Why Did Sylvia Plath Write The Bell Jar

Cornelie Banguid

Period 6

1/9/14

The Bell Jar Research Paper.

Writing the bell Jar for Sylvia Plath was a hard thing to do but also familiar. Sylvia Plath’s own struggle with her depression made the writing of the Bell Jar “truthful. She did not exaggerate or lie about her experiences with depression, to make her illness look more dramatic. Sylvia Plath could alter everyday experiences into Books/ Poems, and make the readers truly connect with the characters and herself. Depression is still an issues and topic of controversy today. The main character in one of Sylvia Plath’s famous works also suffered from the illness.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA to Aurelia Plath and Otto Plath a German American author,

As the story progressed on, Esther slowly became depressed. After learning that she has not been accepted into Harvard, something she has dreamed about all the time and the relationship with her mother, which was once good but turned troubled, it was normal for Esther to fall into a depression. Her depression got worse and Esther was unable to read or write, “when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew” (Plath 106). This quote showed the struggles Esther had with writing. Esther decided to get help by meeting up with a psychiatrist but, the sessions were unsuccessful, and so she tried to commit suicide for the first time by, crawling into a cellar and trying to overdose on sleeping pills. Her suicide was unsuccessful and she was quickly rushed into a hospital. After a few weeks, Esther was transferred into a private psychiatric center. At the private psychiatric center, Esther started to recover and by the end of the book, Esther was about getting ready to leave the Institution new and better than