Identity In The Bell Jar

Unraveling Parallels In her modern classic, Sylvia Plath tells the story of a neurotic woman on the grip of insanity. The Bell Jar presents the atypical coming-of-age of the successful and magnetic Esther Greenwood. As her mental health declines, she longs to escape her cosmopolitan life through taking her own. Though Neurotic Poets recounts the biography of Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar reveals a more personal struggle with clinical depression. Esther’s failure to recognize her self-importance reflects her inability to come to grips with her identity. Mirrors, strong, recurring motifs in the novel, evince her struggle with presenting an outward expression of herself that is in-line with her inner emotions and feelings. She gazes into an elevator mirror that appears too silver and warped in New York, and “[notices] a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into [her] face” (146). Esther does not have a firm sense of self identity, and believes she sees different personalities when she views herself in a mirror. The mirror
The Bell Jar seamlessly weaves in timeless themes with a rare craftsmanship that permits identification and empathy with a character who does not value her own existence. The influences of others are unimportant when one creates for herself purpose and meaning. From the moment of Esther’s shift at the beginning of the novel, she has demonstrated that she is incapable of coping with any type of instability or the availability of options due to her chronic indecisiveness. As the date raping further unraveled Esther’s state of mental stability, it becomes apparent that she does not know how to manage failure and the dissatisfaction of refutation. Consequently, all of these events contribute to Esther’s degrading mental health, until the point at which she is not able to enjoy life any longer, as was the case with Sylvia