Emancipation through Suicide in Plath's The Bell Jar
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Department of English
Abstract
The Bell Jar(1963), a confessional and autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath,
depicts the adventures of a young woman in a male–dominated society that doesnot let her
true potential burgeon. Plath's alter ego, Esther, begins her career as a scholarship student at a
prestigious women's college and works at an internship for ladies' Day Magazine in New
York city. In course of development of this novel she faces a sense of anxiety and depression
due to her ambitious revolutionary and independent nature. The society is gender-biased in
which women are suppressed and confined. Esther's pain and despair grows deeper when she
fails to reconcile the conflicts withinher. This leads to her mental breakdown, and she has to
undergo electroshock therapy in front of indifferent and unkind doctors. At the end of the
novel, though she seems to be transformed, she cannot resolve the problem she faces within
and outside and attempts to commit suicide several times. Her suicide does not perish herself,
and is not taken as annihilation but as rejuvenation, resurrection and transcendence to the
world where she finds her liberation. As such, Esther undergoes liberating transformation
through suicide.