Depression In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar follows a young-woman through her struggle of severe depression, as well as her recovery process. Due to the setting of the novel taking place in the 1950s, Esther is exposed to both gender expectations and social limitations; shaping how she views herself and her role in society. As the plot progresses, Esther’s depression becomes increasingly drastic as she moves from the internship to back home. She starts to realize that she does not want to conform to society’s standards of femininity and mental illness. Esther’s depression is the result of her conflicting identity from refusing to conform to society through its gender expectations and view of mental illness. Profound gender expectations cause Esther to

During a time of male dominance, women had to make a choice of dedicating their life to a family or to their passion. Esther views her life paths as a fig tree, in which “One fig was a husband and a happy home and children...and another fig was a brilliant professor…I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind... I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest…”(Plath 63). Since Esther grew up in a time of inequality towards women, she is expected to know that women can not be dedicated to a career and also raise a family. Therefore, she feels like an outcast because she does not want to be confined to one distinct path. Unlike Esther, minor characters in the story contribute to the idea of women being dedicated to one path. One such character is such as Dodo Conway, who is. the epitome of a woman who was confined down the path of marriage and child rearing. As a result, she had nearly seven children. Esther realizes that “Children make [her] sick” (95) since she views how they have absorbed Dodo’s last bit of freedom. Another form of gender roles Esther confronts is