Real event happens on a daily, but authors want to protect readers from the real world. Authors take real events that happen and turn them into fictional events, so that they will not scare the reader. Sylvia Plath took real events that happened in the medial perfection and changed them when she was writing “The Bell Jar”, so that the reader would not get scared about how patients were treated back then. Authors make events less graphic and horrific then they were when they occurred because these events were terrible to watch, and no one wants to repeat terrible events.
Medical treatments in “The Bell Jar” are fictional events that are based on historical occurrences. “The Bell Jar” is a story that is based on real events, but the characters have different names. “The Bell Jar” relates historical medical practices in fictional ways. Authors take real events and turn them into fiction because they are not able to know every detail and they also do not want to have to repeat heartbreaking events in full detail. Historical events turned into fictional events can happen in many ways and readers sometimes can understand why an author would make events that happened in real life fictional. “The Bell Jar” takes both mental illness and feminism that a person has gone through and has changed them from real life events into fictional events.
“The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath takes place during the time of different medical treatments to cure mental illness. Some treatments used were shock therapy and putting a patient into a diabetic coma which were not safe, and they were not given appropriately. Sylvia Plath uses many historical events in “The Bell Jar”, but she turns them into fictional events because they may not have happened the way that she tells then and she uses fictional characters. Sylvia Plath writes in “The Bell Jar” that “something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world” this quote shows part of the shock therapy that they did on mentally ill patients. In todays world mental illness is treated differently then it was in the 1950’s.
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Today mental illness is treated by drugs and therapy and in the 1950’s they used shock therapy, diabetic coma, and other harmful treatments that worked to help cure the mental illness. In “The Bell Jar” Esther is giving some of the treatments and they work, but Sylvia Plath also leaves us wondering if she was really healed from her mental illness because readers do not know what happens after “The Bell Jar” ends. As readers “The Bell Jar” is read as a biography, and we can understand why she took events in her life and turned them into fictional events.
Plath turned events in her life into fictional events so that readers could draw their own conclusions and so that she would not have to repeat every heartbreaking detail. In “The Bell Jar” Sylvia Plath talks about how Esther stays in a dorm that is only girls and they go to events with just girls. Esther was a girl that wanted to do other things, but at the same time she did not know what she wanted to do. In “The Bell Jar” there is a touch of feminism that takes place through out the story.
Historical events are hard to recreate, so many authors make them fiction because they are not fully accurate when they write about them. Sylvia Plath did this in her story “The Bell Jar”. Fictional events are about as close to historical as they can get. In “The Bell Jar” Sylvia Plath describes medical treatments used to treat mental illness and other treatments for different medical problems. In “The Bell Jar” Sylvia Plath writes “I hadn’t changed. Nothing has changed” this quote is talking about Ester who has a mental illness and feels like she has not gotten better over the course of her treatments.
Some of the treatments they used in the 1950’s did not work for some people. “The Radical Imaginary of “The Bell Jar”” talks about some of the events that Sylvia Plath use to talk about mental illnesses and their treatments. “The Radical Imaginary of “The Bell Jar”” the author says “The Bell Jar participates with an almost gleeful abandon, in the normalizing rituals of national narrativizing” this quote means that the narrating comes from an actual person. The author turns real events into fiction so that readers can not see what the person really went through in real life, but the reader can grasp what happened. Medical events needed to be turned into fiction so that the reader would not know everything that a person has been through.
Most people want to keep some things private and that is one reason most stories take real events and turn them into fiction. “The Radical Imaginary Of “The Bell Jar”” says “ Esther’s rebirth by electroconvulsive shock therapy is, however, undercut by the multiple gaps the text summons: we are left with the uncanny sense of suspicion” this quote means that readers are left to draw their own conclusions because the do not know what really happened because the writer of the story turn real events into fiction.
In “The Bell Jar” Sylvia Plath says “I strode blindly out into the hall, not to my room, because that was where they would come to get me, but to the alcove, greatly inferior to the alcove at Caplan, but an alcove, nevertheless, in a quite corner of the hall, where Joan and Loubelle and DeeDee and Mrs. Savage would not come” this quote leaves us with wanting to know what Esther is hiding from. In “” A Ritual for Being Born Twice”: Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’” Perloff says “she had to write to save herself” this means that “The Bell Jar” is written based off her life and she leaves reader wanting to know what happened after she ended “The Bell Jar”. Sylvia Plath writes about events that happened to her and she turns them into fiction so that the reader will not know that the story is really based off her.
Readers get a look into Sylvia Plath’s life with “The Bell Jar” and “” A Ritual for Being Born Twice”: Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’” readers get a better look into her life. In “” A Ritual for Being Born Twice”: Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’” Perloff says “The image is one of a hopelessly rigid, strong- willed, loveless person who has survived the battle of life only by reducing it to neat little proverbs and formulas” this means that Sylvia Plath survived her mental illness wrote about it. The quote means that she also changed some of her writing so that she would not write completely on her life. Mental illness for Sylvia Plath turns into fictional writing that was based off events that had happened in her life. In “The Bell Jar” Plath writes “then I remembered Doctor Gordon and his private shock machine” this quote means that she remembered some things that happened in her life that she did not want to repeat in her life. There are events in a person’s life that they do not want to repeat in their life.
In “The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” Budick talks about “The Bell Jar” and the feminist discourse that takes place in “The Bell Jar”. In “The Bell Jar” Plath writes about an all-female dorm and an all- female scholarship program. In “The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” Budick says “The situation of women in the modern world is clearly a major concern of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” this means that Plath was concerned about the situation that women were put in and how she felt about feminism in the 1950’s. In the 1950’s women were expected to do what men said and to live a certain way. They were also expected to save themselves for marriage and get married and Esther did not do this in “The Bell Jar”. In “The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” Budick says “ Esther’s immediate response to the killing letter of male language is the first element in the feminist form that Plath presents as a strategy of a feminist literature” this is shown in “The Bell Jar” because Esther does not care what people thinks about her because she does her own thing and is not going to get married, or anything else that is expected of her as a female.
The previous sources all talk about parts of “The Bell Jar” and they mostly focus on the mental illnesses and feminism. Both mental illness and feminism are talked about in “The Bell Jar”. In “Reviewed Work: ‘The Bell Jar’: A Novel of the Fifties. by Linda Wagner-Martin” Martin says “The Bell Jar has too often been read as simply s document in the Plath biography” this means that readers see “The Bell Jar” as a part of Sylvia Plath’s life and readers do not look farther into it. Martin sees “The Bell Jar” in a different way. Martin does not see “The Bell Jar” as a biography, but “as a skillful work of art that comments on the times in which it was composed” this means that Martin looks at it a different way then others do.
Readers should look at it as a work of art and not a biography and they would probably be able to get more out of the story then what they get when they look at it as a biography. Martin helps other readers read “The Bell Jar” in a new way with her perspective. “The Bel Jar” may be Plath’s version of a biography because she did go through the same things that Esther went through, but readers should not just assume and read “The Bell Jar” as a biography. “The Radical Imaginary of “The Bell Jar”” and “Reviewed Work: ‘The Bell Jar’: A Novel of the Fifties. by Linda Wagner-Martin” both state that readers view “The Bell Jar” as a biography but “Reviewed Work: ‘The Bell Jar’: A Novel of the Fifties. by Linda Wagner-Martin” states that we should view it as a work of art. Martin’s perspective on “The Bell Jar” can open up other readers views on the story and can help readers understand the story more and where the story is coming from.
Readers can comprehend “The Bell Jar”, but it can be hard because it was written to take place in the 1950’s where the spoke differently then we do today. We also have different treatments for mental illnesses and there are more supporters for feminism then there were in the 1950’s. Medical treatments in the 1950’s included shock therapy, diabetic coma, and therapy. In today’s world mental illnesses are normally treated by drugs, therapy, or telling a person that it is all in their head. Feminism was rarely heard of in the 1950’s because women knew what they were supposed to do and how they were supposed to act.
Feminism today is almost all you hear about because women want to be treated equal. Mental illness and Feminism were two of the main points that were talked about in “The Bell Jar” and what has been discussed throughout the paper. “The Bell Jar” turned events that were historical and some where not into fictional events. Events that happened in real life can be turned into fictional events by changing names, changing order of events, or changing how events really happen. Sylvia Plath wrote “The Bell Jar” and many say that it was based off her life and if “The Bell Jar” was based off her life many would be able to understand why she changed up the events. No one really wants to repeat history and many readers that have experienced something that has been written in a book do not want to repeat that part of their life.
Works Cited
- Baldwin, Kate A. “The Radical Imaginary of ‘The Bell Jar.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 38, no. 1, 2004, pp. 21–40. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40267609.
- Budick, E. Miller. “The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar.” College English, vol. 49, no. 8, 1987, pp. 872–885. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/378115.
- Meyering, Sheryl L. “American Literature.” American Literature, vol. 65, no. 2, 1993, pp. 381–382. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2927369.
- Perloff, Marjorie G., and Sylvia Plath. “‘A Ritual for Being Born Twice’: Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 13, no. 4, 1972, pp. 507–522. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1207445.
- Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.
