfying conclusion, and the reader is also left with nothing but question marks.
Plath uses metaphors to describe the protagonists entrapment, suffocation and torture. Bill Gibson (2000) clearly defines the purpose of the metaphorical bell jar, stating that the “bell jar is a entrapment, and a way of placing one on a display of sorts, behind a glass”. Hence, Plath uses the bell jar to describe how she feels- an object, to be stared and looked upon. - mom low ideas of mental illness- So plath uses the imagery of the bell jar to convey the suffocation and isolation that is felt by all women. Also, the unlimited expectations that society creates for women and esther’s failure to achieve the expectations leads to her sorrow and disillusionment. Hence, esther
It is obvious that Esther is at a crossroads and feels torn by life. She best describes her feelings with the following passage: "I saw myself in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each a...
Life is full of endless amounts of beautiful encounters for every character in the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, except for Esther. She suffers from a severe and complex mental illness that impacts her life greatly. Although it is clear that Esther suffers strongly from depression in the novel, Sylvia Plath chooses to tell her life abstractly through countless symbols and ironies to prove that Esther depression completely consumes her. Everything that Esther sees is through a lens of depression, which scews her outlook on life.
Esther’s psychological transformation from a perfectly healthy person ends up suffering from depression. Her influences around her have negatively shown Esther a negative path to take. The events during the 1950s such as the Rosenbergs executions have only made the transformation even powerful. Sylvia Plath’s life could be compared to the Bell Jar because she was in the same situation as Esther. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and psycho dynamic has addressed depression through the main character Esther.
One of the main reasons why Esther tried to commit suicide was the way she perceived her mother's actions, and the fact that she hates her mother:
Through an overwhelming sense of symbolism, the author demonstrates both the separation and pressures that Esther Greenwood goes through. The reoccurring image of a bell jar haunts Esther throughout her story representing both her mental illness and her alienation from the society surrounding her. As Dunn states “a glass ‘bell jar’ is used to cover and protect laboratory materials. Significantly, a bell jar also allows objects to remain in view.” Much like a scientific specimen, Esther is readily visible to those around her both observation and study. The jar in this case represents her mental instability, which causes her to be isolated from the rest of society and treated abnormally. Furthermore, “Plath [uses] the bell jar to indicate the circumference of the world of pain and mental suffering Esther Greenwood, the heroine, lives in” (Evans 105). The heroine herself admit...
The beginning of the novel introduces the reader to Esther O'Malley Robertson as the last of a family of extreme women. She is sitting in her home, remembering a story that her grandmother told her a long time ago. Esther is the first character that the reader is introduced to, but we do not really understand who she is until the end of the story. Esther's main struggle is dealing with her home on Loughbreeze Beach being torn down, and trying to figure out the mysteries of her family's past.
...which were dead in mothers’ belly, were placed in the bottle. To Esther, this image always linked to abnormal growth, suffocation and death: “The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t sir” (p.178). The latter part in the novel, Esther experienced a serious of symbolic events, and she began all over again and was ready to new life. However, what waited for her was still the contradiction that the society put on women, and the value of women could not be totally reflected as before. It could be predicted that in such society-value was distorted like the bell jar, Esther would be probable to fall into the “crisis of roles” and lost the courage for living again. The novel did not describe Esther’s “new born”, anyhow, the “new born” of the author-Sylvia Plath did not last for a long time.
At the end of the novel, Esther finally see’s a light at the end of the tunnel. She finally realizes that there is hope for her to become healthy again. Once Esther realizes that she will not always feel as bad as she does, she also comes to the conclusion that all the negativity and questioning in her life have made her into the person she has become. Esther finally realizes what her true identity is and she is okay with who she has become.
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” ( http://thinkexist.com/quotes/sylvia_plath/)