by Casey Montgomery

Created on: November 20, 2007

In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, there are feminist undertones throughout. While the book itself was published in 1963, at the beginning stages of the feminist movement, it is set in 1953. The novel deals with many topics that are still of interest today. The double standard between premarital sex for men and women is one such issue. Esther, a character based on Plath herself, found that her boyfriend had slept with a waitress during the summer. This event ultimately makes her question the contrasting principles on the view of sex for an unwed woman versus that of an unwed man. She sees this idea as hypocritical and faulty. In an attempt to equalize herself and protest this crucial double standard she set out to lose her virginity. Near the end of the book she does so to a Professor at Harvard University during one of her stays at the hospital. The idea that she refused to bow to this double standard and actively set out to undermine it was a widespread reaction to many things during the initial feminist movement in the 1960s.

More so than Esther's fight against double standards was her desire to do more with her life than what was expected that fully encompassed the ideals of the feminist movement. Her mother continually told Esther to take up shorthand and become a secretary. She had no desire to settle into a "normal" woman's job and confine herself to the moral code of her time. She set out to subvert herself and establish herself as a writer. She was full of malcontent at the system and those who let it thrive, keeping women from realizing their potential. In the beginning of the novel Esther is working for a magazine, thinking that it will let her come into her own, but the magazine continues to pressure her into social events, reminding her that she is only a woman. In college she her friends refuse to accept her until she proves herself by getting a boyfriend. Esther eventually manages to surround herself with women who are trying to find their own place outside the system. Plath also talks openly about lesbianism, having one of Esther's friends, Joan, be gay. Also, in the latter half of the book, she remembers a moment in college where two women were kicked out because they were found in a bed together.

In Sylvia Plath's only novel, she hits hard on the glass ceiling that plagued women during this time. Esther was not content settling for a half-life and doing what was expected of her. She wanted more. The story she tells is one of unhappiness and the mental breakdown that is caused by not being allowed to fully discover her would-be greatness.

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