It is1953,
the summer before Esther’s senior year as an English honors student at an Ivy
League all-girls’ college. She, as a
skilled poet, artful writer, and top student, earns a month-long summer
internship for a young ladies’ magazine in New York City. It seems that Esther has everything going for
her: a prestigious scholarship to a top college, a medical school beau, and a
glittering internship. In NYC, however,
questions arise within Esther that she cannot answer, daunting questions about
her future, her life after the internship, after the summer, after graduation. They begin to eat away at her spirit and
morale. She could marry someone, perhaps
Buddy Willard the med student, and clean his house, have his babies, and make
his dinners. Or she could pursue any
number of professional interests such as author, professor, editor, or
explorer. She is frustrated that she must
choose only one and give up the other option. Her inability to choose one direction and
forget the rest is a source of crippling anxiety. The uncertainty of her own future terrifies
this over-achieving young woman. When
Esther returns home from New York to await the start of the fall semester, her
anxiety turns to apathy before spiraling into a deep and destructive depression.
The reason
this highly personal, highly autobiographical novel is viewed as more than a lost
college girl’s diary entries written almost 20 years later is obvious. Along with touching on themes of purity and
sexuality, the feminist classic is a clear portrait of the tough choices young
women faced not just in the 50s but for the past 60 or 70 years. Any girl at a crossroads in her life would be
struck by Plath’s ability to pinpoint the reader’s own personal fears about innocence,
sexuality, marriage, education, and careers through Esther’s story. The feminist struggle between family and career
are debated from the perspective of someone with the beginning of this struggle
on her horizon.
One passage
that exposes the stress college and even high school girls felt 60 years ago
and still feel today gripped me with its imagery and its relativity to my own
life. Esther says she sees her life
branching out like a fig tree, and each fig is a different future she could
pluck and bite into.
 |
| For the record, I did not mark in this library book! :) The passage had already been underlined. What kind of library worker would I be if I wrote in borrowed books? |
The fig
tree appears earlier in the novel when Esther opens an anthology of short
stories to find one about a Jewish man and a Catholic nun meeting under a fig
tree. The fig tree in the Bible is said
to symbol prosperity, security, and peace, which are things Esther longs for, but
she doesn't know which fig seems best suited to bring her happy security.
Sylvia
Plath’s novel and writing style is blunt and haunting. I
read it over the summer, which turned out to be long, dull, and lonely for me,
so I was a bit frightened when the beginning of the novel truly resonated with
me. Esther starts at sad and confused
and slides along the depression continuum. Further into the book when I found I no longer shared her same thoughts or agreed with her plans to hurt herself, relief spread through me. I’m not
sure if I would recommend this book as a remedy for depressive moods, but it did show me that I wasn’t alone in my helpless frustration and indecision. While I appreciated the novel's strong themes
of purity and awakened sexuality and could talk about them for ages and pages,
the idea that stays with me months later is the fig tree. The Bell Jar and its fig tree imagery gave me strange
comfort and even while it left me haunted and intrigued by Plath and her own tumultuous
life.
Have you read The Bell Jar? Did you like it? How did it affect you?
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