Identity In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

Setting in The Bell Jar is not only limited to physical places that a person is in, but due to the suspension of belief on the part of the reader, the anthology of stories that Esther reads also qualifies. The significance of the collection of stories that Plath includes symbolizes her relationship that she had with Buddy Willard. While reading about the instance where two people from completely differing worldviews, religions, and gender had interacted underneath a fig tree, resembling a variation on the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Esther states, “This fig grew on a green lawn between the house of a Jewish man and a convent, and the Jewish man and a beautiful dark nun kept meeting at the tree to pick the ripe figs,” (Plath, 55). Esther views the

Though Esther feels like she knows every aspect about him, and even though both of their respective families attend the same Unitarian church, they are dichotomies of each other. In Buddy Willard’s bedroom, Esther realizes that he is a chauvinist, and predicts the fact that Esther will give up her professional ambitions to compose poetry in order to bear his children. Esther is repulsed at the fact that though Buddy outwardly displays his conservative, yet patriarchal, ideals; his confession which details his affair with a restaurant waitress discredits him. Esther states, “What I couldn 't stand was Buddy 's pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure … and must have felt like laughing in my face,” (Plath, 71). The narrator sets up the tone in Buddy’s voice to help the reader visualize his god complex, and how repulsed she is, even comparing his “meat and potatoes” to “turkey gizzards”. Though Buddy’s actions aren’t condemned by the elders around him, Esther eventually breaks off the relationship, Esther break free from her own designated “inferior”