by Jamie Elizabeth

Created on: April 12, 2009   Last Updated: April 13, 2009

Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar is in many ways a commentary on how women were treated in the 1950s. The struggles of the main character, Esther Greenwood, throughout the novel demonstrate the challenges faced by intellectual women in the 1950s and the choices that they were required to make.

The constant choices, struggles, and hypocrisies in life that Esther faces are Plath's fictional rendering of her own life, and the challenges that she faced as a woman writer and one who also suffered from severe depression. The literary critic Irving Howe observed that "It is quite difficult to read Sylvia Plath's poetry and fiction and not think of her suicide. So often she herself is the subject of her creations."

In writing from herself, Plath created a character and world that are completely realistic in their misery and suffering, and because of this, effectively portray the obstacles of being female and also longing to use one's own talents during the 1950s in the United States. However, Esther, unlike Plath, was able to make the choices that would result in her survival. She chooses to write, she chooses to leave behind the restraints her childhood puts on her ability to express herself both sexually and culturally. She rejects Buddy Willard and his negative effects on her life, and is able to create an alter ego, through which she is much freer with her flirtation.

After returning from her life in New York City, during which time she was conflicted, but still relatively able to live freely, influenced by friends such as Doreen, Esther begins a downward spiral into a deep depression. She is unable to write, and her mother cannot understand what is wrong nor what the best way to help her is. Eventually, Esther ends up in a mental institution after a suicide attempt.

The turning point in the novel is when Esther, while in the mental institution, throws down her mother's gift of roses. By doing this, Esther embraces freedom from her upbringing and from the demands placed on females in her mother's generation. This dramatic embrace of freedom indicates that she wishes to use her intellect and not waste "fifteen years of straight A's" by ceding to what is expected of her based on her upbringing and the fact that she is female. As a result, Esther is able to avoid the bell jar's fatal effects and demonstrates how women could indeed make the choice to express themselves both sexually and intellectually.

Plath, tragically, was unable to avoid the descent of the bell jar, as it is described in the novel, but with her brilliant writings leaves much to be learned about feminism and the struggles faced by female writers.

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