Sylvia Plath’s struggles with mental illness and gender in her debut novel, The Bell Jar, parallel Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, specifically in how Plath’s semi-autobiographical experiences—her fears and anxieties towards her role as a woman in American culture during the nineteen forties and fifties–characterize Friedan’s “problem that has no name.” Esther Greenwood, the book’s protagonist, is thought of as being Plath’s self-insert character, as are all the other characters whose names were changed to distort the reality of Plath’s life into fiction. The Bell Jar is a popular book that is read at the high school and college levels; it is beloved and lauded as being a powerful feminist work of resistance against the feminine mystique and patriarchy. It is certainly true that the novel is a form of activism, speaking to power and defying social constructions, but it is also littered with some negative, more pernicious social attitudes that are important to consider within the novel’s broader impact as a piece of feminist literature. Esther imagines motherhood and married life as a complicated amalgamation of societal pressures that she wishes to stay away from, as well as a secure and romanticized lifestyle that draws her in. This dark pull towards domestic life is indicative of Esther’s acknowledgement of the inevitability of sliding into the role that society cut out for her. The book’s central conflict is an ideological one: how these roles will serve her happiness in the future and whether she chooses to reject them. She deliberates about that future, sometimes imagining herself as being a mother with tons of loving children in a stable home, and other times, revolting against this idealization of domestic life, and thinking only of her career ambitions outside of the grasp of a man. Regardless of which future she entertains, Esther is at a total impasse. Through the symbology of the fig tree and the bell jar itself, she is trapped with an illusion of autonomy to choose who she wants to become. Although she ultimately rejects elements of the feminine mystique in her critical view of marriage and childrearing, she cannot completely reconcile aspects of cultural attitudes towards gender that she internalizes.
The ending of the novel is left unresolved—despite Esther’s goals of being a creative, career woman who can juggle her own life and interests whilst living up to society’s standards of motherhood, beauty and femininity, the reader is left uncertain as to whether this is possible for her. Toggling these two seemingly extreme polar opposites—work and family—leads to her breakdown and hospitalization. Friedan, however, argues that the key to dispelling the feminine mystique is for women to pursue their own interests as autonomous beings outside of the home, finding purpose in work and passions that redefine their self-image as separate from their husbands and children. Esther’s isolation mirrors that of the housewives who live underneath their own bell jars, not privy to the struggle that many women face. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American woman. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone” (1). She suffers these external pressures on her own, able to voice her dissatisfaction towards gender roles, but unable to redefine herself outside of them, constantly daunted by the looming threat of domesticity on the horizon.
In her interactions with Buddy Willard, a boy who she dates briefly, Esther is resistant to the reality of consigning her fate to housewifery. She describes Buddy as being clean cut, well-educated, and an overall stand-up young man in the objective sense that he is “marriage material.” She also sees his mother as embracing her role as a housewife, living a boring life that she does not envision for herself with Buddy as an extension of his family and what the entrapment of that dynamic represents to her. The Willards believe that “‘what a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security’ and ‘what a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from’” (72). Esther is exhausted by these metaphors, and she rejects Buddy’s marriage proposal, telling him that she never wants to get married. Buddy flippantly disregards her rejection, not taking her seriously because no matter how much Esther fights it, they both know, somewhere deep down, that she will eventually acquiesce to these social pressures. However, at the end of the novel, Buddy seems uncertain as to how Esther can reclaim her femininity, innocence and marriageability after her breakdown and hospitalization. “‘I wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther. Now you’ve been […] here’ And of course I didn’t know who would marry me now that I’d been where I had been. I didn’t know at all” (241). Buddy leaves her, and the novel, with the cold reality that her emotional health and well-being is not a priority–her desirability is.
Esther’s resistance to the feminine mystique lies within her recognition that “the last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself” (83). That infinite security, to Esther, represents being under a man’s thumb for the rest of her life–being an object which inspires and caters itself entirely to another person’s existence. She conflates being controlled and repressed by men as being a general tenant of marriage as an institution. And yet, her view of marriage as constraining notwithstanding, she fantasizes a simpler and more fulfilling life in forgetting all of her reservations and embracing herself as a wife and mother:
I was thinking that if I’d had the sense to go on living in the old town I might just have met this prison guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids by now. It would be nice, living by the sea with piles of little kids and pigs and chickens, wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee. (150)
This paradox is reflected in Plath’s own letters to her mother; according to Jeannine Dobbs in her essay, “‘Viciousness in the Kitchen’: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry”:
Plath’s letters to her mother and her novel both make it explicitly clear that Plath was confused and frustrated by the necessity of defining herself as a woman. In 1949, at age seventeen, she wrote: “I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day-spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free.” (12)
Plath oscillated between defiance to patriarchy and comfort in domestic life, but her complexity in regards to the feminine mystique runs deeper, permeating her views of motherhood as being connected to female experience. “I needed experience. How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?” (121). Does she hold male writers to that same standard of personal experience? As Dobbs further writes:
By the time she reached the University at Cambridge, however, her attitude had changed. She began to see motherhood as a chance for “extending my experience of life,” and to fear that if she did not marry she would become one of “the weird old women,” “the bluestocking grotesques,” she saw as alternatives. (12)
It is clear that despite Esther’s own disillusionment with the feminine mystique, she falls prey to its romanticism and perceives that avoiding marriage entirely is not a viable option that she can choose without discarding her femininity. In her more critical view of motherhood, Esther thinks, “If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad.” Looking at a mother and child in the doctor’s waiting room, Esther observes their behavior, noting that “the baby’s mother smiled and smiled, holding that baby as if it were the first wonder of the world” (222). Her cynicism in seeing this baby as flawed and the mother as naive to those flaws points toward her disbelief in women’s happiness deriving from motherhood at all. Yet, at the end of the chapter, Esther reminds herself that she needs to find a husband yet again: “I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man” (223).
Esther describes giving birth as a gruesome and unflattering experience: “I had always imagined myself hitching up to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over–dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal” and then, half-way through the paragraph, glorifying motherhood, “smiling and radiant, with hair down to my waist and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was” (67). Although she ends with a somewhat aloof tone, Esther imagines childbirth as being gross and vulnerable, but also “radiant,” and alluding in her use of the word “first” that she envisions herself with multiple children. Her hair down to her waist in glorious femininity, radiating some kind of beautiful energy that can only be found in natural childbirth in contrast to the pale-white, painful and vulnerable aspects of motherhood that she also describes.
Motherhood, during this time, was viewed as being a woman’s primary objective. A woman was to pour her entire being into her children, losing herself in their happiness, dissolving her identity into ‘mother’ and ‘wife.’ Although Esther acknowledges that heterosexual marriage and motherhood can be stifling for her creativity and self-fulfillment, she does not understand homosexual relationships—“What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?” (219) — or women who are not conventionally attractive under patriarchal beauty standards, who she’ll describe as being a “stumpy, old Classical scholar with a cropped Dutch cut” (220). Esther is extremely judgmental towards women who are not a part of the feminine mystique, whether by choice or because of their sexuality, of being mothers or being conventionally attractive to men.
Luke Ferretter writes in Sylvia Plath’s Fiction: A Critical Study that “Esther has accepted the ideological message of the value of one’s appearance […] That a woman’s appearance is an integral part of who she is” (139). With the exception of her breakdown, where she didn’t shower or wash her hair for days, Esther describes the glitz and glamor of New York as well as the fashionable people who walk its streets with rose-tinted glasses. “She describes her fascination with the fashion industry early in the novel, as she reflects on Doreen’s ‘fashion-conscious’ college, where the students match every outfit with every accessory with a devotion the Esther says ‘attracted me like a magnet’” (139). Upon first glance during her time in the city, she values “clothes, hair, make-up, accessories, grooming, manners, [and] style” (139) above all else. During her hospitalization, she is less focused her own appearance and outfits, but her descriptions of the people around her still resonate at the surface-level. When receiving a shock treatment, Esther is keen to note that one of the nurses has acne scars on her face that she can still see. Her flagrant materialism and shallowness, especially in that of the fashion and beauty industry, rears its head in the pages of The Bell Jar more so than Friedan’s examples of kitchen appliances: “Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives” (243). Friedan discusses American consumerism and corporatism’s hold on housewives; specifically, how brands and products are marketed to housewives as a demographic as a means to fulfill their lives through buying and consuming those products. And while Friedan’s chapter entails this consumerism as within the home, Plath’s consumerism leaks into the rest of the world at large, showing the book’s ideology of its middle to upper class existence within American society–its protagonist as yearning for little gifts and prizes catered to women like Friedan’s lists of “detergents and electric mixers, and red stoves with rounded corners, and synthetic furs, and waxes and hair coloring, and patterns for home sewing and home carpentry, and lotions for detergent hands, and bleaches to keep the towels pure white” (243).
Esther’s association with tradition and popular standards of beauty, heterosexuality, and society’s standards for femininity are internalized perceptions of her world—aspects of the mystique that she believes and perpetuates. As Friedan writes, “they were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets, physicists or presidents. They learned feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights” (2). And despite Plath separating herself from that ideology in terms of wanting an education, she still internalizes what Friedan refers to as “the glory in their own femininity” in her lush romanticization of “conventional” beauty and conservative sentiments of heteronormativity.
Esther’s ingrained cultural attitudes are also apparent when she meets a boy named Marco who she refers to as a “woman-hater.” Marco is ignorant, rude, misogynistic and angry; he tries to sexually assault Esther until she fights him off, and he even calls her a slut, saying “Sluts, all sluts […] Yes or no, it is all the same” (109). Esther notes “I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Women-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one” (107). She admits that these women-haters are not held accountable for their misogyny or behavior, making them seem almost godlike, absolved of their responsibilities on earth. And, much like how these gods cannot be caught, Marco’s violence goes unreported. But what Esther fails to consider is that patriarchy, and misogyny, is all around her, all of the time–not only within the faces of women-haters specifically, but baked within every single aspect of American culture. Hating women or viewing women as inferior was as invisible as the air she breathed–a spectrum from microaggressions to Marco’s outright venom. When she says, “I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat,” (85) how is that not the mentality of a “woman-hater”? How can we compartmentalize society’s normalization of a man who is manipulative, uncaring, and disrespectful as not being sexist?
Esther also reflects the ideological messaging in her view of race, bringing images of people of color into the novel in order to “other” herself by describing herself in the mirror as “a big smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically” when her makeup was running, as she was “appalled to see how wrinkled and used up I looked” (18). She also describes her skin tone in the first chapter as being “yellow as a Chinaman,” (8) a racist moniker used to dehumanize Chinese immigrants in the 19th century. Later on in the novel, she brings the first actual person of color into her narrative in the form of a black man who works as an orderly in her hospital, who she perceives as being insolent to her. She kicks him in the knee because he served her two kinds of beans with dinner, saying “That’s what you get,” with italicization in the original book for added emphasis of some kind of vitriol. Her last mention of him: “Soon after they had locked the door, I could see the Negro’s face, a molasses-colored moon, risen at a window grating, but I pretended not to notice” truly encapsulates Plath’s lack of empathy in regards to someone who looks unlike herself. Not only is the description of the man racist, especially by modern standards in the vernacular that she chooses, but her introduction of this character only serves to reflect a hegemonic, white-centered worldview back to the reader. Ferretter is right when he describes Plath’s racial insensitivity: “[The black orderly] is subordinate to a white woman, who is giving him orders. Esther despises the black worker for his subordinate position, saying that he was ‘grinning’ and ‘chuckling’ in response to orders in a ‘silly’ manner” (97). He continues by discussing how Plath’s description of the black worker marginalizes him, giving Esther power in a situation where she feels helpless and vulnerable: “As one of the marginalized group of mentally ill people, Esther feels better than almost no one. She can and does, however, feel better than a black man, and she does so by means of verbal and physical violence” (97).
In the same way that Esther internalizes aspects of the feminine mystique, Plath’s trite depictions and descriptions of people of color are harmful or dehumanizing. At the very least, she is unaware of these stereotypes, which is hard to believe, given that she was writing during the Civil Rights Movement and her other political commentary on the Rosenbergs indicates that she kept up with current events. At the very worse, she ignores these implications as a means of allowing Esther to harness power on the fringes of society over others who she chooses not to empathize with in the book. Betty Friedan’s work and white second wave feminism has also been derided for her exclusion of people of color and working class women; cultural critic bell hooks noted, “She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women,” which is evident in the discourse of Plath’s feminism as being exclusionary or ignorant of how she perpetuates her whiteness. Plath’s represents people of color as being a mass without identity, erasing their individuality with their race standing in for an adjective that encapsulates their entire being.
As a modern reader, it is impossible to disentangle The Bell Jar’s positive feminist messages from its lack of intersectionality. Esther’s recovery is inspiring to readers, especially when paired with the power of Friedan’s novel, which points out the validity of her feelings in a society where discussing mental health and illness was taboo. Esther’s emotional turmoil of being trapped, isolated and impossibly resigned to a fate that she could not choose are entirely relevant and understandable; Friedan’s articulation of the problem that has no name enriches our understanding of The Bell Jar and how many women felt gaslighted, or in other words, manipulated by the surrounding cultural narrative to question their own sanity, but it still does not encapsulate how all women felt. To dispel a myth of the second wave feminist movement: women of color did not create a separate movement in response to being excluded by white women; rather, their activism was in a different sphere at the same time, but less reported and remembered. As Jesse Daniels writes for Racism Review: “The trouble with white feminism, including some scholarship about the second wave, is that it places white women at the center, as the universal example of ‘all women’.” Where The Bell Jar misses the mark is in Plath’s degradation of marginalized groups in order to find and harness that inner power. These conflicts and contradictions of self-awareness in society within The Bell Jar exemplify Esther’s character (and Plath herself) as being a participant of her culture, deconstructing certain hierarchies of gender and home life, while leaving others (sexuality, American consumerism and race) unquestioned.
The Bell Jar showcases a protagonist who is aware of this dark, mythological vision of womanhood as being fulfilled only by having a house, a husband, and children, but a protagonist who is immobilized by fear of choosing her own path outside of that mystique—under the bell jar or left under the fig tree, starving. “From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor” (77). Esther’s breakdown is a result of her perceived failure to devote time to being both a writer and a mother; as she says, she cannot have all of these options at once, which causes her to do nothing at all. She wants everything, but her ambition adds up to nothing. There’s an emptiness inside of her that she cannot truly explain: “All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true” (31). As Jeannine Dobbs notes:
In her own life, Plath tried for the compromise. There were times, her letters and the remembrances of her family and friends reveal, that domestic life alone seemed to fulfill her. She was a perfectionist at housekeeping as she had always been at her college work and at writing (13).
Plath writes Esther as being stuck between dichotomies, seeing motherhood as terrifyingly monstrous, but also comforting. She wants a happy, simple life with a husband, but hates marriage and its effect on the women around her.
At times, too, she felt that ‘children seem[ed] an impetus to [her serious] writing.’ But a resentment against them, against their demands on her time, their drain on her creativity, is evident too. Pleasure, resentment, guilt. Ambivalence. Plath’s work suggests that the attempt to resolve these feelings failed. (13)
Esther’s push towards her own ambitions and desires pull her one way, and the inevitability of inhabiting various gender roles pulls her another way. Because she feels these two opposing beliefs so strongly, she has the ability to view them as multi-faceted, flawed, and complicated concepts–therein lies the book’s cultural significance as a piece of feminist literature. And yet, Esther’s problem, besides her indecisiveness and her internalization of cultural attitudes that dehumanize herself and others, is her inability to view herself as an individual identity outside of the rest of the world around her. As Friedan puts it: “The identity crisis of American women began a century ago, as more and more of the work important to the world, more and more of the work that used their human abilities and through which they were able to find their self-realization, was taken from them” (403). Esther, by virtue of living in a world that defines women by their interactions with others, cannot separate herself as a person with her own needs and desires from the needs and desires of everyone else, whether interpersonally or societally.
According to Friedan, Esther’s mistake is thinking that she needs to choose at all, sitting under the fig tree instead of letting her heart and mind guide her into living the kind of life that she wants to live.
[Women] must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image. This does not mean, of course, that she must divorce her husband, abandon her children, give up her home. She does not have to choose between marriage and career; that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique. (412)
Although The Bell Jar and The Feminine Mystique alike ignore the plights of women who do not fit this white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied role within society, both books show how it is possible to reject aspects of our culture, whilst unwittingly perpetuating others. Regardless, these books target an issue in American culture that we can all stand to criticize and reflect upon–how we deconstruct the normal and unquestionable roles that we are told to play, and how to break free of these assumptions in order to lead fulfilling and happier lives. In turn, while the contradictions of The Bell Jar and its protagonist showcase an uncertainty that pulls this text away from being wholly subversive, we can still appreciate the book as harboring these questions and complexities, even if its author does not have the answer to them. There is hope for Esther; in her conversation with Buddy Willard, Esther identifies, even for a brief moment, Friedan’s “mistaken choice”: “‘Remember how you asked me where I like to live best, the country or the city?’ ‘And you said…’ ‘And I said I wanted to live in the country and the city both?’” (93). The country and the city, a marriage and a career, an arrow that shoots in all directions–Esther wants to have it all. She wants to laugh at the concept of the choice itself, and perhaps, in this example particularly, she does: “‘Well, you were right. I am neurotic. I could never settle down in either the country or the city’ […] ‘If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell” (94). Underneath all of these contradictions, inner conflict, and internalized cultural attitudes is a glimmer of that feminist resistance–a hopeful view of society where we can all live in between the country and the city, shooting off in all directions without an oppressive cultural mystique to trap us underneath the bell jar.
Works Cited
Baldwin, Kate A. “The Radical Imaginary of ‘The Bell Jar.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 38, no. 1, 2004, pp. 21–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40267609.
Budick, E. Miller. “The Feminist Discourse of Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar.” College English, vol. 49, no. 8, 1987, pp. 872–885. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/378115.
Buell, Frederick. “Sylvia Plath’s Traditionalism.” Boundary 2, vol. 5, no. 1, 1976, pp. 195–212. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/302025.
Daniels, Jesse. “The Second Wave: Trouble with White Feminism.” Racism Review. March 2014. http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2014/03/04/second-wave-white-feminism/.
Dobbs, Jeannine. “‘Viciousness in the Kitchen’: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 1977, pp. 11–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3194361.
Ferretter, Luke. Sylvia Plath’s Fiction: A Critical Study, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.libdatabase.newpaltz.edu/ lib/newpaltz-ebooks/detail.action?docID=581390.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique, 1963, W. W. Norton and Company, 2013.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar, 1971, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.
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