The Bell Jar: Passion and Fig Trees

By Hannah Hills

Class of 2024

If you turn over a physical copy of the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, the first sentence of the back cover spells out perfectly what you find inside, “The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time.” It alludes in unforgettable detail to the trials and tribulations of Esther’s depleting mental state and overwhelming depression. Regardless, Esther’s problem is one that many people face: indecisiveness and fear of making the wrong choices. Even the happiest of us become victim to it at one point or another. This dilemma culminates in the infamously unforgettable fig tree analogy:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. 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. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” (Plath, 77)

This segment may seem familiar; perhaps you have only heard fragments of this full quote, as I had only a few days ago. The “fig tree” trend has unfolded on TikTok, where nearly sixty thousand people, in varying degrees of seriousness, share the different futures they imagined for themselves. However, it’s crucial to fully understand the context of this quote and characterization of Esther before unintentionally assigning this excerpt an inaccurate meaning. Esther is not someone to aspire to be like, but that is where much of this book gets lost. People find their similarities to Esther’s character or empathize with her too closely and don’t see the complete picture of her wrongness. Like we do, she has to tackle the pressures, primarily indirect, that are placed on her to figure out her life in no uncertain terms. All of her older acquaintances are disbelieving that she cannot find a career, any career, and just stick with it. However, as every forthcoming point explains, she does almost everything wrong, and it’s to her own demise. When people make these videos, in most cases, they believe they cannot pursue these futures. Plath, being the figure that she is, interpreted it similarly: complete and utter hopelessness. Esther has many lives she wants to live and yet is stuck in this one, suffering and feeling incapable of achieving any of them. That perspective, though, depends on her hopelessness and feeds on itself in this analogy. Hence, why she is wrong so often, but that does not have to be the case. The fig tree and innumerable figs hanging from it resemble every path we could take, many overlapping themselves. To display it as a “choosing one meant losing all the rest”’ issue is blatantly not the whole truth. It should be freeing to have so many options available to us. 

The first misstep we see Esther take in this eventual spiral is comparing her brilliance to that of others, “I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do” (Plath, 75). She couldn’t cook, she didn’t know shorthand, she couldn’t dance, balance, ride a horse, or ski. (And she must be the sum of her faults, right?) Being exposed to so many people who seemed to have it all, she felt dreadfully inadequate; “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.” She didn’t have some previously incomprehensible breakthrough. She was just letting her self-consciousness control how she defined herself. She does it again later, “Now I saw that the stupidest person at my mother’s college knew more than I did. I saw they wouldn’t even let me in through the door, let alone give me a large scholarship like the one I had at my own college. I thought I’d better go to work for a year and think things over. Maybe I could study the eighteenth century in secret. But I didn’t know shorthand, so what could I do? I could be a waitress or a typist. But I couldn’t stand the idea of being either one” (Plath, 125). The problem is no one can happily live their life feeling like they exist under the weight of everyone else’s achievements. It’s wrong to define our strengths and success around that of someone else. You aren’t constantly in some unacknowledged competition with those around you. As the age-old, ostensibly overused platitude goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

Coupled with this inert self-doubt and inferiority is her fear of embarrassment. If she knows inherently that she will fail, why try in the first place? Even though she could acknowledge and rationalize this fear regarding others, she could never quite apply it to herself. In her own words, “...if you do something incorrect at the table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it, and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty” (Plath, 27). Even in her stupor and depressiveness, she could rationalize failure and how the fear of embarrassment is unjustified, “Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do” (Plath, 27). Esther, with all of her apprehensiveness, understood that when it mattered, you could not let the fear of embarrassment get in the way of doing what you wanted. 

The most apparent reason for her hopelessness, indecisiveness, and every bit of unclarity is simply defined. She was depressed. This doesn’t come as a total shock; according to the Mayo Clinic, women are almost twice as likely to experience depression than men. This disorder often has an onset in the early to mid-twenties, which is Esther’s general age range. Her indecisiveness, likely a symptom of her depression, was not expressly out of fear of making the wrong choice but instead not wanting to choose at all. She couldn’t see the consequence or point, “...wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (Plath, 185). Indecisiveness is often used as a placeholder for passionlessness. Even when she was achieving the things she had only ever dreamed of, it passed in a numb haze, “It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water” (Plath, 4). The things she wanted no longer had the value they used to because she did not have the energy to care for them; she was utterly apathetic. She did not fully understand that what she wanted would not just happen to her. It’s wishful and understandable thinking but plainly unrealistic. She needed to work for it and heal to enjoy these things to their full potential. Each imagined future on her fig tree could bring her joy if she only allowed herself to experience them without the self-destructive mechanisms she had grown inseparable from. I like to think that she could have overcome them—that anyone can, but she does find a perverse kind of comfort in her own suffering because of its familiarity, as many depressed people do. That’s what makes taking these necessary steps to pursue her ambitions so laborious and challenging. 

Another thing Esther so desperately needed to understand was that it’s okay to be wrong about the things you want, or at least thought you wanted. Your dreams change. You aren’t stuck in them, forced to live the rest of your life drowning in that choice. If you are pursuing your happiness, it is not a waste of time or failure. That is why the fig tree is so aspirational; you can pick and try and truly get a taste for every fig-shaped future if you want to. Esther believed that, after she achieved accomplishment after accomplishment, goal after goal, working tirelessly for it and getting straight A’s in high school, sure it was what she wanted to do, her future was set in stone and perfect just the way she had crafted it. Instead, when asked if her work interests her, she has to force the words out. “‘Oh, it does, it does,’ I said. ‘It interests me very much.’ I felt like yelling the words, as if it might make them more convincing, but I controlled myself” (Plath, 31). She felt like a fool, thinking after every obscure triumph brought her way, “...What did I do but balk and balk like a dull carthorse?” I cannot help but think that if she had reflected on her fig tree and tried another option, she would have been more fulfilled. 

When it comes to the fig tree analogy, even before reading the book and deep-diving into Esther’s character, I had never fully achieved her outlook. I cannot help but find the positive in it. She is presented with all of these options, every one priceless, and all available for selection. She could choose just one or multiple. The imagery of the fig tree, chock full of different futures that fulfill you and bring you joy, is nothing less than reassuring. People are quick to ascertain the negative, but I think it’s a valuable tool. As we are now, everyone is going their separate ways for the summer. Or maybe much longer, years, many years, or for some of us, never seeing the same people again. We have countless choices and opportunities ahead of us. That feels like a loaded, irreversible decision. Societally, that narrative is often pushed. There’s this enormous weight that we need to choose the career we want for the rest of our lives at 18, but it's not true. If anything, The Bell Jar illustrates the harm those pressures can cause. As Esther needed to know, we aren’t often genuinely stuck in the choices we make. 

Gen Z is frequently looked down upon for understanding this. We quit our jobs without much fuss, not standing to take some perceived disrespect or lower-than-earned wages. We get stereotyped as being lazy, privileged, and uneducated, but the circumstances of our upbringing are so different. Everything feels so uncertain and, simultaneously, definitive. If anything, that validates our generation's supposed languishing. So, choose the path you want; if it changes, you can too. Take the unconventional route. Don’t stray away from the potentially embarrassing. There’s no need to concern yourself with what others might think; they are on their path, just trying their best, and their best is not better than yours. It's just different.