870 Plath, sylvia
begin to fall apart, however, her sense of identity
also fractures, and she begins to sink into depres-
sion and mental illness, culminating in her suicide
attempt. The novel follows her treatment and recov-
ery at several psychiatric hospitals, while narrating
though a series of flashbacks the events that lead
to her breakdown. By dramatizing Esther’s internal
conflicts and resolutions, The Bell Jar highlights a
variety of themes, including illness, ambition, and
education.
Through the work of Plath’s novel, the image of
the bell jar has become synonymous with the isola-
tion and debilitating pressure of social conformity,
particularly that faced by women. Perhaps even
more than Plath’s acclaimed poems, The Bell Jar, like
J. D. Salinger’s The CatCher in the rye, to which
it is often compared, offers a compelling account of
adolescent coming of age.
Eric Leuschner
ambItIon in The Bell Jar
One of the first thoughts that Esther Greenwood
has in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is that “I was
supposed to be having the time of my life. I was
supposed to be the envy of thousands of other col-
lege girls just like me all over America.” Having
won a series of scholarships and finally a contest
that provided her a month-long job at a successful
New York magazine, Esther finds herself poised to
achieve several goals. Her experience, however, frus-
trates her ambition, and she finds herself wasting
the chance, “letting it run through my fingers like so
much water.” Throughout the novel, Esther’s ambi-
tions are thwarted, primarily through the perceived
constraints placed on her by a variety of social forces.
Esther establishes herself as ambitious from the
start of the novel, but her experiences in New York
indicate the vagueness of her actual understanding.
While discussing her future with her editor-mentor
Jay Cee, she mentally reviews her future plans: grad-
uate from school, study abroad, become a professor
or an editor, and write books of poems. Her response
to Jay Cee, however, is a noncommittal “I don’t really
know,” revealing, as she herself recognizes, the truth.
Before the month is over, Esther is again asked of
her future plans, this time by a photographer. When
she responds as before, her editor has a rejoinder:
“ ‘She wants,’ said Jay Cee wittily, ‘to be everything.’ ”
Esther replies simply that she wants to be a poet, but
she breaks into tears moments later, suggesting the
fragility of her ideas.
Much of Esther’s sense of identity revolves
around her ambition to be a poet. She imagines
anonymously submitting her own manuscript to
Jay Cee, who would recognize it as remarkable,
and places great stock in being accepted to a sum-
mer writing course staffed by a well-known author.
When she is not accepted into the class, she first
channels her ambition into writing a novel while liv-
ing at home for the summer, but she quickly discov-
ers that she lacks life experience, which inspires her
to envision various alternatives: “[P]lan after plan
started leaping through my head, like a family of
scatty rabbits.” While she has a great deal of ambi-
tion, she can never pin down one particular plan.
Esther’s frustration stems in part from the expec-
tations placed on her as a woman, and she often
measures herself against those whom she knows. In
New York, both Jay Cee and a Russian interpreter
challenge her sense of identity and ambition. She
tallies her inadequacies, from not being able to
speak a foreign language to not being able to cook.
At home, she contrasts herself with Dodo Conway,
who had graduated from college, married an archi-
tect, lived in a large house, and raised six children.
In addition, her mother persists in advising Esther
to learn shorthand, the ideal job qualification for
a woman in the 1950s, her prescription echoing
throughout the novel.
In the recurrent image of the fig tree, the theme
of ambition resonates. Esther first reads about the
fig tree in a short story while living in New York.
While initially linked to her possible future with
Buddy Willard, the image later offers the expanse of
a multitude of opportunities, including famous poet,
“brilliant professor,” wife and mother, “amazing edi-
tor,” “Olympic lady crew champion,” international
traveler, and lover of exotic men. Even with these
choices, she imagines countless other figs that she
cannot discern. Faced with limitless opportunity,
she finds herself “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.” In Esther’s