Who Is The Antagonist In The Bell Jar

Application Paper: The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar, a novel by Sylvia Plath, gives a detailed story of Esther Greenwood, a young, bright, and extremely talented young woman. The novel begins with Esther’s life in New York where she works for a magazine as an editor. Her time there is filled with stress from the other college girls in her dorm, a dwindling love life, and constant deliberation over the direction of her life. The novel chronicles how these stressors take an insidious form in her life, leading her to a psychiatrist, electric shock therapy, and thoughts/attempts at suicide. Though she tries many different ways to end her life, Esther continues on her journey, leading her to a new mental hospital, new treatments, and new interactions.
In one scene, she compares her life to a fig tree, paralleling the branches to each direction her life could take, but ultimately choosing nothing:
One fig was a husband and a happy home and children…and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America…and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion…I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. (Plath, 1971, Chapter 7, p. 77)
She is constantly looking for the “branch” that will lead her to happiness and finds something wrong with each one. In an interesting article titled Desperately Seeking Happiness: Valuing Happiness is Associated With Symptoms and Diagnosis of Depression by Ford, Shallcross, Mauss, Floerke, and Gruber (2014), they discuss how desperately seeking happiness can be detrimental to one’s well-being and increase depressive symptoms. In one study, they found that valuing happiness correlated significantly with depressive symptoms. Though that only discusses relationship and not causation, it is an interesting thing to consider. Esther, though talented, top in her class, and a head scholar, could only focus on what she needed to be happy. That amount of stress and worry, coupled with other unknown possible biological and environmental factors could have had some relationship to her later depressive
“…I was scared to death. I had hoped…I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead. Instead, all I could see were question marks” (Plath, 1971, Chapter 20, p. 243). This sentiment that Plath describes is something that many patients and physicians worry about at the end of treatment, especially for depression, the chance of relapse or reoccurrence. In the article Acute and Chronic Stress Exposure Predicts 1-Year Recurrence in Adult Outpatients with Residual Depression Symptoms Following Response to Treatment, authors Harkness, Theriault, Stewart, and Bagby (2014) begin by discussing the how depressive disorder is an extremely recurrent condition. Up to 50% of patients who respond to treatment have recurrent symptoms within two years. Just like the character, Esther has shown much improvement through her electroconvulsive therapy treatments, but based on this article, could have a high chance of her symptoms returning. This justifies her fears for the future, because though she has improved, she could easily slip back down to where she was