What are the main themes of The Bell Jar?
The Bell Jar Themes
- Mind vs. Body.
- Purity vs. Impurity.
- Women and Social Expectations. The Bell Jar offers an in-depth meditation on womanhood and presents a complex, frequently disturbing portrait of what it meant to be female in 1950s America.
- Personal Ambition.
- Medicine.
What is the theme of the bell?
The poem deals with themes like fear of death, and the inevitable progression of the life cycle from youth to death.
What does The Bell Jar symbolize in The Bell Jar?
For Esther, the bell jar symbolizes madness. When gripped by insanity, she feels as if she is inside an airless jar that distorts her perspective on the world and prevents her from connecting with the people around her.
How is the bell jar a feminist novel?
The Bell Jar is a feminist novel, not because it was written by a feminist, but because it deals with the feminist issues of power, the sexual double standard, the quest for identity and search for self-hood, and the demands of nurturing.
What terms does Esther use to describe herself in the bell jar?
She refers to herself as unnatural. However, these highly-critical comments eventually lead her to a suicidal, destructive behavior. Esther constantly describes herself in terms that show that she is dissociated from herself and that she regards herself as something less than human.
What is a bell jar How does the title relate to the novel?
The bell jar referred to in the title is a jar that is made to perserve a dead baby for examination by medical students. Buddy Willard takes Esther to where he studies cadavers, and she discovers the dead babies kept inside of bell jars.
What feeling is being expressed in the bells?
These bells also bring about feelings of happiness, but in a different way. Although they have the same meaning of joy they clearly have different sounds. He also describes how they bring a sense of joy, and somewhat of a fortune, for the future.
What does the jar symbolize?
This study confirmed that the symbolism of the jar in literature as holiness, motherhood and femininity, expectancy and hope, death and regeneration, maturement and transformation, and a container could bring about therapeutic growth in clients.
What are the main themes of the bell jar?
A great deal of the novel concerns the expectations that others have for Esther with regards to behavior and her future, as well as the expectations that Esther has for other. This is most explicit in the societal expectations that Esther feels concerning decisions about a possible career and family.
What does the bell jar mean in Esther’s story?
A sense of confinement permeates Plath’s novel, even as represented by the bell jar that forms the title of the book. The bell jar symbolizes Esther’s suffocation, for the jar intends to preserve its ornamental contents but instead traps them in stale air.
Who is Nolan’s mother in the bell jar?
Nolan to her mother, finding her a cross between her mother and Myrna Loy. This is a relatively idealized sense of motherhood in comparison to the other occurrences of this theme that Plath includes.
What kind of treatment does Esther get in the bell jar?
When Esther goes to a more enlightened, luxurious institution, she begins to heal under the care of Dr. Nolan, a progressive female psychiatrist. The three methods of 1950s psychiatric treatment—talk therapy, insulin injections, and electroshock therapy—work for Esther under the proper and attentive care of Dr. Nolan.
