The bell jar door Sylvia Plath

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  • 5 januari 2002
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Boek
Auteur
Sylvia Plath
Genre
Psychologische roman
Taal
Engels
Vak
Eerste uitgave
1963
Pagina's
234
Geschikt voor
bovenbouw havo/vwo
Punten
2 uit 5
Oorspronkelijke taal
Engels
Literaire thema's
Depressie,
Zelfmoord,
Dood,
Eenzaamheid

Boekcover The bell jar
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De glazen stolp volgt de ondergang van de getalenteerde Esther Greenwood in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw. Wanneer Esther na haar studie stage gaat lopen bij een populair vrouwentijdschrift in New York, wordt ze voor het eerst met de wereld buiten de schoolbanken geconfronteerd. Ze hoopt op een vervolg van haar academische carrière, maar wordt afgewezen e…

De glazen stolp volgt de ondergang van de getalenteerde Esther Greenwood in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw. Wanneer Esther na haar studie stage gaat lopen bij een populair vro…

The bell jar door Sylvia Plath
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Form: Bookreport
Title book: The Bell Jar
Date of first publication: 1963
Author: Sylvia Plath

Relevant information on the authors life:

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts and spent her early childhood in the seaport town of Winthrop. Her maternal grandparents were Austrian immigrants, and her father, a professor of biology, came to the United States from Poland as an adolescent. After her father died in 1940, Plath moved with her mother and younger brother to Wellesley, an inland suburb of Boston, where she attended public school and developed a strong interest in writing and drawing. In 1950, she won a scholarship to attend Smith College and majored in English there. Like Esther of The Bell Jar, Plath spent the summer after her junior year working at a magazine in New York before suffering from her first bout of mental illness.After a highly successful college career, Plath won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England, where she met English poet Ted Hughes. They married in 1956, and after a brief stint in the U.S., where Plath taught at Smith, they moved back to England in 1959. Plath gave birth to their first child, Freda, the following year. She also published Colossus, her first volume of poetry. Her second child, Nicholas, was born in 1962, and Hughes and Plath separated shortly afterward.The Bell Jar was published in January 1963, and was met with moderate critical acclaim. Three other volumes of poetry were published posthumously: Ariel in 1968, followed by Crossing the Water (1970) and Winter Trees (1972).On the morning of February 11, 1963, Plath left milk by her children's beds, along with precise instructions for her housekeeper, and then carefully sealed off her kitchen door. She then used the oven to gas herself, ending her life at the age of 31.
The main part of The Bell Jar is autobiographical. But I don't think all of it is autobiographical. I think that Plath used the things that have happened to her but that she also made those things a bit more dramatically or maybe even less dramatically.
About the autobiographical elements in "The Bell Jar": The Bell Jar was published near the end of Plath's life and, thus, cannot escape the poignancy of her self-inflicted death. At no point in the novel does Esther look back with the detachment of one who has fully recovered from the incidents she is describing.

1. Summary:

Esther Greenwood, a college student from Massachusetts, travels to New York to work on a magazine for a month as part of a writing competition she won. With her there are 11 other people. Most of them are rich girls, and she doesn't really like them. One morning her boss asks her if she knows what she's going to do in the future, Esthers says she doesn't have a clue. Her boss tells her to learn some more languages, because she will needs those in the future. Esther just listens, but she knows she has no time to fit that into her schedule but she will try to talk the dean into it. The dean considers The dean considers her to be an interesting experiment. She was the only girl who passed physics (with an A). She hates physics. So she talked her dean into letting her take chemistry classes without getting credit for them. All the time she pretends to pay attention, but in the mean time she's doing everuthing, but physics. When Esther's in New York she is thrown into a world of excitement, luxury, anxiety, and self-doubt as she attempts to redefine herself. Insecure about her looks and her modest socioeconomic background, her mother hated her father for dying and leaving no money, Esther doesn't really like her mom, so she hasn't had that much of money when she was young. Once she sent a thank you letter to a famous novelist who gave her a scholarship and she got invited. Esther tries to make sense of her new experiences, her family, her friends, and the men she encounters, but she is plagued by feelings of inadequacy and inertia. She thinks back to the men she has dated,-in particular, Buddy Willard , who is in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis and wants her to marry him once he is healthy again. Buddy's confession of having slept with a waitress makes her feel cheated and deceived, and she sets out to lose her own virginity as though in pursuit of the answer to an important mystery. Upon returning home to the Boston suburbs, Esther finds she cannot bring herself to sleep, eat, or wash her hair. She seeks help from a psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon , who prescribes electric shock therapy. After the treatment, because she's still mentally unstable and again she doesn't trust the medical profession, Esther tries to kill herself by ingesting sleeping pills. One day she goes to the basement and takes the sleeping pills with her, she leaves a note for her mom telling that she goes out for a long walk. Then she takes the pills, and everything goes black before her eyes. She wakes up in a hospital, where she is told she is very lucky to have survived with no permanent physical injury. She is sent to a city hospital's psychological ward until her college sponsor, Philomena Guinea , offers to pay for her to stay in a private hospital.

There, Esther comes to trust her new psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan. She walks through the building and meets a girl named Valerie. She thinks Valerie looks to normal to be in the hospital. Dr. Nolan comes in and asks her about Dr. Gordon, he did she shock treatment wrong. She gets 3 insulin injections a day. She grows fatter. Valerie has had a lobotomy in Wymark. At that hospital she's getting also shock therapy. And begins to improve. After the shocktreatment she feels better. "The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air." She receives shock treatment 3 times a week. Later an old friend of Esther's, Joan(Joan has dated Buddy a couple of times), has to go to the hospital as well. She gives Esther newspaper articles about her suicide attempt. Joan slashed her wrists through a window. Later Joan tells Esther she likes her, and Esther tells her she makes her wanna puke. At the same time, she is still struggling to define herself outside her family and the company of men. Later she receives town privileges. At one of her town visits she meets this guy, named meets Irwin (a professor in mathematics), he takes her to dinner. She has sex for the first time. It hurts, she is bleeding and she goes to Joan. She is still bleeding and they go to the emergency. Later Jone returns to the asylum. One night the staff wakes Esther up in the middle of the night because Joan didn't return from the movies. Joan's found dead, she hung herself. Later her mother visits and she tells Esther that "they'll take up where they left off, "We'll act as if all this were a bad dream". Her mother doesn't understand her, and she doesn't even try. Esther and her doctor decide it'll be better that her mom stops visiting her. Later Buddy visits her, he asks her if there is something in him that drives people crazy (Joan & she). She calls Irwin and makes him pay the emergency bills. She goes to Joan's funeral. By the end of the novel, she is ready to leave the mental hospital but with the knowledge that she can never fully recover from the feelings that led to her breakdown in the first place.
2. Describe the end of the story:

The story ends with Esther who 's steping forward into a room to have a final interview with all the doctors and head-staff of the clinic she's in. After the interview they will decide wether or not Esther's recovered enough to go out of the clinic and stand on her own feet again. Someone once described the end of the story as: As Esther steps into her exit interview at the end of the novel, we feel both her airy sensation of being carried out of a nightmare and her looming anxiety that it might, at any moment, begin again. And i seriously believe that that is the perfect way to describe the end of the story.

3. Time:

The story takes time in 1946. You can tell that because in the book everyone keeps talking about a special event that's going to take place: the Rosenberg execution. And that took place in 1946.Between the beginning and the end of the story passes, roughly speaking 4 months. Because the job she has in New York is for 1 month, and then she stays the whole summervacation in a mental hospital, and the summervacation is 2 or 3 months.

4. Setting:

The story takes place in the U.S.A. At the beginning of the story Esther's in New York, and later she goes back home, which is a sub-urban in Boston. Later she goes to a mental hospital. Thge story doesn't say where the clinic exactly is.

5. Characters + 6. Relationships:

Esther Greenwood: The main character of the book. A talented young student from Massachusetts, she wins a fellowship to work on a magazine in New York for the summer but finds herself descending into mental illness and confusion. Esther's actually a really nice girl, she tries her best to understand and respect the people around her. Her mother and father both spoke German, her father died when she was 9. She was only purely happy until the age of 9. Considers herself to be a neurotic. From 0-9 years she was a Methodist, now she is a Unitarian. Her family is catholic.
Doreen: Esther's friend who also works at the magazine in New York. Doreen goes to college in West Virginia and is very popular with men. Esther says that there is no one like her. Doreen makes Esther feel like she is sharper than the others. Doreen is funny and she has got intuition.
Jay Cee: Esther 's boss in New York. Esther oftens wishes that Jay Cee could be her mother.
Buddy Willard: Esther's former boyfriend, a medical student and childhood friend. He wants to marry Esther, which at one time would have pleased her but now only angers her since he discourages her from writing poetry. He contracted tuberculosis at medical school and is recovering at a sanatorium in the Adirondacks. later Esther doesn't want to marry him, when she finds out he slept with a waitress, and lost his virginity to her. Esther sees this as cheating: her being "pure" (still a virgin), and he being "not pure" (being not a virgin anymore).
Joan: A former girlfriend of Buddy Willard s and a student at Esther's college. She is also from Esther and Buddy's hometown.

Constantin: Esther decides that she wants to be seduced by Constantin and agrees to go to his room to listen to balalaika records. She falls asleep beside him, but nothing more intimate transpires.
Dr. Gordon: A psychiatrist who treats Esther with electric shock therapy.
Valerie: A patient at the mental hospital who received a lobotomy.
Dr. Nolan: Esther 's doctor at the private hospital. She also uses electric shock therapy, but tells Esther that it is meant to be a pleasant experience rather than a painful one. Esther comes to trust and admire her.
Philomena Guinea: Esther 's sponsor for both her scholarship to college and her stay at the mental hospital.
Mrs. Greenwood: Esther's mother. She doesn't understand Esther, and she thinks that Esther's making a big deal out of nothing. She doesn't even think of trying to understand her daughter. And she also doesn't support Esther in her study. Esther's studying English. And her mom believes that that's way too low, and that Esther should try and do something else.
Irwin: A professor in mathematics, who sleeps with Esther. She loses her virginity to him.
7. Theme:

I believe that the Bell Jar is the story of a young woman's struggle to survive in a society that does not take her talents or ambitions seriously. It is also, an autobiographical story of mental illness. Esther is driven to attempt suicide because she doesn't think that the society she lives in is understanding her . By the middle of the book, it is clear that Esther is suffering from more than everyday depression: She is unable to sleep, eat, or read, and her behavior becomes erratic and irrational. So the themes are mental illness, and not being understood by society, it's also about the struggle of a young woman to be independent, it's also a story of sexual discovery. The Bell Jar is also in some way kind of a medical history. And it also gives a clear picture of the way people tought about social issues in America in 1950.

8. The Genres:

The story doesn't belong to a specific genre, but to more. First of all it's a novel, a socil novel. About the growing up of a young woman, and how it all starts really perfect for her, but how in the end she ends up trying to kill herself, and being locked away in a hospital. It's also a really dramatic and sometimes quiote shoking story. Because of the things Esther has to go through.

9. Explain the title of the book:

The book's called The Bell Jar. That stands for the way life makes the main character feel. As she describes it herself, she feels like she's living in a bell jar, traped and stewing in her own sour air. -The Bell Jar betekent een glazen stolp-.

Boekenquiz 8 vragen

Nieuw! Open vragen worden nagekeken door AI
De schrijfster van dit verhaal, Sylvia Plath, heeft het boek eerder onder een andere naam uitgebracht. Wat was deze naam?
In het verhaal komt alleen de moeder van Esther Greenwood voor. Waar is haar vader?
Joan, de vriendin van Esther, wordt op een plek dood gevonden. Waar?
Is de volgende bewering juist of onjuist?

Esther Greenwoord wordt maar in één opstelling opgenomen.
Welke therapie werkt erg effectief bij Esther Greenwood?
Is de volgende bewering juist of onjuist?

Dit boek is verfilmd.
Waar lijdt Buddy, de vriend van Esther, aan?
Wat deed Esther Greenwood voordat ze depressief werd?

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