Category: The Bell Jar

In the novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath it shows the women and femininity. Tha novel challenged the rules that each woman should follow in the 1950s, as at that time everything was under control of the men. The main character Esther Greenwood, wanted to prove herself as a woman in a masculine world. From the social point of view, Esther is not achieving the good social standard to make her a good woman in people’s eyes. Thus, Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar represent most of the woman’s problem in the new society, society standards for the young women and needs of women in that time era.

Eater desideted to go out with her friends to party after winning fashion magazine contest in New York, she started to get random feelings that she has what she does not want in her life, and the people around her are not the people she asked for. A silence took over her as she said: The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence”, and then continues on:

“I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window… but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.” (pp.18-19)

Her feelings of New York society are growing a day after a day, the particular mix that she experiences in this society makes her feel more confused and uncertain. It is torn between two realms, a reality represented by New York, and a way of life that wants more than it can offer. And the traditional world of her life with her father, which is too easy for her to survive.

Being a young woman that is 19 years old like Esther, there are some standards to follow to be able to adapt to the country. Some standards each woman have to know them and almost be professional doing them, some examples could be like cooking or be able to inspire the opposite sex as well as each woman should or have to get married at a young age, other wise no men would look at her thinking there is something wrong with her. Esther got a chance to meet Buddy Willard, and them relation got stronger to be her boyfriend. At unexpected times when she talked to Buddy, she saw something she never saw in him which changer her whole point of view about men. Esther figured out that he is not a ‘pure’ man as she though for the whole time talking to him, at first, she respected Buddy and had the feeling that he was different from other men, but after that discovery, she characterised their relationship as being like:

“That Jewish man and that nun, although of course we weren’t Jewish or catholic but Unitarian. We had together under our own imaginary fig tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our separate ways.” (p. 55)

The imagery of the Jew and the nun shows how difficult their relationship has become and, in general, how their view of interactions between the opposite sexes has evolved throughout the book.

Author of The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter, suggests that ‘women have been labelled mad because mental illness has been defined and codified by male psychiatrists’. Depictions of female ‘hysteria’ in texts such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper have notoriously been interpreted as the embodiment of deviance within a patriarchal hierarchy. Whilst The Yellow Wallpaper is recognised as a gothic horror and ‘The Bell Jar’ is classified as a Roman à clef, there are considerable parallels between the female protagonists and equally between writers who have all experienced severe mental health issues and have faced marginalization. The Yellow Wallpaper explores the detrimental effects of the ‘rest cure’, a treatment developed by Silas Weir Mitchell in the 1800s on the unnamed narrator who is experiencing ‘slight hysterical tendencies’. Conversely the male physicians constructed by Sylvia Plath attempt to lift the metaphorical ‘bell jar’ that hangs over Esther Greenwood by prescribing multiple courses of Electroconvulsive therapy which was said to reduce ‘connections in an area of the brain previously linked to both depression and cognitive function’. Both Plath and Gilman utilize their own experiences to create female characters, indoctrinated into their roles as male subordinates, in an attempt to illuminate the devastating effects of the ‘cures’ provided by the male dominated medical community at the time.

From the onset, Gilman’s narrator and her husband are pitted against one another and their conflicting opinions are made abundantly clear. The relationship between the two is a microcosm of a much larger pre existing prejudice against women. The hyperbolic characterisation and villainisation of John, who is ‘practical in the extreme’, comes as no surprise given the genre of the text and whilst it is easy to do so, it must not be forgotten that this is a character constructed by a female writer on behalf of a first person female narrator. Gilman draws from her own bouts with postnatal depression and the treatment that followed. The Yellow Wallpaper is emblematic of the effects of inactivity on minds under stress; embedded within the narrators’ fragmented notions is a distinct opinion that she would have benefited greatly from ‘congenial work’, ‘more society and stimulus’ rather than ‘perfect rest and all the air [she] could get’. The amount of evidence to suggest that this prescribed ‘rest cure’ is not consensual within the text is manifold and whilst the disjointed manner of the narrator’s thought processes and confusion over ‘phosphates or phosphites’ does suggest that John has good reason to oversee her treatment, equally it leaves us questioning whether or not this imbalance of power is what aggravates her mental decline. The repetition of the harrowing interrogative ‘what is one to do?’ reinforces, despite the ability to form her own opinion, the futility of any attempted interjection or challenge to the authoritative voice of her husband which we see dismissed relentlessly. Whether this is due to, ignorance and haughtiness given his combined role as a husband and ‘physician of high standing’, a genuine lack of knowledge or out of malice is something which has been discussed by critics. Sarah Ghosal suggests that John appears to be approaching treatment rather pragmatically given the context and widespread belief that ‘isolation and simplicity will help to cure his wife of her nervousness’. Regardless, it is near impossible to feel no sense of empathy towards the narrator who is forced to succumb to the perpetuating prejudice against women that has been notoriously documented throughout the history of literature in texts such as Hamlet and The Bell Jar. The suppression and dismissal that the protagonists are forced to adhere to is symptomatic of the patriarchal societies that Gilman and Plath were writing in which places such a significance on their alternative perspectives.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet documents Ophelia’s (arguably the most paradigmatic of his heroines) descent into madness which has remained an ‘archetypal illustration of romantic suicide for centuries’ so much so her character has become synonymous with female suicide and depression. Much like Ophelia, Esther Greenwood is a character with suicidal tendencies, to the point that the novel almost becomes a ‘bleak resume of self-murder’. The extent of the character’s attempts to end her own life is telling of Sylvia Plath’s own struggles with her mental health and suicide which followed the release of the text. Similarly, whilst we are urged to believe Gilmans testimony, that this psychoanalytical short story is not biographical in Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, we are introduced to a narrator who is ‘viciously influenced’ by the ‘lame curves’ which ‘suddenly commit suicide’. The narrator anthropomorphizes the floral pattern of the yellow wallpaper, the elements are representative of the scrutiny society makes of lives of women, particularly those who are creative or disobedient. The narrator displays such characteristics, given her dismissal of Johns orders not to write despite his emphatic lexis. The surreptitious continuation of her writing is not scrutinized by contemporary audiences, but her bouts with guilt cause her to imagine ‘the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down’. There is a certain sense of responsibility that we cannot help but assign to John in this sense, as this confinement has caused her to develop such a fixation with this wallpaper. The treatment of mental illnesses are circumstantial and therefore whilst, all three females have experience suicidal thoughts, in varying degrees, the treatment of such differs. Whilst the female protagonists have very different experiences with treatment, one undeniable comparison, is their lack of agency and involvement and just as we see the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper forced into taking phosphates, Esther is forced into undergoing shock treatment and is sectioned.

The lexical field of entrapment in The Yellow Wallpaper is supported through the writer’s use of setting used to strengthen the impact of her story by allowing the distant mansion to physically isolate the narrator from the rest of society. Whilst the narrator sees the barred windows as a means of containing children in the nursery, to the reader combined with the bed nailed down and rings on the walls, it is apparent that it is more likely this is a means of keeping the narrator secure. Critics have argued that the nursery mimics a psychiatric ward for this reason. However, considering windows typically connote a prospect of possibilities, the nursery is likened to a penitentiary and John resembles the penal officers of the eighteenth century. This is indicative of the fact mentally ill women were regarded as children rather than the evil wrongdoers that they once were. It is difficult to ignore the damage this enforced infantilism has caused to the mental health of the narrator when she is reduced to crawling on the floor like a young child. This male dominance is not uncommon for Gilman, the text is often compared to her short story The Giant Wisteria; both gothic tales are known for their exploration of the ‘troubled nexus between the sexual repression of women, the patriarchal control of motherhood madness, and the anxiety of authorship’. Much like the ‘ancestral mansion’ inhabited by the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper, the ‘old mansion’ beneath the ‘knotted arms’ of ‘the great wisteria’ frames Gilmans’ indictment of the patriarchal marginalization of women. The ‘giant wistaria’, has been regarded by critics as a symbolic female presence and the image of it ‘cover[ing] the whole front of the house’ is representative of the attempt to dismantle patriarchal constructs, much like the yellow wallpaper that the narrator tears down. The parallels appear more prevalent towards the end of the story when the wisteria engulfs the house and threatens to bring it down. Gilman leaves the reader with a similar analogy of overcoming oppression in The Yellow Wallpaper when the narrator reaches the height of her mental decline and we see her crawling over John to highlight the juxtaposition of the power dynamic.

There is much irony in the writers use of environment in the yellow wallpaper as a means of treating the narrator for her hysterical tendencies. The very fact she is confined to the nursery on the upper floor is sardonic considering the reason she is undergoing such treatment is because she has postnatal depression. This room is undoubtedly responsible for the narrator’s mental and cognitive decline, in a space where women are traditionally expected to flourish we are forced to experience the torment this confined space causes her. There is no evidence to suggest the isolation from ‘such a dear baby’ has enhanced her emotional, physical or mental wellbeing and in fact we only see the narrator as a ‘tired’, ‘fearful and querulous’ character. Childbirth and motherhood was feared by many women particularly because pueruple insanity, seemingly triggered by childbirth, could affect any woman rendering them insane. Gilman obeyed instructions to ‘’live as domestic a life as far as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’ as long as I lived.’ for three months before she ‘came so near the borderline’ of utter mental ruin that I could see over’. The intention to isolate someone experiencing postnatal depression was to reduce risk to the patient, child and society, given the extremities of symptoms one could expect to experience, but above all restoring the women to their rightful place in society, as mothers and homemakers. Esther Greenwood is another example of a character who is particularly ‘unmaternal’. Whilst she facets a facade, given the first person narrative, we are able to access her internal truth. Identity and a sense of conformity is subject that protrudes the novel as we see her at the pinnacle of her breakdown unable to differentiate herself from ‘the Indian man’ she sees in her reflection. Plath use of mirrors in the text is an extremely effective way of conveying how far removed Esther has become from herself. Misidentification and the idea of the uncertain self is a common theme throughout Plath’s body of work, the short two-stanza poem, Mirror, the personification of the ‘cruel’ mirror demonstrates just how impactful this object and its nondiscriminatory nature can be in people’s lives.

The types of treatment that Esther receives is significant when considering whether or not it is the ‘cures’ Esther is subjected to that aggravate or contribute to her mental decline. The syntactic parallelism employed by Plath serves to highlight the juxtaposition of approaches by Dr Nolan and Dr Gordon and thus the level of their success. From the onset, it is apparent, from his patronising tone the line ‘suppose you try and tell me what you think is wrong’ Dr Gordon is a character we are encouraged to dislike as the reader. With his conventional male attractiveness and seemingly perfect family, Harold Bloom, along with many other critics, argues Dr Gordon is symbolic of the patriarchal power in the medical establishment. Whilst Dr Nolan is the woman who redeems psychiatry carries her across the threshold of her new life’ and is able to ‘suspend [the metaphorical bell jar] a few feet above’ her head. The Bell Jar, given that it is the title of the novel, is the most iconic motif in the text. It signifies the all consuming pain that comes with mental illness, and as the reader we cannot help but feel a shared sense of relief and respect for Dr Nolan who has not only kept her word that it would be painless, but that she has helped relieve some of the suffering Esther was experiencing. Whilst the Bell Jar is still ’suspended, a few feet above my head’ does, insinuating that Esther will never truly be able to move on and forget her experience like her mother wishes, the results compared to the ‘blue flash’ which ‘shuck her till [her] teeth rattled’ is astounding. It is at this point that we see, for the first time, Esther truly content and at peace. Despite this, shock treatment yields disturbing consequences for example in the line ‘I put down the knife and looked at it’ we see that Esther’s mind is slower moving and appears empty. The Mental Capacity Act of 2005 means that professionals are able to make decisions on behalf of individuals who lack capacity. In this sense, Esther’s lack of inclusion makes sense to contemporary audiences as it appears they are working to enhance her mental health. However, the way that she is disregarded completely by Dr Gordon and to a certain extent by Dr Nolan echos the infantilism we see throughout The Yellow Wallpaper.

It would be fallacious to suggest that the latter half of the twentieth century was anything less than revolutionary as the American literary sphere was marked by various social uprisings that sought to weave nationwide equality into the fabric of mainstream society. Aside from being the cornerstone for a profound cultural shift among the general populace, American literature during the post-war period became increasingly experimental through the creation of hallucinatory fictional narratives in postmodern works from Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. With the postmodern aesthetic being at the forefront of most literary circles, it seemed that works of an autobiographical nature were seen to be less daring than those of a postmodern variety. Yet, this is untrue in light of the fact that autobiographical novels such as ‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath and ‘The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’ by Maxine Kingston have been heralded as prominent pieces of feminist literature through the way in which they have deconstructed female identity via occidental and oriental lenses in order to provide a commentary on the human condition. Contrary to this, both works are not without their flaws for two reasons: Firstly, their placement under the autobiography genre is rather questionable. Secondly, Kingston is particularly controversial since certain scholars have accused her of fabrication rather than being entirely truthful about certain aspects of her book.

It can be said that categorising the two works as an autobiography is a tricky task since Plath and Kingston are both rather dubious in light of combining fictitious elements with real life experience. Helga Schwalm helps to distinguish an autobiography from other potential genres by suggesting that an autobiography ‘signifies a retrospective narrative that undertakes to tell the author’s own life, or a substantial part of it, seeking (at least in its classic version) to reconstruct his/her personal development within a given historical, social and cultural framework.’ Undoubtedly, Schwalm’s definition of an autobiography in relation to ‘The Bell Jar’ and ‘The Woman Warrior’ is simultaneously helpful and hindering: On one hand, by defining a seemingly complex genre in a comprehensible and concise manner, Schwalm is able to effectively encourage debate. Also, Schwalm’s definition is applicable to both works as they clearly function retrospectively to provide an outlook of the lives of their respective protagonists; Plath provides her readership with a moving insight into the mental consequences of social pressures that she experienced in America, whereas Kingston portrays her arduous struggle with her Chinese-American identity as a woman living with an authoritarian, traditionalist Chinese family. On the other hand, Schwalm’s definition is a hindrance due to the fact that she clearly states that her definition is limited to classical texts as opposed to having a contemporary outreach.

Although the retrospective element of autobiography is clearly intact in both books, pigeonholing both works as being exclusively autobiographical would be doing a great disservice to Plath and Kingston as their ability to write within multiple frameworks would be downplayed. Kingston more so than Plath skilfully utilises alternative modes of writing through her biography; Kingston establishes her role as a skilful writer from the outset of the book through her interesting use of the narrative form and Chinese oral tradition. Guiyou Huang posits that Kingston clearly goes beyond the autobiographical form through multiple narrators ‘The Woman Warrior alternates between the third person and the omniscient narrator to recount tales of heroism, violence, revenge, racism and sexism.’ It is perhaps the use of such folktales that is most significant to Kingston’s deviation from the genre; the various allusions to Chinese folklore in ‘The Woman Warrior’ are used to transcend cultural boundaries which consequently serve three functions within her writing:

Firstly, they strengthen her Chinese-American identity. Secondly, the folktales validate her experiences as a woman of a different ethnic makeup as they are unique and distinct from the experience of a homogenously white America. Thirdly, they serve as a means of establishing the text as a piece of transnational fiction since Kingston travels to China and America and America to China in a literal and figurative sense. In spite of this, Kingston’s anecdotes are not without controversy since Asian-American writers have reacted to ‘The Woman Warrior’ with vitriol: ‘Frank Chin, among others, accused Kingston of distorting Asian American reality on the one hand, and catering to the demand of the dominant culture for exoticism and stereotypes on the other.’ Though Chin is passionate about ‘The Woman Warrior’ being a deliberate fabrication of the Chinese-American experience, his argument lacks substance. Kingston is not pandering to an American readership through these folk stories to as they blur the lines between fact and fiction to make things complex; Kingston uses myth allegorically to construct notions of womanhood and to lay down her grievances towards the systematic patriarchy of America and China, hence why Kingston uses the word ‘girlhood’ in the title as it crystallises the fact that Kingston is collectively speaking for all Chinese-American women. Similarly, due to Sylvia Plath’s extremely personal reflections of her life, it could be argued that ‘The Bell Jar’ is only semi-autobiographical in nature since the book easily falls under the bildungsroman genre. A bildungsroman novel is characterised as a novel ‘that deals with the maturation process, with how and why the protagonist develops as he does, both morally and psychologically. The German word Bildungsroman means “novel of education” or “novel of formation.”’ It is perhaps the latter translation that is of primary concern here, in spite of the fact that the bildungsroman aesthetic seems to be non-inclusive females, it is obvious that Plath strays away from creating a cliché, traditional autobiography and instead creates a female bildungsroman through Esther Greenwood who evolves from an ordinary, suburban kid in Boston to being a teenager who has gained a prestigious internship at a magazine company in New York: ‘So poor that she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.’

As the only book written in her lifetime, Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ encapsulates a time period in which extreme inequality among the sexes was commonplace. This single ideal suggests that feminism and Plath go hand in hand. Although Plath died well before ‘The Bell Jar’ impacted on the feminist movement, it goes without saying that the circumstances in which the book was written were foundational in linking femininity to internal and external plight. Rosi Smith writes that ‘Plath and her protagonist came of an age in an era where women were explicitly told that happiness can only be achieved through the enactment of biological imperative, in a society in which all deviance was treated with suspicion.’ It is sufficient to say that Rosi Smith’s choice of words is ingenious as she uses the term ‘biological imperative’ in a reductionist way to demonstrate that the sole purpose of a woman in the 20th century was to bear a child and be a mother. However, Plath’s protagonist Esther Greenwood has broken this societal mould by gaining a life changing internship in New York, through this, Esther assumes the role of a middle class everywoman in America despite the fact she did not begin her life with such an envied job and social status. But, upon her return to Boston, Esther is told by her mother her application for a creative writing course was rejected. ‘She was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a college degree. ‘Even the apostles were tentmakers,’ she’d say. ‘They had to live, just the way we do.’’ (TBJ 13). What is most harrowing is the latter part of the quote as Esther’s mother uses the tentmaker analogy to blasphemously denounce the religious contributions of the apostles by comparing them to a failing Esther. These lines are particularly bleak as it is an accurate depiction of an acceptable female experience during the post-war period; as an era fraught with pessimism and financial unpredictability, women had no time to develop as individuals and self-actualise. Plath’s ability to conjure up poignant imagery begins with the title of her autobiography ‘The Bell Jar’. A bell jar is a huge jar with translucent glass in the shape of a dome which usually has a brown base at the bottom of it. Arguably, Plath is extremely clever in her decision to name her autobiography after the bell jar due to its connotations. The title is apt since a bell jar is used by a person to trap a small object. The object in question can see everything outside of the bell jar, but it cannot escape unless the person who captured said object kindly unscrews the lid. In light of this, Marhukh Baig argues that the title serves as a metaphor to describe ‘the vacuum between self and society develops the idea of alienation and detachment from the world outside the jar causes a need for self-discovery and further provokes the notion of being enclosed.’ Baig is correct in his interpretation of the title as a bell jar is primarily used for trapping an object. Furthermore, the bell jar is also a metaphor that alludes to the systems put in place to oppress women in the unfair environment that is post war America. The plight of the post-war woman in the 20th century is a plight unheard as all speech inside of a bell jar is distorted.

An influx of Chinese migrants came to the US in the late 19th century to seek work as a result of an economic downturn in their home country. Unfortunately, the Chinese were unwelcome at this time and were subjected to xenophobia. A famous journalist named Jacob Riiss, an immigrant himself, bolstered xenophobic views at the time by describing the Chinese as ‘a constant and terrible menace to society who are in no sense a desirable element of the population.’ With this in mind, it becomes clear that the Chinese-American identity in ‘The Woman Warrior’ would have been influenced by a distinctly racist type of occidental fear. Debatably, ‘The Woman Warrior’ could be seen as an antithetical piece to Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ in view of the fact that Kingston depicts the Chinese-American experience as opposed to the White American experience. Nevertheless, Kingston’s depiction of female identity is very similar to that of Plath’s due to the oppressive nature of Chinese and American society. It is the portrayal Maxine’s mother that links ‘The Bell Jar’ and ‘The Woman Warrior’ together. The most striking line in ‘The Woman Warrior’ occurs in the first chapter of the book: ‘Oh, come now. Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to be rid of them. Girls are maggots in the rice. It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’

Contextually, Kingston’s use of the word maggot is derogatory; the word serves a metaphorical purpose through by offensively distorting China’s one child policy; the baby girls (maggots) assume the position of being an anachronistic part of a family history, this is reinforced by the fact that the maggots slither upon the rice (a staple dish eaten by families in China). In a similar vein, by placing geese higher on the societal totem pole than daughters, Maxine shows her readership that the patriarchy has outstretched to the orient since geese are seen as being easier to trade as a food substance for slaughter when compared to unwanted baby girls.

In conclusion, Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ and Maxine Kingston’s ‘The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’ are an expose of sickening injustices towards females within a patriarchal framework. The respective protagonists, Esther Greenwood and Maxine Kingston suffer greatly at the hands of their parents as their confidence is knocked back through language and crystallised by the societies around them. In spite of this Kingston triumphs in the face of adversity by the end of the book through self-actualisation as she enrols in college, in turn fulfilling her role as the woman warrior. In light of autobiographical writing, it is evident that Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ and Maxine Kingston’s ‘The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts’ are not classical autobiographies, nor are they traditional in style; Plath’s utilisation of the literary concept bildungsroman and Kingston’s transnationality blur the lines between fact and fiction, thus rendering the two works as being clear cut postmodern autobiographies.

Bibliography

1. Schalm, Helga, ‘Autobiography’, in The Living handbook of Narratology . [Accessed 15th January 2016]
2. Huang, Guiyou, The Columbia Guide to Asian American Literature since 1945 (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 16. [Accessed 15th January 2016]
3. Shu, Yuan, ‘Cultural Politics and Chinese-American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston’s The Woman Warrior’. MELUS 26 (2001). pp. 199-223. [Accessed 15th January 2016]
4. Bildungsroman, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. [Accessed 15th January 2016]
5. Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar (Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971). [Accessed 15th January 2016]
6. Smith, Rosi, ‘seeing through the Bell Jar: Distorted Female Identity in Cold War America’ . [Accessed 15th January 2016]
7. Baig, Maruhkh, ‘in Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar as A Psychological Space: US Open English & Literature Journal’, 1 (2013), (p. 3). [Accessed 15th January 2016]
8. Riiss, Jacob, ‘How the other half Lives (New York: Createspace, 2009). [Accessed 15th January 2016]
9. Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Vintage International Edition, 1989), p. 31. [Accessed 15th January 2016]

The mental breakdown and insanity of women in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath are portrayed in numerous different ways. The Yellow Wallpaper introduces the reader of a nameless woman’s progressive mental breakdown from postpartum depression after giving birth and this provides the reader an opening into the perception and treatment of mental illness in the late 19th century.

The novel is set in a Gothic horror-style story and follows the slow deterioration of its nameless narrator’s mental state, but it also looks into the ways her husband’s attempted treatment contributes to this decrease. Gilman suffered from postpartum depression and this situation is very alike to the story’s narrator and was prescribed the same ‘rest cure’ provided by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, whose name is referred to in the story. She underwent a mental breakdown as a result of this isolated treatment, which excluded her from any form of writing or work outside of her proposed domestic field. The forced confinement of the story’s narrator, and her husband’s authoritative instructions against writing or any other activity mirrors the same type of ‘rest cure’ that was given to Gilman in her life. In the novel, the nameless wife, her very caring husband, and the unpleasant room, which is plastered in an old fashioned wallpaper all seem to play important roles in driving the wife mad. The husband’s suffocating attention, played along with the isolated environment provokes the nature of the wife’s nervousness, which causes her to fall into the roots of insanity to the point where she views herself in the wallpaper. The author’s skilful use of the setting and also of the point of view, which is in first person, allows the reader to participate in the woman’s growing insanity.

Similarly, this theme is shown throughout Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”, where we follow the story of Esther Greenwood, the breakdown she experiences and the start of her recovery. We learn that Esther, the protagonist in the novel, begins life at college and fantasises of becoming a famous writer, while women, at her age were looking for a husband, in the 1950s. The novel is set in the early 1950s and was written before the feminist movement of the 1960s. Esther, in The Bell Jar is treated for a nervous breakdown by doctors. It seems as the story mirrors the events in Plath’s life, an intelligent and academically successful child, whose father had died when she was just a young child.

Both authors cleverly put to use their real life situations in their work, showing how being a woman in a patriarchal society (in their time) eventually caused their mental breakdowns. In both novels, the authors manage to touch upon the role and expectations of women, feminism, the treatment of madness, confinement, insanity and mental illness. The Bell Jar has had many people having criticising comments and it seems as if a great amount of people agree with the fact that the male dominated society in which the protagonist of the novel, Esther lives in seems to contribute to her mental breakdown.

Published in London one year before the author committed suicide, The Bell Jar, is a semi-autobiographical look inside a year in the life of a young women dealing with depression. With some of the names of places and people changed, the author, Sylvia Plath chronicles her life at age twenty through the character Esther. Esther is a poet who tries to end her life when she should’ve been having the time of her life. In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the deterioration of the main character, Esther’s, mental health is a theme presented throughout the story and best illustrated in relation to her change in location throughout the novel. The symbolism used to show a characters change as a parallel to their literal change in location is a theme Thomas C. Foster explains in chapter 19 of How To Read Literature Like A Professional.

The Bell Jar, begins in New York with an ominous lightness. Esther has won a writing contest and along with 11 other “lucky girls” is gifted a luxurious paid for experience that anyone would envy. Much like how Foster said “when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok,” it is safe to assume that sending Esther north to New York was symbolic of improved life and higher class. Esther details the positive experiences she is having and the abundance of free gifts she is receiving. Enough to please anyone. This should all be a dream come true, except Esther can’t seem to feel happy. She does things to try and escape reality. In these moments she tells herself “New York is dissolving, they [the girls] are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more.” She understands her yearning to escape is not normal and she longs to be like the other girls who are not battling these heavy thoughts. Esther understands that she is “supposed to be having the time of [her] life” however she can not escape the dark. Things were not great for Esther in New York, however the worst parts of New York for her were nothing compared to the lows she experienced when she left.

The story grows darker with Esther’s move back home to Massachusetts from New York to live with her mother. In How To Read Literature As A Professor, it is explained that characters often “see their home as can be magnetic, elusive, or suffocating, and many characters travel to either find it or escape it” which was a part of what led Ester to pursue the contest in New York. Ester’s home life is most accurately described by Foster as “suffocating.” New York was an escape from the bleakness realty of life at her home with her mother. When Ester reluctantly returns to her home, the reader can understand her dread when Esther says “as the houses grew more familiar I slunk still lower”. Esther progressively slips into madness as time progresses when we see her find it difficult to complete everyday tasks. She reaches an all time low when her depression leads her to a suicide attempt. The lightness she experienced a few times in New York completely disappeared from the narrative at this point when “the silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.” Esther hit the bottom and it was apparent that a change in location was necessary.

The Bell Jar closes just as Esther enters her exit interview at the psychiatric institution where she has spent the past few months recovering. This location was a catalyst for positive change in Esther’s mental health, as Foster pointed out in How To Read Literature Like A Professor, “geography can also define or develop a character” which is exactly what the change in location to the institution did for Esther. The story ends without telling the reader outright what is in store for the characters. However a hint the reader gets about Esther’s life after the end of the story is that for a ‘long time afterward,’ she couldn’t bear to look at the free stuff she got at her summer internship, but when she was ‘all right again’ she brought the stuff back out, used the free lipstick still and ‘last week’ gave a plastic starfish from a free gift “to the baby to play with”.

The change in Esther ́s location was a symbolic way for Sylvia Plath to chronilize and tell the change in the state of Esther’s mental health. Depression and mental health is a recurring theme presented throughout the novel and best illustrated in relation to her change in location from New York, when things are okay on the surface but clearly something is going on beneath. To her home when her mental state really deteriorates and she reaches the low point in her life (attempting suicide). Then finally the mental institution where she is able to pick up the pieces and regain some hope. Underneath Esther’s sarcastic shell, as she narrates this story of her past self, you can still feel young Esther’s pain and agony, especially as she deals with her suicidal depression all throughout the novel.