Analysis of The Bell Jar The ultraconservative air of the 1950s breeds the Betty Crocker kind of woman, content with her limited role in a male-dominated society, who simply submits to the desires and expectations of the opposite sex. The Bell Jar, by Sylviva Plath, explores the effects of society's traditional norms on a young woman coming of age. The main character, Esther Greenwood, a nineteen-year-old student, receives messages throughout her life about the place of women in society. Esther's aspirations to become a writer, more specifically a poet, are obvious. The realization of these aspirations in the 1950s, however, is not so clear. Esther's environment pushes her to marry, to settle down, to have children; to be the happy housewife. For nineteen years, she puts on a facade, pretending to be the woman everyone wants her to be, trying to please her family and peers, until she breaks down mentally and tries to suicide. His mother was the first of his teachers to convey this message. For example, Mrs. Greenwood wants her daughter to learn shorthand because it will allow her to earn a living until she can get married, because it might even get her a husband. She constantly emphasizes the importance of Esther remaining "pure", so that she can obtain the best possible husbands. Esther realizes early on that, for most women, marriage and family are the main substance of their lives. Esther gets more lessons from her medical student boyfriend, Buddy Willard. He often spews remarks like one day Esther will "stop rocking the boat and start rocking a cradle." He also says that once she has children, she will "feel differently" and will no longer want to write poems, that she will be "brainwashed and numbed like a slave in a private, totalitarian state." . This is what happened to Buddy's mother, who, after marriage, allowed her husband to walk over her like a "kitchen doormat." It's his mother that Buddy quotes when he says, "What a man wants is a partner 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 where the arrow shoots. From." Even the editors of Ladies Day, the magazine that gave Esther and 11 other girls a free trip to New York by winning their fashion magazine competition, accentuate the girls' femininity. Upon their arrival in New York , the editors take the girls from fashion shows to beauty salons via gala lunches and publicity evenings. Then, after dressing them up as Cinderella, the editors pose them in front of a camera with a dozen other “young people. anonymous men with all-American bone structures." The magazine is clearly not interested in promoting the girls' intellect that won them the competition in the first place. It's no wonder Esther tires of this stale environment and. unprofitable which only stifles her personal development Before Esther left for New York, her life was safely circumscribed. She was always "chasing good grades, prizes and scholarships of all kinds." as long as she can remember. During that fateful summer in the city, questions suddenly arose in her mind: What does it mean to be a woman? What feminine role should she play? The book features a variety of female roles: Dodo Conway, a perpetually pregnant woman whose face beams with a "serene, almost religious smile"; Buddy Willard's mother, wife of a professor and prominent citizen who constantly quotes words of wisdom;Doreen, the blonde bimbo from the South who always gets the men she wants; Betsy, the happy, innocent, simple model from the Midwest; Philomena Guinea, the successful novelist who offers Esther a university scholarship; and Jay Cee, the editor-in-chief of a successful fashion magazine. But despite Dodo's placid contentment, Jay's intelligence, Mrs. Willard's feminine wisdom, Doreen's attractiveness, and Betsy's innocence, all are essentially flawed as humans and as women. In addition to her beautiful appearance, Doreen also possesses innate vulgarity and frivolity. Dodo, although maternally content, represents nothing more than a flabby, misshapen animal. Mrs. Willard, although seemingly refined and cultured, actually lets her husband walk all over her like a doormat. Philomena Guinee's novels are not literary masterpieces, but endless, talkative serials, while Betsy represents the empty-headed "nice girl". For all these women, it is impossible to assert their independence, to be alone on solid foundations, to be their own person. These male-dependent, bulging-headed, imperfect women constantly bombard Esther's mind; their world and their way of life do not satisfy his needs or desires. One of the novel's key passages best describes the conflicting emotions running through Esther's mind and shows a vision of her life branching out like a green fig tree: From the end of each branch, like a big purple fig, a future wonderful attracted him and winked at him. . One fig was a happy husband, home and children, another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant teacher. . . and beyond and above these figs were many other figs which I could not make out. . . I saw myself sitting in the crotch of that fig tree, dying of hunger, simply because I couldn't decide which of the figs I would choose. I wanted every one of them, but choosing one meant losing everything else, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and turn black, and, one by one, they fell to the ground at my feet. This passage from Esther's symbolic tree shows the astonishing complexity and confusion that characterizes the choices women must make. A common root emerges in thousands of different branches and it faces the dilemma of choosing one and only one path. Negative images of childbirth and babies are also present throughout the book. In a gynecologist's office, watching a mother lovingly caress her baby, Esther wonders why she doesn't feel those same maternal sensations, as biological and social roles suggest. For her, babies represent a trap and sex a bait. She realizes that they represent life, but not the life she wants to live. She does not want to find fulfillment through childbirth, as many women would like; she wants to flourish, alone, without anyone's help. Between the enormous fetuses on display at Buddy's hospital and her neighbor, Dodo Conway, a permanent slave to her seven children, Esther feels overwhelmed, even nauseated. The babies lure Esther toward suicide by presenting her with only two options: give herself entirely to the child or die. The choice to live looms so visibly and painfully that she takes matters into her own hands by later attempting suicide. She also attends the birth at the hospital where Buddy works. The woman's stomach was so high that I couldn't see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothing but a huge belly of spider fat and two skinny, ugly little legs wedged in the high stirrups, and all the time the baby..