Observation In The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

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In addition, Sylvia Plath employs imagery to present her mother to the readers as a sadistic woman who readily accepts her husband's death. Plath's poems convey her feelings of inadequacy, jealousy, hopelessness, and anger at her mother. Plath often referred to her mother's greatest sin was forcing her children, including Sylvia, to stay home from her husband's funeral. This action only deepened the deep seeded hatred for her mother, causing Plath to believe this was a tell-tale sign of her mother's lack of grief over her father's death. "An observation in the Bell Jar by a sadistic Esther appears to support this interpretation, while also presenting a rather cruel caricature of Aurielia's (Plath's mother) tendency to fall back upon banal Christian platitudes for guidance" (Tsank 166). Uncensored journals written by Sylvia Plath were retrieved, where she wrote about her brutal hatred for her mother, whom she blamed for her father's death. Plath wrote, "I hate her hate her hate her.....I…show more content…
Death came to be a reoccurring and common theme in Plath's poetry due to the sudden untimely death of her father. In addition, Plath often felt as a victim to every man in her life, writing of her realization that she could never escape her father's hold over her. Plath has written extremely controversial poems regarding death, such as the poem Edge and Lady Lazarus, written a week before her own death. In Lady Lazarus, Plath wrote that "dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well" (Plath 13). Plath manages to make her controversial themes in story witty as the "persona mocks herself [...] she is engaging in self parody" (Dickie). Many were offended or disgusted by the grotesque and frequent theme of death and abuse in Plath's poems, but Plath always stayed true to her themes throughout her

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