The Bell Jar And Susanna Kaysen's Girl Interrupted

There is no doubt that we have all had our low points. Some people may land further down than others. Some of those people take their downfall and share it with the world, sometimes in a subconscious way to either give hope to people or to show how they are not the only ones experiencing these problems. Three books, written by different authors of different times, will portray a sense of similarity. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar was set during the 1950s, when women mainly did things in order to pass time, before they got married. For the main character in The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood is a college student who suffers from depression in a numbness type of way, going about life as if everything means nothing. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir Prozac

Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted took place during the 1960s, when the Vietnam War occurred amidst with many civil rights movements happening. Kaysen describes how and why she ended up in the hospital, being identified with Borderline Personality Disorder. Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Susanna Kaysen all use their own experiences from mental institutions, their attempted suicides as symbols, and their feelings of depression as a common theme, to show the world what it is like for others in the novels.

To begin, Sylvia Plath was a significant figure in the literary world, but much of her writing had been based on what happened to her. When she was only eight years old her father had passed away, which could have been the initial cause for her onset of depression. She had been accepted into a college later on in life, received many achievements for her writing and academics, attempted suicide after being rejected from a program, was placed in McLean Mental Hospital, later married famous poet and writer Ted Hughes, and had two children (Materer 18-26). Women were often stigmatized for being overly

Their individual experience caused them to write more, showcasing what happened to them. “Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?” (GI), in a way this put the a view on who was truly sent to these institutions and under what circumstances. Since they wrote as honest as they could about their life. They continuously wrote about their life after the mental hospital, showing the even heavier impacts of it on their lives and how they may have changed. despite being in similar places, it will build or break them in various ways, from relationships to their later actions of how they affect those around