The Female Predicament in The Bell Jar and St. Mawr (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
Throughout this paper it is my intention to explore the following question: How does Esther Greenwood, Sylvia Plath’s protagonist in The Bell Jar, deteriorate as a result of the loss of her father, societal pressures and expectations and her inability to compromise and find some mutually acceptable role for herself? The Bell Jar is possible to be examined from multiple and intertwined layers of psychological distress of Esther Greenwood, which frequents and leaves her as if being trapped in a jar; also because of her feelings of intolerance against female stereotypes around her and causes her to reject all of those role models in order to thrive to demonstrate her own way of being a woman against the social and gender norms of US society in the 1950s, which were accustomed to be brutal and harsh against anything different; a general attitude of the social sphere and role model considerations of the time which is un-prepared at all to accommodate any feminist and/or sexually independ...
The text of Esther is built around a chiastically-structured plot, the shape of which reflects the reversal of the Jews’ fate and of Haman’s plans. The text also employs a number of carefully arranged subplots and literary features which serve to frame it as a replay of a previous event in world history. Keywords: Esther, Mordecai, Haman, intertextuality, literary structure, literary analysis. Date: Jul. 2019.
Esther Greenwood’s Distaste of Life as Seen in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
NOBEL: Journal of Literature and Language Teaching, 2017
This study attempts to analyze the causes and the effect of Esther Greenwood’s distasteful feelings. The aims of this study are to understand what makes Esther has distaste of life including toward men, her friends, her mother and the general social’s perspectives. It also explains the effect of Esther’s distaste. This study uses descriptive qualitative method. Things that will be done are describing the causes and effect of Esther’s distaste using Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. After analyzing the data, the result shows that Esther Greenwood has distaste for her life because of her unconscious mind. She got a lot of influences from her bad experiences including the time she spent with her ex-boyfriend, her mother, her friends, and also her opposite views toward the social perspectives. Then, the effect of Esther’s distaste is that she tends to use defense mechanisms such as denial, fantasy, reaction formation, rationalization, repression, displacements, sublimation, undoing, and a...
Constructions of Esther in Twenty-First Century Novels
2020
This paper uses tools from feminist literary theory to analyse three twenty-first century novels: Esther: Royal Beauty by Angela Hunt (2015); Esther: A Novel by Rebecca Kanner (2015) and The Gilded Chamber by Rebecca Kohn (2004). The novels are all creative retellings of the Book of Esther, and the paper situates them in the context of a textual reception history which has been characterised by rich and varied ‘aggadic interpretation and a tendency to creatively rewrite, rather than translate, the problematically subversive canonical version. Working from the premise posited by structuralist Gérard Genette, that whenever a text is creatively retold, it is “transvalued” (the derivative text replaces aspects of the target text with the values of its own context), it considers which cultural values are being imputed into twenty-first century retellings of the story. Using Meir Sternberg’s narratological criticism as a framework, which posits that the ways in which readers fill in the “...
Two Sides of Esther's Morality
Romans Sendriks, 2017
The student of this research paper attempts, despite various viewpoints concerning Esther’s manipulative moral behavior and its challenging problems, to prove that Esther was a righteous woman. The student draws this conclusion from the evidence in the book of Esther itself chaps. 5-8 which indicate that Esther’s deeds concerning Jews’ impending holocaust coming from the hands of the enemy should be considered as morally righteous. Furthermore, the student, based on the research findings, also offers the solution to the various challenging problems which Esther’s actions and character present.
Esther’s Sartorial Selves: Fashioning a Feminine Identity in The Bell Jar
Plath Profiles
Sylvia Plath’s roman-a-clef, The Bell Jar (1963), remains a commercial and critical success more than a half-a-century after its initial publication. I suggest that one of the reasons for the novel’s enduring popularity is Plath’s exploration of the connections between clothing and identity. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, fashion historians, and literary scholars, I contend that Plath uses protagonist Esther Greenwood’s vexed relationship with her wardrobe to demonstrate how the discourses of fashion that dominated American women’s magazines in the 1950s functioned to limit women’s personal and professional options. For Plath, I argue, Esther’s failure to find herself through fashion is indicative of white, middle-class women’s problematic position in a culture that defines them as both consumers and commodities in a male-dominated heterosexual marketplace.
With a little background on the author’s life, it is a painful experience for the readers to watch Esther go down as she tries to find reasons to hold on to life, and observe the similarities between the character and the author herself. This essay will focus on these similarities, and will explore the ways in which Esther Greenwood is orphaned time and again by her father, by men, by her passive mother, by doctors and by society in so many different layers, while also focusing on Plath’s autobiographical writing aspects in her poetry.
Dialog, 2010
She has been described as weak, beautiful but brainless, and "the scab undermining the impact of a striking worker's sacrifice." This article engages such opinions, but takes a different view of the character of Esther. It is a narrative critical reading that is nuanced with 'realistic empathy', from the perspective of someone whose life story has much in common with Esther's tale. Given away as a child by my biological parents in a society that preferred boys, like Esther, I was adopted by a single parent and raised in a strongly patriarchal society. I am now an Asian immigrant in New Zealand, a predominantly Western society, while Esther was a diasporic Jew in Persia. 1
Esther: Subverting the “Capable Wife”
Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture
In this article I suggest that an additional reading of the book of Esther sees that work as a subversive sequel to the Capable Wife lauded in Proverbs 31:10–31. Through a comparison of words taken from each of the Proverbs verses, I explain how the redacted version of Esther mines and undermines the earlier work, subtly making fun of such an idealized figure.