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War Made Us Equal In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

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War Made Us Equal It is the 1950s, post-war America, a young woman is lost between two worlds. Anyone who has ever read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar will know, and pity this girl, because much like the author herself, Esther Greenwood descends deeper into madness and depression, the longer she is left tangled between life paths. A traditional life, being a good wife and mother, or a modern life where she can follow her passion for poetry? For some readers, it can be hard at times to understand why she even has to make this choice. For others, they have long decided which way they would choose, and it took them about a minute. Why would anyone ever attempt to suicide over this, why is it so hard for her and not for us? The truth is, Sylvia lived …show more content…

Luckily, the post-war boom in the economy aided the all classes in the community, and this actually points to the start of how America became known as ‘classless’ for the growing economic equality between its classes. The first cause of this equality was the closing pay-gap (Hoberek 3), and as a result the middle class grew at a remarkable rate with the addition of worker class citizens, becoming the largest class in America. Jack Beatty believes that this is what put a temporary stop to the class conflict, the idea of a country where classes do not exist (qtd. in Hoberek 5). If the middle class of a nation includes the most people, the number of the comparatively rich or poor become less. From this theory, the middle class branched out to change the social experience of classes in the United States. This class was allowed to control the culture of post-war America because they represented all the classes, and they used this power to identify their issues and interests with those of the whole society (Hoberek 5), making sure those problems were put in front of everyone and eventually solved. After the post-war influence ended in the 1970s, the equality between the classes slowly slipped away. But even so, it left its effect on America by making sure all sections of society knew what it was like to be

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