The bell jar is a considerably powerful novel. It is a poignant account of an American girl's beak down and treatment during the late fifties in America. The Bell Jar constantly displays Sylvia Plath's tremendous magic with words. The book takes the reader on a journey from the heights of urban glamour to the terror of feeling imprisoned within one's own mind. Interlaced through out the book are Plaths real life experiences and feelings. We are shown a mirror between fact and fiction.
In this loosely autobiographical novel, Plath's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, sinks into a profound depression during the summer after her third year of college. Esther spends the month of June interning at a ladies' fashion magazine in Manhattan, but despite her initial expectations, is uninterested in the work and increasingly unsure of her own prospects in life. Esther begins her spiraling deterioration into an utterly depressing state of mind. She is confused, fed up and depressed about life itself. Esther grows increasingly dissatisf
ied with the way society works and she no longer seems herself fitting in anywhere. She has a dream which sums up her predicament in the book, and this predicament is something that young people today unfortunately can relate to well.
Throughout The Bell Jar, Esther contemplates the issues facing every young woman of Plath's time as well as our own. From a woman's dilemma in choosing between a career and family to the ambivalence of remaining a virgin. As the unmistakable threads of feminist thoughts are interwoven within Esther's circumstances, Plath creates an extremely moving statement of society's demands of young women of her era as well as a heart-wrenching portrait of the internal struggle within a woman coping with these issues.
The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously, a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search
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