Sexism In The Bell Jar

In Sylvia Plath’s, “The Bell Jar”, placed in the 1950s, Ester Greenwood discovers that she has everything she could have asked for, such as, her internship of being a guest editor for a well-known magazine, a man who loves and wants to marry her, and yet she still feels empty. After evaluating her life, she comes to the conclusion she has lived in a glass bell jar, always being able to see the world out of it, but she remains isolated and alone in her own world. Ester finds herself questioning the standards that are placed on women and how she was expected to follow these rules while in college, working, and being in a mental asylum after attempting to take her own life by ingesting sleeping pills. The choice of being either a “saint” or “sinner”

Male and female sexuality are ideologically the same concept; however, an enormous binary is placed on women when it comes to expressing their sexuality because of the standards that are set on being a “good woman” while men are praised for embracing theirs. Back in the 1950s, even in 2016’s society, women were seen as being used if people had an inkling that the woman had any type of sexual interaction. “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. –Gloria Anzaldua” The borderland theory, or binary spaces, are areas where two distinctly different cultures meet and create a middle ground where both characteristics of the

Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line” (Chapter 7). Ester explains how there are shallow actions that people use to categorize people. Being a woman who sleeps with people does not make you any lesser or more of a woman, but people used to know whether or not a woman was worthy of being wed. If a woman was seen unworthy to wed she was practically useless to the 1950s society. This statement reinforces the binary that Ester lives with saying that people just see women as either being heathen or saints in her time. Ester is aware that being promiscuous can possibly have her shunned and be labeled as a