Girl in a Jar

Esther’s story in The Bell Jar combines a coming-of-age as well as a descent into severe mental illness. She is trying to find her place in an inhospitable world, and thinks she’s crazy for thinking the way the world works is wrong. Esther gradually becomes very discouraged with the world around her, mostly about how it treats women differently with men. She finds that the life she’s been training for her whole life is not one that she’ll be able to have. The revelation that her options as a woman are disappearing one by one as she gets older, like figs withering on a tree, is scary and sickening for her. None of her options look good except to give up.

                I found that I related much more to Esther’s story than to Holden’s or Stephen’s. All of them deal with separation from society to a certain extent, and Holden also deals with depression and suicidal thoughts, but Esther’s experience seemed to me a lot more real and brought out more emotions and empathy in me. I actually ended up reading the whole rest of the book in one sitting this past weekend because I was so caught up in it. I related a lot to many of her experiences, and I really sympathized with her anguish at feeling alone. I wish she could have had a mentor or a community of women also forming a feminist consciousness to help her out.

                I do think a lot of this book was more relatable to me than others because Esther is a woman, and being a woman and/or a feminine person in this world is a very difficult thing. Even though our world has changed a lot since The Bell Jar was published, a lot of Esther’s experiences of isolation from the widely broadcasted images of womanhood are still present nowadays. Even in the shelter of her white, American, middle-class life (among other categories that she wouldn’t have been very aware of, such as being cisgender and straight) Esther feels like she’s under attack from the ideals of society. And she is, very much. It’s not just Marco the woman-hater: misogyny is an insidious sort of violence that is present in all facets of society and doesn’t allow women to function as full people. I’ve found fragments of this in the other books we’ve read, in the ways Stephen and Holden and minor male characters treat and think about women. It’s like your personhood is removed along with your goals and dreams, and you’re only there to be in a supporting role for men, behind the scenes. Even today, it can feel like there are only certain roles available for women. Your body is often under attack too, whether cis or trans. Sometimes you might feel like the only option is to go off the rails and destroy everything you’ve worked for in order to be free from expectations and stereotypes. That’s why I really enjoyed seeing Esther as the main character, and I enjoyed seeing her very relatable perspective on misogyny in her daily life, as well as her descent into a socially manufactured insanity, even though it was really painful to see.