Dissent In The Bell Jar

Dissent in The Bell Jar: Rejecting the Restricted Role of Women in the America of the 1950s

It is not easy for a woman to have a place in society, but to have one in the America of the 1950s was even more difficult than nowadays. The figure of woman in the 1950s was linked to the domestic sphere. She was supposed to “not want careers, higher education, political rights – the independenceand the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for” (Friedan 13). Despite that, Esther Greenwood, the main character of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, is an example of how women can dissent from their restricted role within social conventions. This paper is going to explore how Esther is forced by her surroundings to be subjected to these conventional rules; how she reacts againstthem and how the consequences of her actions lead her to self-destruction.

To begin with, one must consider the fact that the women that are around Esther are the typically male-dominated women. Esther’s environment presses her to marry, settle down, and have children; to be the happy housewife. However, Esther’s aspirations are completely different. She wants to become a writer. This isan ambition that is not well seen either by her mother, Buddy Willard, who is Esther’s on and off boyfriend and he has all the qualities that a woman from a conventional society would like for her, or Buddy Willard’s mother, who thinks that “what a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is the place the arrow shoots off from” (Plath 67). That is to say that the ideal figure of womenthat they have is the one that only lives for and by men; submitting themselves to the needs and pleasures of men. What is more, the girls whom she lives with in New York are not far from these submitted-male-dominated women. These girls are supposed to be well dressed and well mannered as they are “shown” in parties full of men in need of wives. About this fact, from a feminist point of view, onecan infer that they are princesses turned into puppets by a male-dominated society. But it is worth mentioning that Jay Cee, Esther’s roommate in New York, could be considered the only one that transgresses the ideal of “feminine mystique[i]” by dating men, going to parties and not preserving the image of the idealized good girl that should attend to these parties. The rest of female characters tryto impose on Esther the accomplishment of the rules of a male-dominated society. Esther, however, does not want to follow the path she is expected to, she does not want to lose her agency in the world; “the trouble was [she] hated the idea of serving men in any way” (Plath 72). If she married she would lose her capability to become a writer and to build her life as she wants. She points that outclearly when she states: “So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.” (Plath 81)

From the moment she decides not to marry Buddy Willard and to start living her own life as she wishes, Esther enters in an emotional spinning wheel that willlead her to what society considers complete madness. When her application for a scholarship to do a course about literature is refused, she feels as if her world was torn. She is not able to read, to write; she does not even want to shower. Then her attempts to commit suicide begin. She tries to cut her veins, to hang herself at home and to drown in the beach; but she does not seem to be braveenough to face death. Finally, she takes another step and she is found in a basement crawl space having taken a large amount of sleeping pills.

But even before that, there are clear hints of the fact that she is uncertain about her life because the shadow of conventional rules is haunting her. “’I don’t really know,’ I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that,...