The Bell Jar Research Paper

Sylvia Plath “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” (“The 15 Best Sylvia Plath Quotations” www.matchbookmag.com. Matchbook Magazine, 2011-2016). Sylvia was born in a time where women were limited on the things they could do in their lifetime. Using her own experiences with mental breakdowns and attempted suicide, Sylvia Plath portrayed her struggles in her semi autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which was criticized for its graphic and depressing nature yet helped helped others with similar struggles.

Sylvia had a hard life with suffering depression with not many happy events in her life. Sylvia Plath parents were Otto

The Bell Jar is about a woman name Esther. She was a overachieving college student. Spent unhappy summers as a guest editor for a fashion magazine in New York City. After she was done she moved back in with her mom. She then grew increasingly depressed. She suffered a mental breakdown and attempts suicide. After she attempted suicide she was then institutionalized. Esther recovers much of her mental and emotional stability by the end of the novel, but the reason for her improvement are not entirely clear (Henderson 30). One of Sylvia Plath’s Poems is Ariel; it is a book full of Plath’s poems. A poet Robert Lowell explains Ariel; “a fever of poems written by a passionate, pained and occasionally mad young women. Among her most shocking , those that raged against a long-dead father and a womanizing husband” (Montagne). After Sylvia wrote one of her poems in Ariel she tucked her two tiny children in brd, sealed their door with towels, rested her head on her oven door and turned the gas on. She ended her life on February 11, 1963. When she wrote her poems she used strong and painfully