Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 and grew up on the Massachusetts coast. Her father died when she
was eight. A stellar student, Plath won scholarships to attend Smith and Cambridge University,
where she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. They had a rocky marriage and two children.
Plath won great acclaim for her first book of poetry, The Colossus, in 1959, and published the
pseudonymous The Bell Jar in 1963 to make money. Plath had suffered from mental illness
throughout her life and she fell into deep depression as her marriage dissolved, eventually
committing suicide in 1963. Several books of her poetry published after her death display Plath’s
genius and won her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Historical Context of The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is set in 1950s America, a time when American society was predominantly shaped
by conservative values and patriarchic structures. It was a society that placed particular restraints
on women as it expected them to embody traditional ideals of purity and chastity and to aspire to
the life of a suburban mother and homemaker rather than pursuing their own careers. Many
women, like Esther Greenwood, felt crushed by the expectations 1950s American society placed
on them. Their resentment of these pressures was one of the motivating forces that inspired the
feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Summary
In the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood, a brilliant college student, wins a month to work as
guest editor with eleven other girls at a New York magazine. Esther lives with the other girls at
the Amazon, a woman’s hotel, and attends a steady stream of events and parties hosted by the
magazine. Though Esther knows she should be enjoying herself, she feels only numb and
detached from the old ambitious self that her boss, editor Jay Cee, tries to motivate. Esther
vacillates between wanting to be wholesome, like her friend Betsy, and wanting to break all
rules, like her friend Doreen. She worries about the rigid expectations of virginity, maternity, and
wifeliness that society (and her mother) holds for young women and feels paralyzed by her
contradictory desires for her own future. She goes on a string of bad dates, the best of which
feels anticlimactic when the Constantin, an interpreter, makes no romantic advances and the
worst of which ends with the misogynistic Marco trying to rape her.
Throughout her time in New York, Esther flashes back to her troubled relationship with Buddy
Willard, a handsome know-it-all medical student who Esther once admired and is now disgusted
by, having realized Buddy is a hypocrite for projecting a virginal public image even after he’s
had a sexual affair. Buddy is currently suffering from TB, but Esther plans to break up with him
as soon as he gets better. On her last visit to the sanatorium, she rejected Buddy’s marriage
proposal and broke her leg skiing.
Back at home near Boston, Esther is rejected from a writing course she had planned to spend the
rest of the summer taking. Stuck at home in the suburbs, Esther’s mental illness, which was
nascent in New York, amplifies into suicidal depression. She stops bathing or changing her
clothes. She tries and fails to write a novel and loses the ability to sleep, read, write, or eat. She
lies about her identity to every stranger she meets. She sees Dr. Gordon, an unsympathetic
psychiatrist who prescribes and then incorrectly administers electric shock treatment. Esther tries
to kill herself in a variety of unsuccessful ways (by slitting her wrists, hanging herself, and
drowning) before hiding in a crawlspace under her house and taking fifty sleeping pills.
Esther is found and rescued and wakes up in a hospital. Facing her own horrific reflection in
a mirror, she does not recognize herself. Esther is soon moved to the psychiatric ward of the city
hospital where she is paranoid, uncooperative, and still suicidal. Eventually the wealthy
novelist Philomena Guinea, who has sponsored Esther’s college scholarship, decides to sponsor
her move to a private asylum, where Esther is treated by the compassionate Dr. Nolan and enjoys
comforts and freedoms that the city hospital lacked. The doctors arrange to cut off Esther’s
steady stream of judgmental visitors (including her mother) who have been exhausting Esther
with their advice and inaccurate theories about depression. Joan Gilling, a college friend of
Esther’s, winds up at the asylum too after emulating Esther’s suicide attempt. Through a
combination of analysis, insulin injections, and correctly administered electric shock therapy,
Esther improves and begins to contemplate reentering her old life.
As her condition improves, Esther earns more freedom to come and go from the asylum and she
uses these privileges to buy a diaphragm and to lose her virginity in a one-night stand with a
math professor, Irwin. With the encouragement of Dr. Nolan, Esther has learned to embrace her
independence as a woman and shake off the stifling social expectations she used to feel
constrained by. Unfortunately, though Esther expects her loss of virginity to be a revelation, it
results in painful hemorrhaging. Later, she discovers Joan having an affair with another
patient, DeeDee, and thinks about lesbianism, which she has no attraction to. Soon afterwards,
Joan hangs herself. Buddy visits Esther at the asylum and Esther gets closure on their
relationship. Esther feels stable and prepares to return to college, though she knows the bell jar of
mental illness could descend on her again at any time. The novel ends as Esther enters a last
interview with the doctors before returning to college.
Mind and Body
At its essence, The Bell Jar is an exploration of the divide between mind and body. This
exploration unfolds most visibly in the development of Esther’s mental illness, which she
experiences as an estrangement of her mind from her body. As her illness amplifies, Esther loses
control over her body, becoming unable to sleep, read, eat, or write in her own handwriting. She
frequently catches her body making sounds or engaging in actions that she was not aware of
having decided to do, as when she can’t control her facial expression for the picture in Jay Cee’s
office, or when she discovers herself sobbing at her father’s grave. Over time, Esther’s body
becomes her antagonist. At first, she simply refuses to wash it, but eventually she tries to be rid
of it altogether by plotting her own suicide. She keeps track of the body’s “tricks” to stay alive
and is determined to “ambush” her body “with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in
its stupid cage.” After her suicide attempt, Esther has trouble even recognizing her body,
thinking her mirror reflection is a picture of someone else and watching her usually skinny body
grow fat with insulin injections.
However, although Esther’s illness widens the gap between body and mind, that gap in fact
exists throughout the novel. It is not caused by mental illness—mental illness simply expands it.
Mind and body are always divided, as evidenced by Esther’s experiences at novel’s start and her
memories of herself before her illness. In the first chapter of The Bell Jar, before Esther becomes
depressed, she has a dissociative experience of not recognizing her reflection in the Amazon’s
mirrored elevator door. Flashing back to her day on a ski slope near Buddy’s sanatorium, Esther
remembers being exhilarated by the experience of hurtling downhill towards the sun, as if she
could transcend her flesh and become “thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”
Plath’s prose style underscores the fundamental division between mind and body through its
prodigious use of metaphor and estranging descriptions. The figurative language she uses is
incredibly rich and original and feels simultaneously apt and bizarre. As it compares human body
parts and human consciousness to everything from goose eggs to nooses, the novel’s language
subtly complicates and questions stable understandings of ‘body’ and ‘mind.’ Esther’s
perspective also frequently perceives parts of the human body as inanimate objects until she
realizes they are feeling flesh, as when she comes round after fainting from food poisoning and
sees a vague heap of cornflowers before realizing the heap is her own arm. Likewise, Esther
often perceives lifeless objects as sentient beings, as when, lying beside Constantin, she sees his
wristwatch as a green eye on the bed.
Purity and Impurity
Esther remains preoccupied by questions of purity and impurity throughout the novel, framing
them in different terms at different points in her development. She thinks about purity of body as
well as purity of mind. Indeed, Esther often speaks of purity as a kind of spiritual transcendence
that can be accessed through transcendence of the body. At novel’s start, she admires the
clearness of vodka and imagines that drinking it into her body will purify her spirit. Later that
night, she soaks her body in a hot bath to feel spiritually cleansed. Esther also flashes back to the
feeling that she might be rendered “saintly” by racing down a ski slope towards the sun.
Yet even though Esther considers purity in multiple arenas of experience, she considers it most
frequently in terms of sex. There, ‘pure’ is synonymous with ‘virgin.’ Esther’s obsession with
the sexual purity of those around her and her angst about her own virginity dominates Esther’s
thoughts on female sexuality. “When I was nineteen,” Esther reflects, “pureness was the great
issue…I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who
hadn’t…I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary
line.” Contemplating losing her virginity to Constantin, Esther thinks she would wake up the
next day and look in the mirror to “see a doll-size Constantin sitting in my eye and smiling out at
me.” Through these thoughts, Esther not only uses purity and impurity to organize the world
around her, but also conceives of sex as something that leaves a visible mark—an impurity—in
the form of an image on a person’s eye.
Even as Esther is attracted to the transcendent, spiritual purity mentioned above, she is resentful
of and frustrated by her sexual purity. She feels stifled by the double standard of social
expectation, constantly reiterated by women like her mother and Mrs. Willard, which instructs
young women to remain virgins until marriage while allowing young men to engage in sexual
experimentation without seriously tarnishing their characters. After discovering that Buddy has
had an affair, Esther grows furious at his hypocrisy (pretending to be ‘pure’ while in fact being
‘impure’), which echoes the hypocritical standards of the social expectations surrounding her.
Esther becomes determined to abandon her own virginity and embrace sexual freedom, which
she eventually manages by buying a diaphragm and having sex with Irwin.
Women and Social Expectations
The Bell Jar offers an in-depth meditation on womanhood and presents a complex, frequently
disturbing portrait of what it meant to be female in 1950s America. Esther reflects often on the
differences between men and women as well as on the different social roles they are expected to
perform. Most of her reflections circulate around sex and career. Esther’s interactions with other
female characters in the novel further complicate these reflections by presenting different stances
towards the idea of womanhood.
Esther is upset by society’s insistence that young women stay virgins until after marriage while
allowing boys sexual freedom. Female characters like Esther’s mother, Mrs. Willard,
and Betsy embrace these social expectations and try to push them on Esther by sending her pro-
chastity pamphlets and dispensing sexist maxims. Female characters like Doreen, Dr. Nolan,
and Joan Gilling reject these expectations and introduce Esther to alternative ways of thinking.
Doreen models an unmarried sexual relationship with Lenny Shepherd while Dr. Nolan assures
Esther there is nothing wrong with pre-marital sex and encourages her to get fitted for a
diaphragm. Through Joan’s affair with DeeDee, Esther glimpses a lesbian relationship that bucks
society’s heterosexual norms.
In addition to enforcing a double standard for women and men’s sexual lives, Esther’s society
also imposes different expectations for male and female careers. In general, women are expected
to be homemakers, wives, and mothers and to devote their energies to caring for men and
children rather than pursuing their own dreams. Esther’s mother, Mrs. Willard, Betsy, Dodo
Conway, and many others demonstrate this conventional path and intimate that Esther should
follow it too. Her mother’s insistence that she learn shorthand implies her faith in a low-level,
traditionally female secretarial career. At the other end of the spectrum, Jay Cee, Philomena
Guinea, Dr. Nolan, and Dr. Quinn demonstrate an alternative path pursuing careers outside the
domestic sphere, and encourage Esther to do so as well.
Though some of the men in the novel are kind or at least harmless, many of the novel’s male
characters reinforce the gross gender inequality in Esther’s society and treat Esther and the
women around them with pronounced sexism. Buddy automatically assumes Esther is inferior-
minded because she is a woman and also assumes that she will want to marry, have children, and
discard all her personal ambition to become a housewife. Marco (and, to a lesser extent, Irwin)
objectify Esther for their own sexual gratification. Esther refers to Marco as “a woman-hater.”
Indeed, he proclaims all women are alike and attempts to rape Esther.
Bell Jar
The bell jar symbolizes mental illness and gives the novel its title. It is Esther’s own metaphor
for describing what she feels like while suffering her nervous breakdown: no matter what she is
doing or where she is, she sits alienated “under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour
air.” Though she can see through the transparent glass to the world beyond, the glass jar distorts
the image of that world, leaving the suffering viewer with a warped understanding of reality.
After undergoing electric shock therapy and analysis at the mental asylum, Esther feels the bell
jar lifted. However, even as she welcomes health, she fears a future re-descent of the bell jar and
wonders whether other bell jars also imprison the seemingly sane people around her.
Mirrors
Mirrors symbolize identity and Esther’s reflection in and relation to mirrors throughout the novel
follows the loss of her healthy self to mental illness. Esther’s inability to recognize herself in the
elevator reflection at the Amazon, the compact mirror in Jay Cee’s office, and the mirror a nurse
hands her at the city hospital illustrates Esther’s slipping grasp on her own identity, which is
profoundly distorted by her suicidal depression. At the peak of her depression, Esther relies on
this slippage to make suicide easier, thinking that she if she watched the reflection of herself
slitting her wrists in a mirror (rather than looking at her actual wrists), she would be able to go
through with the task. At the same time, the description of a mirror as “a silver hole” suggests
that, to some extent, all images of identity are false, more a projection by the viewer than a
revelation of essential truth.

Critical analysis
The story of a poet who tries to end her life written by a poet who did, Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell
Jar” (Harper & Row) was first published under a pseudonym in England in 1963, one month
before she committed suicide. We have had to wait almost a decade for its publication in the
United States, but it was reissued in England in 1966 under its author’s real name. A
biographical note in the present edition makes it plain that the events in the novel closely parallel
Sylvia Plath’s twentieth year. For reasons for which we are not wholly to blame, our approach to
the novel is impure; “The Bell Jar” is fiction that cannot escape being read in part as
autobiography. It begins in New York with an ominous lightness, grows darker as it moves to
Massachusetts, then slips slowly into madness. Esther Greenwood, one of a dozen girls in and on
the town for a month as guest editors of a teen-age fashion magazine, is the product of a German
immigrant family and a New England suburb. With “fifteen years of straight A’s” behind her, a
depressing attachment to a dreary but handsome medical student, Buddy Willard, still
unresolved, and a yearning to be a poet, she is the kind of girl who doesn’t know what drink to
order or how much to tip a taxi driver but is doing her thesis on the “twin images” in “Finnegans
Wake,” a book she has never managed to finish. Her imagination is at war with the small-town
tenets of New England and the big-time sham of New York. She finds it impossible to be one of
the army of college girls whose education is a forced stop on the short march to marriage. The
crises of identity, sexuality, and survival are grim, and often funny. Wit, irony, and intelligence
as well as an inexplicable, withdrawn sadness separate Esther from her companions. Being an
involuntary truth-seeker, she uses irony as a weapon of judgment, and she is its chief victim.
Unable to experience or mime emotions, she feels defective as a person. The gap between her
and the world widens: “I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty.” . . . “The
silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” . . . “That morning
I had tried to hang myself.”

Camouflage and illness go together in “The Bell Jar;” moreover, illness is often used to lift or
tear down a façade. Doreen, a golden girl of certainty admired by Esther, begins the process by
getting drunk. The glimpse of her lying with her head in a pool of her own vomit in a hotel
hallway is repellent but crucial. Her illness is followed by a mass ptomaine poisoning at a
“fashion” lunch. Buddy gets tuberculosis and goes off to a sanatorium. Esther, visiting him,
breaks her leg skiing. When she had her first sexual experience, with a young math professor she
has picked up, she hemorrhages. Taken in by a lesbian friend, she winds up in a hospital. Later,
she learns that the friend has hanged herself. A plain recital of the events in “The Bell Jar” would
be ludicrous if they were not balanced by genuine desperation at one side of the scale and a sure
sense of black comedy at the other. Sickness and disclosure are the keys to “The Bell Jar.” On
her last night in New York, Esther climbs to the roof of her hotel and throws her city wardrobe
over the parapet, piece by piece. By the end of the novel, she has tried to get rid of her very life,
which is given back to her by another process of divestment—psychiatry. Pain and gore are
endemic to “The Bell Jar,” and they are described objectively, self-mockingly, almost
humorously to begin with. Taken in by the tone (the first third of “The Bell Jar” might be a
mordant, sick-joke version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), the reader is being lured into the lion’s
den—that sterile cement room in the basement of a mental hospital where the electric-shock-
therapy machine waits for its frightened clients.

The casualness with which physical suffering is treated suggests that Esther is cut off from the
instinct for sympathy right from the beginning—for herself as well as for others. Though she is
enormously aware of the impingements of sensation, her sensations remain impingements. She
lives close to the nerve, but the nerve has become detached from the general network. A thin
layer of glass separates her from everyone, and the novel’s title, itself made of glass, is evolved
from her notion of disconnection: the head of each mentally ill person is enclosed in a bell jar,
choking on his own foul air.

Torn between conflicting roles—the sweetheart-Hausfrau-mother and “the life of the poet,”
neither very real to her—Esther finds life itself inimical. Afraid of distorting the person she is yet
to become, she becomes the ultimate distortion—nothing. As she descends into the pit of
depression, the world is a series of wrong reverberations: her mother’s face is a perpetual
accusation, the wheeling of a baby carriage underneath her window a grinding irritation. She
becomes obsessed by the idea of suicide, and one of the great achievements of “The Bell Jar” is
that it makes real the subtle distinctions between a distorted viewpoint and the distortions
inherent in what it sees. Convention may contribute to Esther’s insanity, but she never loses her
awareness of the irrationality of convention. Moved to Belsize, a part of the mental hospital
reserved for patients about to go back to the world, she makes the connection explicit:

“What was there about us, in Belsize, so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping
and studying in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a
sort.”

Terms like “mad” and “sane” grow increasingly inadequate as the action develops. Esther is
“psychotic” by definition, but the definition is merely a descriptive tag: by the time we learn how
she got to be “psychotic” the word has ceased to be relevant. (As a work of fiction, “The Bell
Jar” seems to complement the clinical theories of the Scottish analyst R. D. Laing.) Because it is
written from the distraught observer’s point of view rather than from the viewpoint of someone
observing her, there is continuity to her madness; it is not one state suddenly supplanting another
but the most gradual of processes.

Suicide, a grimly compulsive game of fear and guilt, as addictive as alcohol or drugs, is
experimental at first—a little blood here, a bit of choking there, just to see what it will be like. It
quickly grows into an overwhelming desire for annihilation. By the time Esther climbs into the
crawl space of a cellar and swallows a bottle of sleeping pills—by the time we are faced by the
real thing—the event, instead of seeming grotesque, seems like a natural consequence. When she
is about to leave the hospital, after a long series of treatments, her psychiatrist tells her to
consider her breakdown “a bad dream.” Esther, “patched, retreaded, and approved for the road,”
thinks, “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad
dream.”

That baby is only one of many in “The Bell Jar.” They smile up from the pages of magazines,
they sit like little freaks pickled in glass jars on display in the pediatric ward of Buddy’s hospital.
A “sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly” seems to wait for Esther at the end of the ski run
when she has her accident. And in the course of the novel she witnesses a birth. In place of her
never-to-be-finished thesis on the “twin images” in “Finnegans Wake,” one might be written on
the number and kinds of babies that crop up in “The Bell Jar.” In a gynecologist’s office,
watching a mother fondling her baby, Esther wonders why she is so separated from this easy
happiness, this carrying out of the prescribed biological and social roles. She does not want a
baby; she is a baby herself. But she is also a potential writer. She wants to fulfill herself, not to
be fulfilled. To her, babies are The Trap, and sex is the bait. But she is too intelligent not to
realize that babies don’t represent life, they are life, though not necessarily the kind Esther wants
to live; that is, if she wants to live at all. She is caught between the monstrous fetuses on display
in Buddy’s ward and the monstrous slavery of the seemingly permanent pregnancy of her
neighbor Dodo Conway, who constantly wheels a baby carriage under Esther’s window, like a
demented figure in a Greek chorus. Babies lure Esther toward suicide by luring her toward a life
she cannot literally bear. There seem to be only two solutions, and both involve the invisible: to
pledge faith to the unborn or fealty to the dead. Life, so painfully visible and present, defeats her,
and she takes it, finally, into her own hands. With the exception of the psychiatrist’s disinterested
affection for her, love is either missing or unrecognized in “The Bell Jar.” Its overwhelming
emotion is disgust—disgust that has not yet become contempt and is therefore more damaging.

Between the original and the second publications of “The Bell Jar” in England, Sylvia Plath’s
second, and posthumous, volume of poems, “Ariel,” was printed. Some of the poems had
appeared in magazines, but no one was prepared for their cumulative effect. Murderous
experiences of the mind and the body, stripped of all protection, they were total exposures, and
chilling. They made clear almost instantly that someone who had been taken for a gifted writer
might well be one of genius, whose work—intense, luxurious, barbarous, and worldly—was
unlike anything ever seen before. Although the extraordinary quality of the poems made her
death the more lamentable, that death gave her work certain immediate values it might not
otherwise have had. Death cannot change a single word written down on paper, but in this case
who the poet was and what had been lost became apparent almost at the same time: as if the
poems had been given and the poet taken away in one breath. An instantaneous immortality
followed. Sylvia Plath also became an extra-literary figure to many people, a heroine of
contradictions—someone who had faced horror and made something of it as well as someone
who had been destroyed by it. I don’t think morbid fascination accounts for her special position.
The energy and violence of the late poems were acted out. What their author threatened she
performed, and her work gained an extra status of truth. The connection between art and life, so
often merely rhetorical, became too visible. The tragic irony is that in a world of public-relations
liars Sylvia Plath seemed a truth-dealer in life by the very act of taking it.

“The Bell Jar” lacks the coruscating magnificence of the late poems. Something girlish in its
manner betrays the hand of the amateur novelist. Its material, after all, is what has been
transcended. It is a frightening book, and if it ends on too optimistic a note as both fiction and
postdated fact, its real terror lies elsewhere. Though we share every shade of feeling that leads to
Esther’s attempts at suicide, there is not the slightest insight in “The Bell Jar” into suicide itself.
That may be why it bears the stamp of authority. Reading it, we are up against the raw
experience of nightmare, not the analysis or understanding of it.

Bell Jar- A Feminist Reading

The Bell Jar is a feminist novel not because it was written by a feminist, but because it deals with
feminist issues of power, the sexual double standard, the quest for identity and search for self-
hood, and the demands of nurturing.

Losing Control
The Bell Jar is a novel about a young woman, Esther Greenwood, who is in a downward spiral
that ends in an attempted suicide and her challenge to get well again. Esther is increasingly
fascinated by death. When she feels as if she is losing control over her life, or losing power, she
begins to take control of her own death.

She had always been a high achiever in school, ranking at the top of her class and winning many
awards. All of that high achievement lead to her obtaining an internship with Ladies’ Day
magazine, the focus of the first part of the novel. It was while working at the magazine in New
York City that she began to lose control. Then, when she returned home, she found out that she
had not been accepted to the summer writing program that she had been looking forward to. She
really began to lose her own power and self-confidence. She could no longer sleep, read, or
write. She needed this power that she had always had, but she had lost all control.

Esther began to plan her own demise at this point; it seemed to be the one thing she had power
over. It seems to me that Esther is much like a person with an eating disorder; people who suffer
from eating disorders lose control over their lives and compensate by controlling their food
intake.

Sexual Double Standard

Esther’s other great fascination in the novel seems to be birth. She refers to the babies in the jars
at Buddy Willard’s medical school several times. She also describes Mrs. Tomolillo’s birthing
experience in detail. In this detailed description, she refers to the birthing room as a “torture
chamber” (Plath 53). Esther is feeling the demand placed on women to be natural mothers or
nurturers. She feels as if she will have to give up herself if she decides to marry and have a
family. She expresses this when she says,

I also remember Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I
would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems anymore. So I began to think maybe it
was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and
afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state (Plath 69).

This demand for being a natural nurturer ties in with the issues of the sexual double standard and
power struggle. Esther often expresses her feelings that having children is a man’s way of
keeping power over his woman.

Esther often thinks about the sexual double standards that she faces in society. In particular, she
has constant thoughts about her sexual status. She is a virgin for most of the novel, and this
constantly weighs on her mind:

When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into
Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even
men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people
who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and
another (Plath 66).

She was brought up to believe that a woman must still be a virgin when she got married and
assumed the same was true for men. Then, she discovered that Buddy Willard was not a virgin.
In fact, he had slept with a waitress a couple of times a week for a whole summer. Esther soon
discovered that it may be “difficult to find a red-blooded intelligent man who was still pure by
the time he was twenty-one” (66). She “couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a
single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not” (66). She
didn’t like this sexual double standard, so she was determined to find a man and lose her
virginity. If it was alright for a man to do, then it was alright for her to do.

Searching for Self

The novel deals especially well with the feminist issue of a woman searching for her identity or
sense of self. One of the reasons that Esther loses control over her life is that she thought she
knew how her life would pan out. She really began to think about her future, the vast possibilities
open to her, and the decisions she would soon have to make for her life when she was interning
in New York. She was overwhelmed. She wanted to be everything at once while realizing that
she couldn’t be everything at once.

Esther had always been such a high achiever; failure had never really occurred to her. Suddenly
she was off her track. She made this realization when she was talking to her boss, Jay Cee. When
Jay Cee asked Esther what she wanted to do in the future, Esther froze and thought,

What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a
grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I’d be a professor and write books of poems, or
write books poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had all these plans on the top of my
tongue.
‘I don’t know,’ I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock hearing myself say that, because the
minute I said it, I knew it was true (27).
Esther suddenly felt the pressure of having to know who she was going to be, and she wasn’t
prepared for the journey toward that discovery. Looking at women such as Jay Cee and Doreen,
she thought that she should automatically know. This lost feeling made her feel powerless.

Plath's Feminist Agenda and the Fig Tree

Plath’s feminist agenda in the novel is summed up in the fig tree analogy. Esther imagines this
fig tree where each fig represents a choice in her life, such as a husband, a career as a poet, or an
array of exotic lovers. Faced with all of these choices, she cannot choose. She says,

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future
beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and
children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a
brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and
another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig
was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with
queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic
lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more
figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig
tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of
the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but
choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to
decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they
plopped to the ground at my feet.” (63)

Sylvia Plath shows the reader the dilemma that a woman faces in her life through the story of
Esther Greenwood. A woman faces the issue of power. She can take control of her own life, as
Jay Cee seems to have done, but face possibly living a lonely existence. She can give that power
to a man, and lose her identity to motherhood and being a wife. She can choose a career or
motherhood, but in Esther’s opinion, not both. Through the analogy of the fig tree, Plath is
saying that a woman cannot have it all, as much as she may want to. Unlike men, who can have a
family, a career, or ‘it all,’ a woman has to choose one thing or nothing. For this reason, I believe
that The Bell Jar is a feminist novel.