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Quest of Identity: The Internal Conflict that Arises when One's Dream…

- - - - "if two of those things are “creative genius” and “mother,” still seems like a recipe for unhappiness, if not certain death" (Gould)
      - "Feminist critics in particular tended to see in Plath’s suicide a repudiation of the expectations placed upon women in the early 1960s" ("Sylvia Plath")
      - "Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius" ("Sylvia Plath")
      - "However, the end of her marriage in 1962 left Plath with two young children to care for and, after an intense burst of creativity that produced the poems in Ariel, she committed suicide by inhaling gas from a kitchen oven" ("Sylvia Plath")
    - - "I think particularly the poetess Ann Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsmanlike poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting" ("A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr") #
      - Sylvia discussing poetry - "I don't think I could live without it. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one" ("A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr")
- - - - Writing Literature and Having a family
        
        In order to write literature, Esther feels that she needs experiences in life. However, these experiences include having a family and getting married.
        
        Sylvia also echoes this need for experience.
        
        "Well, I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel" ("A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr")
        
        "How could I write about a life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die" (109-110)
        
        Society tells Esther that it is impossible to write literature and have a family. #
        
        "I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more" (85)
        
        "When I told the poet I might well get married and have a pack of children someday, she stared at me in horror. 'But what about you career?' she had cried (220)
      - Esther's Passion for Literature
        
        Esther clearly has a passion and love for literature.
        
        "I said I wanted to be a poet" (101)
        
        "People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people could remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep " (60)
        
        However, despite this passion, she is still unsure if she wants to become a poet.
        
        "'What do you have in mind after you graduate?' What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. 'I don't really know' I hard myself say. I felt a deep shock hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true" (32)
    - - The Expectations of Women in the 1950s: Historical Source
        
        "Housekeeping and raising a family were considered ideal female roles during the 1950s, although that standard was less rigid than in previous decades" ("Women's Role in the 1950s")
        
        "Two out of five women with husbands and school-age children worked outside the home" ("Women's Role in the 1950s")
        
        "37 percent of female college students were leaving school before they graduated, most for marriage. Even those who stayed in school were not thought to be preparing for a career, the way their male counterparts were" ("Women's Role in the 1950s")
      - External influences that impact Esther and her beliefs.
        
        Esther's Female Role Models
        
        Esther's Mother - Due to the loss of her husband, she is forced to work and stay at home and raise the kids. She holds true to most of society's norms, working only to provide for her children. Furthermore, she encourages Esther to fit into society's mold for women, getting her to learn shorthand in order to become a secretary. Esther's mom does not want her career to influence her ability to become a mother and wife.
        
        Mrs. Willard - Mrs. Willard is a strong supporter of traditional gender roles for women. She stays at home and takes care of her family. Mrs. Willard believes that women's role should be focused in the home, taking care of the family. Furthermore, Mrs. Willard has strong beliefs about chastity.
        
        Doctor Nolan: Dr. Nolan breaks traditional gender roles, working as a psychologist. Dr. Nolan is trusted and appreciated by Esther. Furthermore, Dr. Nolan encourages Esther to break out of traditional gender roles, helping her to get a diaphragm in order to prevent pregnancy and allowing Esther to become less afraid about losing her virginity.
        
        The negative messages Esther hears from others about women's role in society - Esther is never really exposed to another character telling her to pursue a career.
        
        Marriage
        
        ""Im never going o get married." "your crazy." Buddy brightened. '"You'll change your mind"" (93)
        
        "Theres lots of blind people in the world. You'll marry a nice blind man someday" (171)
        
        "What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place that the arrow shoots off from" (72)
        
        Having Children
        
        "I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more" (85)
        
        "You oughtn't to see this,...You'll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn't to let women watch. It'll be the end of the human race" (65).
      - Esther explicitly expresses her lack of interest in marriage and children throughout the entire novel. #
        
        Having Children - The possibility of having children looms over Esther the entire novel, like a cloud of doom, causing her to abstain from pre-marital sex.
        
        "I climbed on the examination table, thinking ' I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear" (223)
        
        "How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn't I dream of devoting my self to baby after fat pulling baby like Dodo Conaway?" (222)
        
        "What i hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb, I had told doctor Nolan. "A man does not have a worry in the world, while Ive got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line"" (221)
        
        Marriage - Esther does not want to get married because she fears that this will result in her being under the control of a man. Furthermore, she does not want to spend all of hear days cooking and cleaning. Instead, she wants to take charge of her own life.
        
        What Esther wants in her life....
        
        "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)
        
        "The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters" (76)
        
        What Esther believes...
        
        "I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and hand children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state" (85)
        
        "This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mom did from morning till night" (84)
        
        " 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)
- - - - "However, perhaps an even more interesting, and less direct connection is to Helen Eustis's article, "How to Get Anything You Want," in the September 1953 edition of Mademoiselle magazine. Like Plath's message, Eustis's article is fraught with the narrator's attempts to make sense of how the world around her works and just what she can do to make herself successful...She, like Esther, is still hungry if you will, for a desired life that she ultimately cannot achieve. though she attempts to sustain herself, on apples and fairytales, she finds her provisions to be unfulfilling in the same way that Esther, in the fig tree passage, finds herself surrounded by figs yet unable to decide upon what to consume - an indecision that results in her metaphorical starvation" (Smith)
        
        "Coyle notes that Esther is 'starving' not simply from indecision but also from an increasing sense of alienation from sale and alienation from the world and her potential goals'" (Smith)
        
        "Basically, it is the pressure of choice - and most particularly, as clear from the enumeration, the choice between being a wife-and-mother and being a female creator - that leads to the protagonist Esther Greenwood's schizophrenia and psychic collapse" (Séllei)
      - "Plath draws upon Stanley Sultan's "The Fuge of the Fig Tree," published in the Kenyan Review in 1952" (Smith)
        
        This is the story that is mentioned earlier in the novel about the elderly man and woman
  - - - "I started adding up all the things I couldn't do. I began with cooking. My grandmother and my mother were such good cooks that I left everything to them. They were always trying to teach me one dish or another" (76)
        
        "Esther encounters relays the proper way to prepare and consume food, yet Esther continually finds herself unsure of the best way to nourish herself" (Smith).
        
        "Read in this context, then Esther's inability to cook might not only result in her literal starvation but also her metaphorical starvation" (Smith) #
    - - "Then the buzz of the orange squeezer sounded from downstairs, and the smell of coffee and bacon filtered under by door. Then the sink water ran from the tap and dishes clinked as my mother dried them and put them back in the cupboard" (115).
      - "At midday the grays paled a bit, and we parked in an icy turnoff and shared out the tunafish sandwiches and the oatmeal cookies and the apples and the thermos of black coffee Mrs. Willard had packed for our lunch" (88)
  - - - "to the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream" (237) #
      - "I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descent again?" (241)
        
        Interesting because for Sylvia Plath the bell jar does in fact descend again...foreshadowing?
    - - "If there is still a gap between our hopes for these young women and their realities, they are nonetheless beyond the suffocating "bell jar" (Lanser)
      - "The hardest thing in the world to do-and it is especially hard when one is young, female, and highly gifted-is simply to be oneself. Only when Esther recognizes that she will never be a Jody, a Jay Cee, a Doreen, or a Mrs. Guinea, that she will never marry a Buddy Willard, a Constantin, or a Dr. Gordon, that she wants no lesbian affairs with a Joan or a Dee Dee- does the bell jar " (Perloff)