The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

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When glancing through the looking-glass of Sylvia Plath’s life, the reader of “The Bell Jar”, perceives the fictional anecdote of Esther Greenwood’s life as a disguised autobiographical work of Sylvia Plath’s reality. With that in mind, many characters in Plath’s novel emulate actual people who have invoked or resembled a piece of the author’s black despondency. The young, slim psychiatrist, Philomena Guinea, is a parallel to the successful, wealthy writer, Olive Higgins Prouty; she acts an guiding figure for Esther. Mrs. Guinea granted Esther the money needed to receive treatment at Caplan, a private psychiatric institution where Esther was injected with insulin and given electroshock treatments. Mrs. Guinea is the one of the three most successful women in the novel when it comes to aiding Esther in overcoming her depression. In the same light, …show more content…

Prouty made her fortune through her ways of writing romance novels and donated most of her earning to her favorite charities, such as the Children’s Hospital in Boston. By being a fictional representation of Plath’s patron, one can decipher that Esther does not connect with Philomena the same way as she does with Dr. Nolan or Jay Cee by Esther’s remark, “I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing,” which reveals the complex relationship that Plath and Prouty endorsed in a world of the novelists (Plath, 185). However, a more profound connection is revealed between Plath and Prouty when Esther deceitfully discloses her name as, “Elly Higginbottom from Chicago” to Lenny in the exposition of the plot because “[Esther] didn’t want anything that [she] said or did that night to be associated with me and [her] real name and coming from Boston”(Plath,

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