The Bell Jar opens at the onset of a serious identity crisis for Esther Greenwood. Her dislocation to the unfamiliar world of New York City and fashion magazines—the result of one more “prize” she’s won for her excellent academic performance—seems to kick in some deep uncertainties about who she is, and from the start of the narrative we see her “trying on” a range of identities. Is she more Betsy or Doreen? Will she try to be Jay Cee, a powerful literary editor who lunches with famous novelists and poets, or a housewife who knows the practical skill of shorthand, like her mother? She “experiments” with a Doreen-style persona in her evening on the town as “Elly Higginbottom from Chicago” and then recoils from the carnal and creepily violent grotesquerie she witnesses back at Lenny’s memorable bachelor pad. But she can no longer pull off the Betsy persona, either; she tries to go along with the Ladies’ Day events planned for the interns, but her heart isn’t in it (and it literally makes her ill at one point). “[S]omething was wrong with me that summer,” she states early in the narrative; “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullaballoo” (3).
The “something wrong” clearly has to do with identity, with the pressure to construct and maintain a passable public self. (She only feels truly “herself,” notably, when she’s in the thoroughly private confines of a hot bath.) When Jay Cee interrogates her, the “terrible things” she says might not seem all that terrible, or even unfamiliar, to the average Uni junior or senior. “Doesn’t your work interest you?” (31); “What do you have in mind after you graduate?” (32). Esther is deeply troubled by these questions—or, rather, she’s deeply troubled by her inability to produce the usual acceptable answers. She describes herself as being “unmasked” by Jay Cee, even though we can see that her mentor is only expressing reasonable concern, doing the kind of thing mentors do. The cheerful, overachieving persona that has defined Esther so far in her life no longer feels genuine to her, and under Jay Cee’s direct questioning, her façade crumbles quickly: “I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort or another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race” (29). She tries to access her “old, bright salesmanship” (33) and produce some answers that will get Jay Cee off her case, but the very recognition that giving such answers equals “salesmanship” is at the root of her problem—she doesn’t quite believe in her own product.
It’s not that Esther lacks motivation, or has no idea what she’d like to be when she grows up. She has a passion for poetry, and she’s always imagined herself as an academic poet/professor or a literary editor. Jay Cee freaks her out by reminding her what a competitive world she’s thinking of entering and making her believe that her award-spangled perfect-GPA transcript will not be sufficient (“Hundreds of girls flood into New York every June thinking they’ll be editors. You need to offer something more than the run-of-the-mill person” [33]). I suspect that this idea of daily life as a perpetual effort to build a resumé will resonate with Uni students, and Jay Cee’s admonitions—you’ve always impressed people, and you’ve been amply rewarded and praised and told that you’re special and gifted, but soon you’ll be in the “real world” where these achievements won’t amount to much—might be depressing for you to read. If anything, the process has only gotten more cutthroat since Plath’s day. The conversation Esther is having with Jay Cee, the summer before her senior year of college, is one that high school juniors regularly have, with counselors and parents and other concerned elders, nowadays. You’re being asked to “define yourself” earlier than ever; education is seen less as an opportunity to explore and discover your interests, to mold your identity, than as a rigorous program of training in preparation for a specific career. You’re expected to know what program you want to enlist in at the point of entry; indecision puts you behind in the “race.” In Plath’s day, the moment of truth comes near the end of the college career; these days, it tends to come near the end of high school. To answer Jay Cee’s loaded question—“What do you have in mind after you graduate?”—with “I don’t really know” increasingly might feel like a failure on the student’s part. Of course you need to know what you want to be when you grow up; childhood and adolescence is merely a preparatory stage toward this ultimate act of self-definition. Coming of age as a declared major.
Do you relate at all to Esther’s sense of failure—of some deep inadequacy as a person—for her uncertainty about her future? It’s not that she isn’t interested in anything, although it is grimly funny to watch her try to persuade Jay Cee with her flailing efforts to articulate this interest (“I felt like yelling the words, as if that might make them more convincing” [31]). She feels strongly about the inherent value of poetry, as she comes up with a good rejoinder to Buddy’s dismissive remarks about poetry compared to medicine months after the fact (“I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep” [56-57]). But there’s also a strong social pressure on a young woman in the 1950s to marry, and she gets the idea—from Buddy, from Mrs. Willard, from the example of her own parents—that poetry and housewifery are incompatible. That freedom and housewifery are incompatible, for that matter.
Esther seizes on the image of the fig tree from the short story Jay Cee asks her to read to illustrate her indecision: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch . . . a wonderful future beckoned. 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, and another fig was . . . the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila,” and so on (77). “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, 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” (77). “What’s wrong with her” isn’t indifference, apathy, or a lack of intelligence or creativity. It’s an inability to choose. And the choice here has to do with more than a mere occupation. It’s a matter of identity—who she will be in the world. She’s convinced she is supposed to be able to choose one, and to be unable to choose is to fail to come of age properly.
Something in Esther recoils from the prospects of being a housewife as her primary identity, largely because she’s been given the idea that marriage means something different for a woman than for a man. In Mrs. Willard’s words, she’ll be the “place the arrow shoots off from”—the domestic stability in the background that makes possible her husband’s worldly accomplishments: “That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. 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, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket” (83). Buddy Willard finds her indecision amusing, and he doesn’t seem to take it all that seriously. When he asks if she wants to live in the country or the city, she says both, and he laughs and tells her she has “the perfect setup of the true neurotic” (93); the question itself was drawn from a diagnostic test he’d learned about in psychology class. Her putative boyfriend gets a kick out of diagnosing her, here and elsewhere.
As the novel moves into the second half, it becomes clear that Esther is in fact grappling with some serious—and life-threatening—psychological issues. But at this earlier point, she fully and rather confidently embraces the label of “neurotic”: “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell” (94). Do you see her inability—or hesitation—to commit to one “fig” at the expense of all other possibilities as a weakness, even an illness? Or does Esther’s indecision seem at all familiar here?
I suppose I envy the student who, as a senior in high school, knows (or thinks they know) precisely what they want to do after graduate school—but I also sometimes wonder how much of this certainty is genuine. As long as the plan accords with what the parents and other important elders want, I can see how this apparent sureness of purpose would be rewarded. It’s awkward to ask one’s parents to shell out a small fortune in tuition simply to allow a young person to explore a fig tree’s worth of interests in search of identity and purpose. There’s a powerful incentive to tell them what they want to hear, to frame college tuition as a sound investment in a clearly foreseen future track. As Esther and Jay Cee illustrate, it feels better to be able to answer the Big Question with poise and confidence. But personally, I relate to the student who openly admits they have no idea what to do after graduation, but who’s still excited about the road ahead—who approaches the prospect of college (or even the prospect of not going to college, right away or ever) as an opportunity for genuine learning, exploration, and self-discovery with no particular “career path” in mind. Maybe this narrowness of purpose isn’t required. Maybe we are more than our chosen careers. Maybe we can stumble into a career—or multiple careers—without any “master plan” in effect. When students tell me they know exactly what they want to do with their lives at age sixteen, I just hope they’re not telling me what they think I want to hear. I hope they really mean it, and that it works out for them. And I hope that they’re open to the idea that their plans might change.
While Esther’s experience becomes harder and harder for many readers to relate to in the second half of the novel, it’s important to recognize that her identity crisis—which eventually becomes as extreme a crisis as we can imagine, where she literally loses all sense of self and will to live—arises from some stuff that’s pretty easy to relate to. It’s too simple to say that her breakdown results only from people asking her what she’s going to be when she grows up, but it’s crucial that we recognize how these pressures to define herself, combined with the increasingly limited options realistically available to her as a woman in 1950s America, provide a reasonable basis for her loss of reason.
For a high-school student struggling with these same questions of self-definition, this novel can be pretty scary.
