Trauma effect leading to self-destruction: A study on Sylvia Plath’s

The Bell Jar

Abstract

Destructiveness may, however, sometimes seriously disrupt and interfere with both artistic
creation and treatment. Destructive feelings may become overwhelming and lead neither to self-
creation in treatment nor to artistic creations, even by the highly skilled. Instead, these feelings
may be dealt with by uncreative attempts at control and stasis. Trauma is a mental disorder that
disrupts people’s thoughts and behaviours. Today, trauma is recognized as one of the most
common mental illnesses worldwide that need to be studied and investigated in some disciplines
and through literature in particular. Anyone may develop trauma and depression regardless of
age or social background, yet, women are most likely prone to depression. Sylvia Plath was
unable to turn creation into self-creation, the construction of new and valuable aspects
of personality and emotion. Strong drives to destruction as well as creation appear in many of her
poems. There are new images of the ominous, deadly side of homely kitchen things and of living
bodies and flowers. The Bell Jar is a highly autobiographical novel that unveils Plath’s
seemingly perfect life, underlain by grave personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had
their origin in the death of her father Otto Plath.

Keywords: Mental illnesses, Trauma, Depression, Neurotic, Psychotherapy

Since the dawn of humanity, many diseases have swept and killed a large number of people;
some of these diseases have been worked on and eliminated, while others continue to threaten
humans. Disorders are not only physical; there are also mental illnesses. Slade (2009) defines
mental illness as a condition that has no known physical cause, it is rather a functional illness,
and the subjective experience apparently lies at the centre of mental diseases. One of the most
commonly recognized mental disorders in the world today is depression. In clinical terms,

272
© 2024, IRJEdT Volume: 06 Issue: 05 | May -2024
depression is defined as a phrase used to describe any disorder in which a disruption in the
person's mood is the primary aspect or problem. Clinical depression, also known as major
depressive disorder, is one of the most prevalent and significant types of depression (Pierce,
2018). Major depressive disorder is characterized by the co-occurrence of multiple distinct
symptoms. Beginning with chronic grief, bad temper, anhedonia, drowsiness, low energy,
feelings of worthlessness and low self-esteem, extreme self-blame, complications in appetite and
weight, anxiety and tension, troubled sleep, which can be insomnia and hypersomnia, difficulties
in concentration and decision-making, physical discomfort such as headaches and back pain, and
last but not least, desperation, suicidal thoughts or behaviour. Anhedonia is likely the most
distinguishing symptom of major depression, which is the disappearance of the individuals’
capacity to appreciate things that they would typically like. Those who are depressed perceive
life from the lenses of pessimism, thinking that any daily practices or social interactions are
pointless in helping them to step aside from their dark zone.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath tells the story of a gifted young woman’s mental breakdown
beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the
early 1950s. The Bell Jar is an image that readers of twentieth-century literature recognize all too
well. The suffocating, airless enclosure of conformism making life hell for an iconic nineteen-
year-old girl in the 1950s is on par with Holden Caulfield's carousel. The Bell Jar itself as an
isolated object is simple enough to characterize – a smothering, stiff, unbreakable case, the
captive helplessly enclosed within its glass walls. However, the embedded symbolic meaning is
slightly more obscure. Many critics view the bell jar as a symbol of society's stifling constraints
and befuddling mixed messages that trap Sylvia Plath's heroine, Esther Greenwood, within its
glass dome. However, another often overlooked reality is that the physical, albeit metaphorical,
suffocation induced by the bell jar is a direct representation of Esther's mental suffocation by the
unavoidable settling of depression upon her psyche, and that this circumstance greatly alters the
way in which the entire novel can and should be perceived. The novel’s protagonist, Esther
Greenwood, share many similarities with Plath, including her inability to adapt to New York
City, her attempt to commit suicide by taking an excess dose of sleeping pills, her period of
recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy. The novel was interpreted as autofiction via
which Plath attempted to liberate herself from an oppressive past experience, but also to point to
a possibility of struggle through re-vision. Esther Greenwood may have completed a semi-

273
© 2024, IRJEdT Volume: 06 Issue: 05 | May -2024
successful rite of passage, but in reintegrating her into a society which is only ideologically
represented as desirable, Plath, perhaps inadvertently, made overt the lack of possible narratives
for acceptable female experience and the unacknowledged multitudes of untold herstories which
deserve recognition. Plath implicitly voiced a demand for female reconfiguration of the official
historical conception of the world, one that Smith pointed to and one that to this day pulses with
subversive strength.
One of the most highly known reasons for depression is stress. It has been demonstrated that the
majority of severe depressive episodes in adult samples are preceded by painful events. This
defies the popular belief that most people do not experience depression following a traumatic
occurrence. The Bell Jar’s narration unfolds from the hysteric mind of Esther Greenwood. Esther
is not only an unreliable narrator; she is psychologically damaged and suicidal. Critics of The
Bell Jar too often rely on content from Plath’s life for analysis. Literary scholar Henry Schevy
credits Plath’s death with the sensationalism and misunderstanding of her work, contending that
too many pay insufficient attention to the division between art and life (20). Readers look to
Plath’s dark fictional work and see Sylvia, rather than Esther. It is useful to consider Plath’s
perspective, but analysis that rests on the novel as an autobiographical work does a disservice to
the text. To take Plath, or Esther for that matter, at her word, is to forget that fiction is meant to
produce cultural meaning rather than personal. This poignant novel by Sylvia Plath about a
young woman’s nervous breakdown holds many life-lessons. The Bell Jar uses symbolism and
cynicism in its many layers to express the harsh reality of depression and feelings of social
inequality. The scenes of suicide are powerful and makes one look at why someone would desire
to take their life. In The Bell Jar, we undeniably encounter an amnesiac condition of its main
protagonist, who, in a condition of severe mental distress, is not capable of functioning in the
real world. Her dissolved self follows the path of ritual initiation proposed by the patriarchal
system which forces her to complete it without self-realization.
Though Plath is a poet, she has one novel, The Bell Jar, which is a semi-autobiographical novel
published in 1963, a month before her death. It recounts the story of Esther Greenwood, a young
lady dealing with severe depression who eventually ends up in an asylum after her endeavour of
committing suicide. Innes explains that Esther is a college student, a skilled writer, and a winner
of a fashion magazine contest. She is a highly-educated, semi-liberated, emerging intellectual
and a sexually confused late adolescent. Finally, she is mentally ill. Esther, like Plath, recovers

274
© 2024, IRJEdT Volume: 06 Issue: 05 | May -2024
from her suicide attempt and goes to the female psychiatrist Dr. Nolan for help. She secludes
herself from other people her old teachers, employers and even her mother. Under Dr. Nolan’s
treatment, Esther is slowly able to break the bell jar that she feels had cut her off from the outside
world. She finds herself normal, attracted to men like Irvin, she finally manages to make love
with him despite in her previous encounters. In The Bell Jar, Esther describes the relationship
between mind and body as one in which each imprisons the other. The mind traps the body
literally; it gets Esther locked in a psychiatric hospital. But at the same time, the body traps the
mind. It has little tricks from preventing her from killing herself. after following multiple
attempts at suicide, Esther finally manages to overdose of enough sleeping pills as to land herself
in the hospital. Shortly after she is sent to a Psychiatric Ward, where it is expected electroshock
treatments will cure her depression. She calls the body a cage that prevents the mind from
extinguishing itself. If only there was something wrong with my body, she tells her nurses. She
views problems of her mind as different from the problems of her body.
Depression is like a demon that possesses the patients’ minds, attacks their thoughts, and disturbs
their behaviours. By utilizing Beck’s model to study the mindset of the depressed character
Esther in the selected novel, the analysis can give a clearer picture of the character’s thoughts
and sometimes unreasonable actions, such as committing suicide after going through what may
be called a passing phase. The Bell Jar becomes a key to the complex psyche of both Esther and
Plath herself. Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of this novel is actually Sylvia Plath and the
trauma of breakdown, suicide attempts, and shock therapy described here are largely the personal
experiences of the novelist. First of all, she takes on her mother, who wants her to become either
a conventional career woman or wife and not a creative writer. The Bell Jar, about an inward
struggle to come to grips with depression and regarding an interest in life. Esther’s slow dissent
into madness is the result of her ego’s incapability that compensates between her id and
superego, finally leading to depression and neurosis. The feminist re-visioning of the trauma
experience emphasises that one of the prominent wounds of trauma is the crushing of the human
spirit…which may indeed be the hardest wound to heal (Root, 1992) and this form of trauma is
manifested in The Bell Jar.

275
© 2024, IRJEdT Volume: 06 Issue: 05 | May -2024
Cited Reference

 Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.
 Mendels, Joseph. Concepts of Depression. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1970.
 Bonds, S. Diane. The Separative Self in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Women's Studies
18.1: May 1990, 49-64.
 Gotlib, Ian H. and Constance L. Hammen. Psychological Aspects of Depression. New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992.

276
© 2024, IRJEdT Volume: 06 Issue: 05 | May -2024