Essays on The Bell Jar

Most of Sylvia Plath’s works are propelled by “inexorable and often terrible forces driving through her mind and bodyThe forces are fears, or nightmarish impulses towards brutality or suicide” (Knickerbocker 346). These dark emotions are present and felt in her works, alluding to the kind of life she lived before her suicide when she was just 30. There was nothing much that can be learned about her personal life which exposed her in the kind of sufferings that her works have alluded to, but her poem “Daddy” talked about a German father who was a Fascist and died ...

In the Victorian period The Woman Question was a widely discussed topic, and engaged many Victorians, both male and female. The ideal woman of that age was associated with tenderness, understanding, innocence, domestic affection and submissiveness. The woman had to maintain the status and integrity of her husband, being always the devoted and pleasing angel in the house. Coventry Patmore supported the idea that women should be extremely pure and selfless in his popular, best-selling long poem “The Angel in the House” (1854). A woman that failed at such responsibilities was labelled either mad or hysterical. During the Victorian ...

On October 27, 1932, Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932. Her father was a professor at Boston University and her mother was a student there. Sylvia’s father died when she was a child and this loss was said to have influenced her writing in later years. She was dedicated to writing, began keeping a journal as a child, and began submitting her poetry to magazines when she was in high school. Remarkably, Sylvia graduated summa cum laude from Smith College even though she had attempted suicide at least once and suffered from depression during her college years. Sylvia moved to ...

Introduction

Sylvia Plath is one of the most admired and dynamic poet of the 20th Century. She was mostly known for her book the Bell jar which was a collection of poems. Her poetry represented a self loathing and disturbing stance that could probably have been prompted by the tough life she had led as a child and under the care of her authoritarian father. According to Biography.com (n.p), her poetry was “highly acclaimed” due to its “confessional style,” linking her to other confessional poets like Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. This paper should present facts about Sylvia Plath’s early life, career ...