Conservative Roles of Women in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The ultraconservative air of the 1950’s breeds the Betty Crocker kind of woman, satisfied with her limited role in a male-dominated society, one who simply submits to the desires and expectations of the opposite sex. The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath explored the effects of society’s traditional standards on a young woman coming of age. The main character, Esther Greenwood, a nineteen year-old college student, receives messages about a woman’s place in society throughout her life. Esther’s aspirations of becoming a writer, specifically, a poet, are obvious. Carrying out these aspirations in the 1950’s is not so clear-cut, though. Esther’s environment presses her to marry, settle down, have children, to be the happy housewife. For nineteen years she puts on a façade, pretending to be the woman everyone wants her to be, trying to please her family along with everyone else in her life, until she mentally breaks down and attempts suicide.
Her mother serves as the first of her teachers in conveying this message. For example, Mrs. Greenwood wants her daughter to learn shorthand because it will get her a living until she can marry, because it can even get her a husband. She consistently emphasizes the importance of Esther staying “pure”, so she can get the best of possible husbands. So early on Esther realizes that, for most women, marriage and family comprise the main substance of their lives.
Esther receives more lessons from her medical student boyfriend, Buddy Willard. He often spits out remarks like one day Esther will “stop rocking the boat and start rocking the cradle.” He also says that once she has children she will “feel differently,” and not wa...
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Finally Esther breaks down when she attempts to paste a forced smile on her face while modeling in front of the Ladies’ Day photographers. Dissolving into tears, the whole façade of the past nineteen years crashes down on her at once. Before leaving New York, Esther abandons all of her fashionable clothes provided by the magazine, letting each item float down over the city from the top of her hotel. This action represents the renouncing of the feminine standards, and obliteration of the self. After her distressful month in New York, Esther returns to Massachusetts, where she attempts suicide in the basement of her house by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills and climbing into a crawl space. The years of gender inequality messages, false identities, and artificial contentment weigh her down, as she finally takes matters into her own hands.
...es these primitive standards, she becomes melancholy because she does not attune into the gender roles of women, which particularly focus on marriage, maternity, and domesticity. Like other nineteen year old women, Esther has many goals and ambitions in her life. Nevertheless, Esther is disparaged by society’s blunt roles created for women. Although she experiences a tremendous psychological journey, she is able to liberate herself from society’s suffocating constraints. Esther is an excellent inspiration for women who are also currently battling with society’s degrading stereotypes. She is a persistent woman who perseveres to accomplish more than being a stay at home mother. Thus, Esther is a voice for women who are trying to abolish the airless conformism that is prevalent in 1950’s society.
The character of Esther is widely criticized for her perfection as a character, both receiving positive acclaims and negative feedback. Esther’s reserved, quiet character illustrates the role of women during the Victorian period and what little impact on society women played. Critics of Bleak House generally praise the narration and Dickens’s use of Esther’s character, which gives direction to the novel.
...g either one.” (Plath 120). Society has come a long way from there, though a margin still contain these views, more and more people are forming feminist ideals. The only if is that if Esther were here today our world would suit her much more comfortably.
In the novel, Esther Greenwood, the main character, is a young woman, from a small town, who wins a writing competition, and is sent to New York for a month to work for a magazine. Esther struggles throughout the story to discover who she truly is. She is very pessimistic about life and has many insecurities about how people perceive her. Esther is never genuinely happy about anything that goes on through the course of the novel. When she first arrives at her hotel in New York, the first thing she thinks people will assume about her is, “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a
Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell Jar”, tells a story of a young woman’s descent into mental illness. Esther Greenwood, a 19 year old girl, struggles to find meaning within her life as she sees a distorted version of the world. In Plath’s novel, different elements and themes of symbolism are used to explain the mental downfall of the book’s main character and narrator such as cutting her off from others, forcing her to delve further into her own mind, and casting an air of negativity around her. Plath uses images of rotting fig trees and veils of mist to convey the desperation she feels when confronted with issues of her future. Esther Greenwood feels that she is trapped under a bell jar, which distorts her view of the world around her.
Literature is the superlative resource when one is attempting to comprehend or fathom how society has transformed over the centuries. Many written works—whether fictional or nonfictional—express the views of gender roles and societies’ expectations. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is an exemplary novel that explores these issues. Ester Greenwood was portrayed the superficial and oppressive values of the mid-twentieth century American society through her experiences of gender inequalities and social conformities. Plath’s own life was correspondingly mirrored in this novel; which in turn left the reader aware of the issues in her time period. At the conclusion of The Bell Jar, the audience realizes that she was pushed to completely conform to society.
...ey have surrounded her with. She longs for a deeper connection with her past, but she realizes this is not to be, at least not as far as her family is concerned. She must adhere to the role of the loyal daughter as it has been established through many generations, and strive not to shame the family as her aunt did many years ago.
Previously, the narrator has intimated, “She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own.” Her thoughts and emotions engulf her, but she does not “struggle” with them. They “belonged to her and were her own.” She does not have to share them with anyone; conversely, she must share her life and her money with her husband and children and with the many social organizations and functions her role demands.
On the eve of her freedom from the asylum, Esther laments, “I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead- after all, I had been ‘analyzed.’ Instead, all I could see were question marks” (243). The novel is left open-ended, with a slightly optimistic tone but no details to help the reader fully understand the final step of her healing process. Esther desired to be free of social conventions and double standards, but consistently imposed them upon herself and on the people around her. Her evolution in understanding never reaches a satisfying conclusion, and the reader is also left with nothing but question marks.
It is obvious that Esther is at a crossroads and feels torn by life. She best describes her feelings with the following passage: "I saw myself 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 a...
Esther reads a poem about the life of a fig tree, which includes details of the love and prosperous life of the tree, and the heavenly life of the characters in the poem. Once she is finished reading, her thoughts trail off onto the comparison of the fig tree to her own life. She describes the aspect of having a husband and kids as one fig, and her favorite editor on another and so on and so forth. However, later on in the story Esther describes these figs, “... they began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet,” (Plath 77). Once she came to the realization that none of these aspects would ever be a part of her life, because of her depression, she vastly loses more and more hope, from the little hope that she did have before. Not only was the loss of hope about love and her passion for writing, but her hope for her own life lasting any longer.
... scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face to tell her what she had done was wrong” (226).The reason Esther is in this situation is because of her mom. Esther depression has reached its climax. The result of an unhappy relationship according to Freud has impacted Esther.
However, Esther begins to think negatively of Buddy when she finds out that he has slept with another woman and is no longer a virgin. Esther claims that “he had been pretending… to be so innocent,” and that Buddy’s illness was “a punishment for living… [a] double life.” Esther is understandable angry because she as a female is expected to be pure and innocent whereas men can sleep with many other women without consequences. According to Kirsty Grocott of The Telegraph, Plath creates a double standard between men and women “by littering the book with brutal, ignorant or ineffectual males, men that enjoy freedoms that women can only dream of.”# Plath may have included this to demonstrate how damaging this double standard can have on young women.
The fact that Esther couldn't really accept her father's death contributed to career problems: she had no idea of what to do with her life, she `thought that if my father hadn't died he would have taught me....`
Dr. Nolan is the only role model character in the novel in which Esther shows love to. Dr. Nolan supports Esther in a way that she wishes her mother could support her. She encourages Esther’s unusual thinking and doesn’t tell her it’s wrong to think the way she does. She puts great trust into Dr. Nolan because she promised her that nothing would go wrong during her shock treatment, and Esther accepted her proposal.