Fear

A theme from Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar"

“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.”(Plath 77). Esther wants to travel, be a wife, mother, a brilliant professor, a poet, and an amazing editor. She is afraid that if she gets married, she will miss out on everything else or lose who she is as a wife or mother. However, she is afraid that if she chooses a career that she will never get the chance to be a wife and a mother. While Esther is nervously trying to decide what she wants, she is missing every opportunity by being afraid of missing where she is.

Esther‘s first desire is to be an editor; she is in New York to work on a fashion magazine, writing, editing and enjoying “…ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon[s]...” (Plath 3). However, while Esther is supposed to be enjoying her job, fabulous friends, and every opportunity given to her she is worried she is just letting the time pass her by “I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”(Plath 3).

Another concern weighing on Esther is the fact that she has never left Boston and wants to see Europe and Africa and South America. Esther describes the women that she had met (in New York) as “looking awfully bored”; she saw them bored while sunbathing, bored painting their nails, bored while talking about skiing in Switzerland, and bored with yachts and the men they had met. Esther describes their behavior as “ [making her ] sick. I’m so jealous I can't speak. Nineteen years, and I hadn't been out of New England except for this trip to New York…” (Plath 4). What also worried her was that “Here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.” (Plath 4). So while Esther was trying her best to enjoy where she was, she could not help but worry that there was something else she so desperately wanted to do.

Another reflection of her acute awareness is that she has yet to meet the man she wants to marry. Buddy Willard is who (at the beginning) Esther thought would be the guy who should be everything she needed in a husband type. Esther is fascinated with him but what she comes to realize is that Buddy was a hypocrite. He wanted a wife that reflected his mother: traditional, conservative and pure; what causes Esther to think he is a hypocrite is the fact that he “slept thirty times with a slutty waitress one summer, smack in the middle of knowing [her].” (plath 71). This causes Esther to stress about the fact that she was still a virgin and therefore in her mind unworthy of being desired (in that way).

Another thing that Esther fears about marriage, losing her virginity, and having children is the societal pressure/expectation placed on her and other women at the time. Women in the 1950s were encouraged to stay pure for their husbands so that they (the men) could teach them about sex and to stay pure so that men would respect them more. Esther began to realize that the people saying these things “ … didn't seem to consider how a girl felt.” and led Esther to not understand (or like) the fact that a man could lie about his purity and live a double life when the woman really had to stay pure and honest.

The last thing Esther says about marriage is that when she “caught sight of some flawless man off in the distance” he would move closer and she “immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.” (Plath 83). Esther wanted the security to change and shoot off in all directions by herself without having to wonder if a man would love her after seeing fault after fault in her (or her in him). She does not want to be confined by a man who will not appreciate the way she is or give her the room to change anyway she wants to.

A major fear Esther faces is once she is in the asylum what her life would be like when she left, what the people who knew her thought or would think, returning to a world full of expectations and the non-routine way of her life outside the asylum. She tells herself that she is not crazy and feels shame in the fact that other people might think she was in an asylum because she was weak or crazy.

In its entirety, Esther’s fear stems from her life: missing out, missing out on one thing and missing out on everything else, or taking too long to decide and missing out on everything entirely. Her fear stems from the double standard placed on her and the women of her time, societal pressure, and the fear of not living up to someone else’s standard.