“The Feeding of Young Women”:

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar,

Mademoiselle Magazine, and
the Domestic Ideal

Caroline J. Smith

I
n one of the most often cited passages from Caroline J. Smith is an assistant
Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel, The Bell Jar, professor in the University
Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood,
reflects upon the potential paths her life Writing Program at The George
might take and her ultimate inability to make Washington University. She is
decisions about her future:
the author of Cosmopolitan
I saw my life branching out before me
like the green fig tree in the story. Culture and Consumerism in
From the tip of every branch, like a fat Chick Lit (2007).
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 fig 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
2 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

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 1971,
62-63)
The passage is a favorite among literary scholars who consistently relate its
significance to the larger themes of Plath’s novel. Some critics, like Susan
Coyle in “Images of Madness and Retrieval:An Exploration of Metaphor in
The Bell Jar,” see the passage as a metaphor for Esther’s psychological deteri-
oration; Coyle notes that Esther is “‘starving’ not simply from indecision but
also from an increasing sense of alienation from self and alienation from the
world and her potential goals” (1984, 165). Critic Marilyn Yalom in “Sylvia
Plath, The Bell Jar, and Related Poems” explores the way in which the figs in
the novel are used as “traditional symbols of female fecundity” (1985, 170)
while Linda Wagner-Martin in The Bell Jar:A Novel of the Fifties, grounds her
reading historically, noting that “Esther believed firmly that there was no way,
in the American society of the 1950s, that a talented woman could success-
fully combine a career with homemaking” (1992, 38).
Most notably, in this passage, Plath draws upon Stanley Sultan’s “The
Fugue of the Fig Tree,” published in The Kenyon Review in 1952 and later
included in the 1953 collection, The Best American Short Stories.1 The story
that Esther reads and Plath relates, like Sultan’s story, is about a fig tree that
grows between a Jewish man’s house and a convent.The man and a nun meet
each day to pick the fruit and slowly develop a relationship.The fig tree from
this story is the fig tree that Esther imagines in the passage above. However,
perhaps an even more interesting, and less direct, connection is to Helen
Eustis’s article, “How to Get Anything You Want,” in the September 1953
edition of Mademoiselle magazine. Like Plath’s passage, Eustis’s article is
fraught with the narrator’s attempts to make sense of how the world around
her works and just what she can do to make herself successful. Eustis’s nar-
rator envisions the world through rose colored glasses: “I would sit in the
crotch of the apple tree, munching fruit and throwing cores to the ground,
reading books that told of rags-to-riches, books that ended ‘And so they lived
happily ever after,’ books that traced the rise of famous men and women,
thinking:Yes, this is how it will be” (1953, 112). Though one might expect
the tale to continue in a positive vein, detailing the narrator’s successes,
Eustis’s tale exposes the anxiety of the narrator.While “Sometimes it seemed
. . . that creatures existed who were born with the silver spoon of luck in their
 Caroline J. Smith 3

mouths, able to get what they wanted without even thinking of it,” she also
notes that when these women are asked about the secret to their success they
never seem to have satisfying answers (172).Though others seem quite capa-
ble of winning “Nobel Prizes, their Oscars, their executive jobs, their Prince
Charmings” (172), the narrator reflects at the close of the piece:“I cannot get
the absolute anything, the total everything, that I want, and I know it” (174).
Like the protagonist of Plath’s novel, the narrator of Eustis’s piece ends up
feeling a sense of dissatisfaction. She, like Esther, is still hungry, if you will, for
a desired life that she ultimately cannot achieve.Though she attempts to sus-
tain herself, on apples and fairytales, she finds her provisions to be unfulfill-
ing in the same way that Esther, in the fig tree passage, finds herself sur-
rounded by figs yet unable to decide upon what to consume—an indecision
that results in her metaphorical starvation.
This strong echo of the mixed messages imparted to readers of women’s
magazines is representative of The Bell Jar as a whole. Plath’s novel directly
interacts with, and is informed by, publications such as Mademoiselle. Plath
herself was familiar with these publications. During her high school years, she
wrote short stories aimed at acceptance by women’s magazines, primarily
Seventeen and Mademoiselle, and received her first success in Seventeen in
August of 1950 for a story entitled “And Summer Will Not Come Again”
(Stevenson 1998, 18). During her junior year, Plath competed and was cho-
sen as one of Mademoiselle’s Guest Editors for their August 1953 college issue;
in June 1953, Plath, along with nineteen other women from college cam-
puses across the United States, traveled to New York City to intern—the
event fictionalized in The Bell Jar (Wagner-Martin 1987, 96). Esther
Greenwood’s circumstances parallel Plath’s own experiences that summer in
NewYork so much so that Aurelia Plath, Plath’s mother, contended in a 1970
letter to Harper & Row, the book’s publisher, that Plath hesitated to have the
book published in America because it would upset those whom she had car-
icatured (Butscher 1976, 308). In her journals, Plath records her submissions
to various women’s magazines and notes acceptances and rejections. She also
spends time contemplating marriage, noting an attraction and repulsion sim-
ilar to Esther’s. For instance, in an entry for September 1951, she writes,“. . .
I could hold my nose, close my eyes, and jump blindly into the waters of
some man’s insides, submerging my-self until his purpose becomes my pur-
pose” (2000, 99). Though Plath claims she could accomplish this task, this
passage immediately follows paragraphs in which she expresses her worries
over her ability to be a successful writer. Plath’s involvement with the mag-
azine industry, her intention to write for these magazines, and her publica-
tions in these texts imply a familiarity with their content.
4 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

Plath writes her own ambivalence about the place of women in the
1950s, alluded to above, into the character of Esther who operates at an
intense level of anxiety throughout the novel—an anxiety which leads to her
mental breakdown and suicide attempts. As we see in the fig tree passage
above, Esther is unsure of her “proper” place in society, and she imagines the
choices before her as fruit which she must pick before it shrivels and goes
bad. Consistently, in The Bell Jar, Plath expresses Esther’s anxiety through
food moments. Throughout the novel, Plath surrounds Esther with behav-
ioral models, from her mother to her peers to the conflicting domestic ide-
ologies purported by women’s magazines such as the fictional Ladies’ Day
magazine for which Esther interns in the summer of 1953. Each model
Esther encounters relays the proper way to prepare and consume food, yet
Esther continually finds herself unsure of the best way to nourish herself.
In this article, I consider the way in which Plath uses these significant
moments of eating throughout her novel to underscore the intense hold that
these behavioral models have on her sense of self. I begin by examining the
way in which Plath’s novel interacts with and is informed by 1950s maga-
zines, focusing specifically upon 1953 issues of Mademoiselle magazine, the
year in which Plath’s novel takes place.While the publication was not aimed
at a demographic seemingly concerned with housekeeping, as its tagline,
“The magazine for smart young women,” betrays, Mademoiselle still contained
articles and advertisements that subtly discouraged women’s navigation
beyond the private sphere of the home, encouraging women to pursue the
traditional role of wife and mother. Advertisements for Lenox china (May
1953) and articles on cooking (Ann Aikman’s “How To Eat Like Royalty,”
April 1953) ran next to articles like “College:Whether to Go,Where to Go”
(January 1953) and “The Word Around the World: Jobs in International
Radio and Television” (February 1953). Consistently, Mademoiselle presented
readers with conflicting messages about their place in relation to the home.
Reading both articles and advertisements in 1953 editions of Mademoiselle
and looking specifically at passages in The Bell Jar that deal with Esther’s eat-
ing and housekeeping habits, I assert that 1950s consumer culture—a culture
that encouraged women to navigate beyond the private sphere of the home
while limiting those options by simultaneously discouraging that
navigation—is not conducive to Esther’s being properly nurtured—a cir-
cumstance that contributes to the metaphorical starvation that Esther envi-
sions for herself in the fig tree passage.
Few critics have examined the way in which Plath’s novel is informed by
1950s editions of Mademoiselle magazine. Many critics, including Linda
Wagner-Martin (The Bell Jar: A Novel of the 50s) and Marjorie Perloff (“Icon
of the Fifties”), have looked at The Bell Jar in an historical context.And, both
 Caroline J. Smith 5

Marsha Bryant and Garry M. Leonard have examined Plath’s work in rela-
tion to women’s magazines of the 1950s. Bryant, in her article “Plath,
Domesticity, and Advertising” for College Literature and in a more recent essay,
“Ariel’s Kitchen: Plath, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Domestic Surreal,” for
the 2007 collection The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath, examines
Plath’s poetry in relation to the popular women’s magazine, Ladies’ Home
Journal. In “Plath, Domesticity, and Advertising,” Bryant notes “[Plath’s] writ-
ing prompts new ways of thinking about American advertising” (2002, 17).
“Ariel’s Kitchen” expands upon this earlier essay, drawing rich and complex
connections between Plath’s poetry and the domestic ideologies of the
advertising included in Ladies’ Home Journal, asserting that “the alternative
archive of Ladies’ Home Journal has the potential to challenge widespread
assumptions about Plath, domesticity, and poetry” and “enables a recovery of
cultural configurations,” which Bryant defines as “the surreal domesticity of
Ariel’s kitchen” (2007, 212).Yet, Bryant’s articles focus primarily upon Plath’s
poetry, looking at it in relation to the advertising of the time period. In fact,
Garry M. Leonard’s article,“’The Woman Is Perfected: Her Dead Body Wears
the Smile of Accomplishment’: Sylvia Plath and Mademoiselle Magazine,” is
the only substantial scholarship on the direct correlation between The Bell Jar
and Mademoiselle. Leonard explores the ways in which Plath’s poetry and fic-
tion responded to 1950s commodity culture. He asserts that Mademoiselle
contained “socially constructed guidelines for femininity,” and he considers
the impact that these guidelines might have had upon Esther Greenwood
and Plath herself (1992, 63). While Leonard discusses the guidelines that
Mademoiselle imparts to readers, he looks specifically at consumer cul-
ture—whether it be articles like “There’s Nothing Like It” where author
“[Bernice] Peck writes of a bath as though it were a religious sacrament” (67)
or an advertisement for a bra which indicates that “’It’s a matter of morale to
have those curves that make such a difference in your clothes’” (64). Leonard
illuminates Plath’s work with these readings of Mademoiselle, but he does not
look at the more implicit messages that Mademoiselle imparts to readers about
the domestic.
Pairing Plath’s novel with Mademoiselle magazine, as Leonard has done,
seems logical for several reasons.As mentioned above, Plath was familiar with
these publications, a fact which justifies the pairing of these two texts.Yet, I
would argue that Mademoiselle magazine and The Bell Jar also beg a thematic
comparison, especially in regard to the sometimes confusing messages the
magazine imparts to women readers, such as Esther and Plath, regarding their
place inside (or outside) of the home. In For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the
Experts’ Advice on Women, Barbara Ehrenrich and Deirdre English examine a
variety of women’s advice manuals, including magazines such as
6 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Mademoiselle, noting how these pub-
lications’ “experts wooed their female constituency, promising the ‘right’ and
scientific way to live” (1978, 4). Yet, Ehrenrich and English encourage
women readers to be wary of the messages imparted, noting that the advice
offered was not always the best advice to follow. Magazine historians, such as
Nancy A.Walker in Shaping Our Mothers’World: American Women’s Magazines,
have also focused upon the messages that these magazines contain, particu-
larly in so far as domestic ideologies were concerned. Walker notes: “One
point that will become clear is that at no time during their histories have
women’s magazines delivered perfectly consistent, monolithic messages to
their readers” (2000, vii).
While Walker focuses on women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal
and McCall’s, her observations hold true for magazines like Mademoiselle
aimed at a younger demographic as well. Like most women’s magazines, the
pages of the 1953 issues of Mademoiselle contain a mix of articles and adver-
tisements aimed at its target audience—“smart young women.” There are
fashion spreads showcasing the most fashionable winter coats or summer
wear, depending upon the season, and advertisements for tampons, bras, and
girdles.There are profiles of colleges and universities and advice columns for
brides-to-be. In 1953, there were several consistent columns, which appeared
throughout the year. Fashion and beauty were often a focus such as in Helena
Rubenstein’s column about make-up, the monthly spread “Shopping
Shortcuts,” or the reappearing feature,“Scoops of the Month,” which show-
cased a Mademoiselle reader who not only modeled the latest clothing but also
shared her accomplishments with other readers. Mary Parker contributed a
travel column, highlighting trips to Mexico and Canada, and the column “To
Amuse Ourselves” written by Geri Trotta focused on dining out in cities like
New York and London. Additionally, Ann Aikman wrote several columns on
cooking, sharing a story with readers and following with a recipe.
Photographs of featured silverware patterns accompanied each of her pieces.
Embedded within the content from this year are discordant messages
about a woman’s “proper” place in society.The reccurring columns from that
year, listed above, point to this divide. Women were, on one hand, encour-
aged to travel to Mexico while, on the other hand, they were admonished to
stay home and learn the best way to cook a chicken (Ann Aikman’s “The
Coming of Age of a Chicken,” March 1953).While Mademoiselle magazine’s
pages were packed with “How To” tips for its dedicated readers, promising
women all the answers with these instructional articles, at the same time,
these articles would often provide their readers with dual messages, encour-
aging women to be self-sufficient while also offering them limited options
for achieving self-sufficiency.
 Caroline J. Smith 7

The September 1953 issue of Mademoiselle dedicates itself to both “Fall

fashions” and “How to” tips (“How to/get a job/get a man/get anything you
want”); one of its articles,“21 Jobs for the Liberal Arts Graduate” reveals the
conflicting messages the magazines often purported.This article details both
the “Future for the dedicated” (women presumably willing to sacrifice a fam-
ily for their job) as well as the “Future for the Divided” (women who want
both a promising career and a family) (“21 Jobs” 1953, 121). For those ded-
icated women seeking to become a Language Specialist for the National
Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency, one is promised,“Career
service, but promotion requires specialization, e.g., a year of travel or work in
Cambodia. Graduate study (perhaps at night) international trade, geog. or
econ. Pay might go to $5,940; very rarely to $11,800 for women” (121). In
the next column over, entitled “Future for the divided,” Mademoiselle warns
its readers, “Husband faces FBI investigation too. Officially, his wife should
keep details of her day at the office secret. Maternity leaves. But finding a
nursery school in Washington can be a hard job” (121).
This particular article and the information provided for the readers are
representative of Mademoiselle’s content from 1953 on the whole. Here,
despite the fact that upon skimming column headings Mademoiselle attempts
to provide its readers with options (women can obtain jobs outside of the
home, even combine those jobs with family duties), the magazine under-
mines its own “progressiveness” through the text included underneath these
columns.Though purportedly, there is a future promised for those “divided,”
the text implies that, in actuality, there is not. As a language specialist, a
woman may take a maternity leave, but mentioning the fact that there are no
good nursery schools in Washington may make a that same woman think
twice about her choice. Furthermore, taking a job with the FBI may cause
conflicts with one’s husband. Similarly, in the other jobs detailed, there seems
to be discouraging advice lurking in the “Future for the divided.”Those hop-
ing to be a research or analysis trainee have “Little chance for part-time work
above clerical level,” while those wishing to be group leaders face “Evening,
weekend assignments [which] make full-time, regular jobs rough on mar-
rieds” (“21 Jobs” 1953, 121). Though attempting to provide readers with
choices, Mademoiselle simultaneously limits those choices and, at times, seems
to discourage women’s navigation beyond the private sphere.
In part, the mixed messages of these magazines often arise from the con-
struction of the magazine itself.While magazines consist of articles developed
by the magazines’ editorial staffs, they also rely heavily on advertisements cre-
ated by advertising agencies that are not directly affiliated with the magazine
itself. Advertisers may develop marketing schemes that they believe mesh
with the needs of a magazine’s particular target audience, yet what they
8 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

attempt to sell is not always what the audience intends to buy, whether liter-
ally, in the form of a product, or figuratively, in the form of a lifestyle. As a
result, there are sometimes discrepancies within the magazines themselves.
The frequent advertisements for Gorham silver patterns, which declare “Off
to a beautiful start . . . with love and Gorham silver,” for instance, may not
immediately interest a woman who is intending on enrolling in college in
the near future (“21Jobs” 1953, 26). Instead, she may be more concerned
with reading one of the profiles of “outstanding colleges and universities”
that Mademoiselle contains (Felker 1953, 128).
The fact that Mademoiselle’s articles and advertisements, especially in
terms of the domestic, seem to be at odds points to the fact that, during the
1950s, the domestic “rather than a prescribed and stable” space was actually
one “contested and negotiated” (Walker 2000, vii). As the title of Arlene
Skolnick’s Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty
implies, the actuality of the 1950s was oftentimes in opposition to the ideal
images representative of that time period. Historian Elaine Tyler May, in
Homeward Bound:American Families in the Cold War Era, agrees; in her chapter
“Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth,” she discusses the
Eisenhower administration’s emphasis on “the virtues of the American way
of life” (1988, 16), yet she also acknowledges the very real problems facing
Americans by becoming more insular, asserting that the home, at this period
in time, was “a fragile institution” (22). In Shaping Our Mothers’ World:
AmericanWomen’s Magazines, Nancy A.Walker also discusses the historical cir-
cumstances following World War II that confused American perceptions of
domesticity. She explains:
World War II made Americans acutely conscious of involvement with the
rest of the world, while the Cold War that immediately followed fostered
insularity, both politically and within the family. Attitudes toward proper
gender roles changed dramatically in some parts of the population during
the war, and that change continued to affect women’s lives into the 1950s.
. . . Increased postwar prosperity focused the attention of white America on
social-class mobility, while the civil rights movement forced recognition of
politically sanctioned inequality. New appliances and convenience foods
flooded the market. . . . (Walker 2000, 29)
Walker’s historical summary shows the ways in which America itself was filled
with contradictions—at once aware of the world at large yet insular, both
conscious of white America’s prosperity while also acknowledging inequality.
In her article “Do Women Like to Cook?” Laura Shapiro further addresses the
changes in women’s relationships with their kitchens and cooking and the
effect that those developments had on women’s relationships with their
homes, noting that “the advent of packaged and semi-prepared foods [made
 Caroline J. Smith 9

it] possible to put meals on the table while doing very little actual cooking”
(1995, 155).These historical situations contribute to the conflicted domestic
ideologies deployed by women’s magazines, which “in the period from 1940
to 1960 conveyed not a unitary but instead a multivocal concept of the
domestic world during a period when that concept was being contested and
expanded.The magazines at times celebrated women’s primary role as home-
maker and at other times subverted that ideology” (viii-ix).
An advertisement for L’Aiglon clothing from the September 1953 edi-
tion of Mademoiselle illustrates Walker’s point perfectly. Here, in this ad, we see
a woman, meticulously clothed in a coatdress of Lorette (“55% Orlon, 45%
wool”), black hat atop her head (“L’Aiglon” 1953, 34). A microphone with
the letters “ABC” intersects the ad from the top, partially obscuring a view
of the left side of the woman’s head. In her left hand, she holds an egg; her
right hand clutches an eggbeater that rests inside a bowl on the table in front
of her.The image is arresting because the woman appears clothed for some-
thing other than beating eggs, a potentially messy task. Here, our concept of
domesticity is challenged; the woman we see associates herself with a tradi-
tionally female task (that of cooking), yet her personal appearance implies
that she participates in important activities outside of the home.The text of
the advertisement may further confuse our perceptions. It reads: “She’s the
food editor on a well-known home magazine . . . the food expert of a happy
family in Chappaqua, NewYork. She’s an expert on Chinese art with a cura-
tor’s job at the museum . . . an expert on American fashion who looks to
L’Aiglon for smart clothes like this coatdress of Lorette” (34).The text implies
that this woman before us is every woman, capable of being any one of the
many things listed above her; the choices, however, at once celebrate the
woman’s role as homemaker (“food expert of a happy family”) while also
challenging that role (“expert on Chinese art”).
It is advertisements like those for L’Aiglon clothing that seemingly haunt
Plath’s protagonist. Though this advertisement ostensibly promises readers
“the absolute anything, the totally everything” that they may want, the pho-
tograph seems to contradict that promise (Eustis 1953, 174). The juxtaposi-
tion of the woman’s clothing—the “coatdress of Lorette”—and the egg, egg
beater, and mixing bowl seems almost ridiculous. The subtext of the adver-
tisement, then, is that such an achievement is not easy; in fact, it’s almost
absurd, the image seems to conclude. Simultaneously achieving such dis-
parate roles as “food editor,”“food expert,” and “expert on Chinese art” is as
difficult to accomplish as reconciling such impulses as having “a husband and
a happy home and children” and becoming “a famous poet” or “a brilliant
professor” (Plath 1971, 62). Moreover, both the advertisement and Esther not
10 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

only seem to question the possibility of such an achievement but also which
version of the “proper” woman is more appropriate.
Throughout The Bell Jar, Esther preoccupies herself with performing
“appropriately.” For Esther, the only way to be accepted by others is to con-
form to what society thinks a woman in the 1950s should be.As a result, she
devotes much time throughout the novel to watching other women perform
femininity—a femininity prescribed, yet simultaneously confused, by
women’s magazines. Garry M. Leonard explores the relationship that Esther
has with other women in the text as well as the messages that she seems to
ingest in terms of society’s views of women—a message that becomes most
apparent after Esther watches a film in which the hero, torn between two
women, eventually chooses the “nice blond girl” over the “sexy black-haired
girl” (Plath 1971, 34).“The implicit message in the film,” writes Leonard,“is
that a woman must first divide herself and then banish the sensual half.A girl
is either ‘nice’ or she is not; she is either loved for denying her needs, or she
is abandoned as punishment for exploring the world on her own, for using
her unprecedented emotions and desires as a guide” (1992, 70). Leonard’s
comment points to the fact that mass media of the time period, in his exam-
ple film but I would also argue in the form of women’s magazines, often
depicted women as either acceptable or unacceptable in the eyes of society,
as either “good” or “bad” girls.
These distinctions, for Esther, are often directly linked to the way in
which women in the novel relate to or interact with their food. Esther’s
mother and her boyfriend’s (Buddy Willard) mother perform the roles of the
ideal 1950s housewife. Both can cook, and both, when discussed in the novel,
are characterized by this ability. Upon first returning home after her experi-
ence in New York, Esther is awakened by the sound of her mother making
juice (“the buzz of the orange squeezer sounded from downstairs”) and the
smell of “coffee and bacon” (Plath 1971, 94). Instead of being awakened by
her mother’s voice, Esther is awakened by the sounds of proper domesticity;
Esther’s mother cooks for her daughter and cleans up the kitchen (“Then the
sink water ran from the tap and dishes clinked as my mother dried them and
put them back in the cupboard”) (94). Though she cannot directly see it,
Esther envisions her mother’s neat and orderly housekeeping. Likewise,
Buddy Willard’s mother is the type of woman who keeps a neat house and
properly feeds her family. When Esther and Mr. Willard visit the sanitarium
where Buddy is staying for his tuberculosis, Esther mentions that the two
“parked in an icy turnoff and shared out the tunafish sandwiches and the oat-
meal cookies and the apples and the thermos of black coffee Mrs.Willard had
packed for our lunch” (71). Plath’s repetition of the word “and” here indi-
cates the excessiveness of Mrs.Willard’s gesture. Instead of just packing sand-
 Caroline J. Smith 11

wiches, Mrs.Willard packed a complete lunch, one with cookies, apples, and
coffee, an act that points to her effectiveness as a homemaker. Mrs.Willard’s
homemaking is so effective, in fact, that it transcends the physical boundaries
of her home and follows her family into the outside world.
At one point in the novel, Esther despairs over the tasks that she is unable
to do. Not accomplishing these tasks, Esther feels, makes her different from
those women who can perform effectively. She reflects:
I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.
I began with cooking.
My grandmother and my mother were such good cooks that I left every-
thing to them. They were always trying to teach me one dish or another,
but I would just look on and say,“Yes, yes, I see,” while the instructions slid
through my head like water, and then I’d always spoil what I did so nobody
would ask me to do it again.
I remember Jody, my best and only girlfriend at college in my freshman
year, making me scrambled eggs at her house one morning. They tasted
unusual, and when I asked her if she had put in anything extra, she said
cheese and garlic salt. I asked who told her to do that, and she said nobody,
she just thought it up. But then, she was practical and a sociology major.
(Plath 1971, 61)
Again, Esther compares herself to others around her. Unlike Jody, who makes
delicious, experimental scrambled eggs and is “practical and a sociology
major,” Esther sees herself as deviant for not being able to cook and wanting
instead to become a writer. Esther’s anxiety becomes even more under-
standable when looked at in relation to Mademoiselle magazine’s recurring
column on cooking. As noted earlier, Mademoiselle presented a short article
on cooking, accompanied by a silver pattern in many of the issues from 1953.
The September 1953 column, entitled “The Feeding of Young Men,”
instructed women on how to cook. Though the article opens by saying,
“Whatever your mother may have told you, the way to a man’s heart is devi-
ous and complicated and not usually through his stomach,” it continues in
the next paragraph to say, “Still, it is almost impossible to go around with
anyone for any length of time without once giving him something to eat”
(Aikman 1953, 58). Mademoiselle explains that though “you naturally want to
give him something more or less impressive. It needn’t be elaborate” (58).You
could, it advises, just scramble him some eggs. Despite the fact that the begin-
ning of the article instructs young women how to keep it simple, the end of
the article presents the reader with a full-scale dinner, either sauerbraten or, if
you’re not as daring, guinea hens. This article presents its reader with an
unclear message about cooking. Do you need to cook something elaborate to
ensnare a man or not? Will scrambled eggs really do? In Esther’s case, neither
12 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

sauerbraten, guinea hens, nor scrambled eggs are an issue, for she is unable to
cook anything at all—a fact that increases her anxiety about being seen by
women like her mother, Buddy Willard’s mother, and Jody as unacceptable.
Esther’s observation here distinguishes her not only from women of her
mother’s generation but also from her contemporaries, like Jody.While other
women she knows may be dreaming of the perfect silver pattern or life in
the suburbs, Esther fears that she does not want all that married life may
promise her. She notes:
It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and
toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d
left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when
he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and
I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed,
utterly exhausted. (Plath 1971, 68)
Esther believes that marriage would imprison her in the kitchen, making
food as her mother and Buddy Willard’s mother do. Articles such as “The
Feeding of Young Men” and “The Eternal Appetite,” compounded this anx-
iety. While Aikman’s first article stresses the importance of being able to
impress with a good meal, in “The Eternal Appetite,” she alludes to the
never-ending labor that goes into keeping a man fed, asserting, “A husband
may not eat as much as an elephant but he eats almost as often; no sooner
have you got the last meal off your mind than he looks up and remarks pleas-
antly, ‘Gee I’m hungry’” (1953, 28). Articles such as these reinforced the idea
that men were unable to cook for themselves and reliant upon the women they
dated, and eventually married, to do it for them. Read in this context, then,
Esther’s inability to cook might not only result in her literal starvation but also
her metaphorical starvation. Unable to perform the appropriate domestic
behaviors, as exhibited by her mother and Jody, Esther will be unable to feed
either herself or any young man, and the consequence of this action will result
in one of her “fat purple fig[s]” falling, uneaten, at her feet (62).
The act of eating becomes, for Esther, a contested space while food itself
becomes a way to determine “social meaning” (Mintz 1996, 7). In his book
Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past,
Sidney Mintz describes the way in which eating becomes more than a
“’purely biological’” act:
The foods eaten have histories associated with the pasts of those who eat
them; the techniques employed to find, process, prepare, serve, and consume
the foods are all culturally variable, with histories of their own. Nor is the
food simply eaten; its consumption is always conditioned by meaning.
(Mintz 1996, 7)
 Caroline J. Smith 13

Mintz’s assertion rings true for Esther who from the onset of the book sees
social meaning connected to the way women of the novel interact with their
food. Though Esther expresses apprehension regarding her inability to per-
form proper, domestic behaviors, the way in which the women of her life
interact with their food remains largely consistent. However, upon Esther’s
arrival in New York, she not only meets women like Jay Cee, her editor, and
Doreen, a fellow intern, who defy the roles to which she has grown accus-
tomed, but she also sees women eating differently, which further confuses
Esther’s relationship to her food.
Doreen, in particular, becomes a woman who fascinates Esther. At first,
Esther notices Doreen because of her “bright white hair standing out in a
cotton candy fluff round her head” (Plath 1971, 4). But before long, it is
Doreen’s eating habits that preoccupy Esther. Plath writes: “Doreen was
spooning up the hunks of fruit at the bottom of her glass with a spindly sil-
ver spoon, and Lenny was grunting each time she lifted the spoon to her
mouth, and snapping and pretending to be a dog or something, and trying
to get the fruit off the spoon. Doreen giggled and kept spooning up the
fruit” (10). In this scene, the labor necessary to prepare food is absent, and in
contrast to Esther’s mother or Buddy Willard’s mother, Doreen uses her food
to entice the men around her. This experience opens Esther’s eyes to the
ways in which women might not fit the more conservative model con-
structed by Mademoiselle for its readers.
Despite the fact that Esther becomes exposed to women defying the
standards of femininity, she is never fully able to rid herself of the anxiety she
feels about her association with them, and she continually makes attempts to
distance herself from them.Though Esther compliments her boss, Jay Cee, on
her intelligence, moments later she declares her “plug-ugly;” she at once
approves and disapproves of her (Plath 1971, 5). Esther’s relationship with
Doreen is complicated in such a way as well.While Esther is flattered to have
Doreen take notice of her, at the same time, Esther wishes to disassociate her-
self from her. Though Esther accompanies Doreen to Lenny’s apartment,
when Doreen appears on her doorstep sick, Esther shuts the door, wishing
that Doreen would go away and hoping that the cleaning lady who brought
Doreen around would know that she “had nothing to do with Doreen” that
“It was Betsy [she] resembled at heart” (18, 19). Though Esther may be
attracted by a version of the feminine that differs from Betsy’s good-hearted,
honest, and pure nature, ultimately she finds herself conflicted, wishing to
conform to society’s expectations of her.
The first half of Plath’s novel, which chronicles Esther’s experiences in
New York, is peppered with food moments—moments that continue to
emphasize Esther’s anxiety concerning her ability to fit in with the norma-
14 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

tive world around her, the normative world, that is, which abides by the more
conservative images constructed by women’s magazines. At the Ladies’ Day
banquet that Esther attends in New York during her internship, she reveals
her extreme anxiety about her performance in social settings, particularly
when that performance involves food. Throughout this chapter, we see
Esther contradicting herself, presenting herself as acceptable in the eyes of
Mademoiselle readers yet revealing that she sometimes strays from the maga-
zine’s prescriptions. Esther proudly proclaims at the start of this chapter,“No
matter how much I eat, I never put on weight.With one exception I’ve been
the same weight for ten years” (Plath 1971, 20). Here, Esther is at once claim-
ing she never gains weight yet also offering the reader information contrary
to that fact. Not only is her statement contradictory, but her declaration also
seems to reinforce to her reader that she does not stray from the ideal body
type exhibited in the girdle advertisements that fill Mademoiselle. Despite her
excessive cravings, her size will never increase.
Esther continues, “We were always taken out on expense accounts, so I
never felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other peo-
ple waiting who generally ordered only chef ’s salad and grapefruit juice
because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York
was trying to reduce” (Plath 1971, 20). Esther’s use of the term “reduce” calls
to mind the jargon used in women’s magazines; in the July 1953 issue,
Mademoiselle offered an article entitled “Diet with Dessert: The New
Reducing Theory That Lets You Have Your Cake and Figure Too” (Peck
1953, 66). Esther shows here that she is conscious of the ways in which she
is different from the other women around her; “Everybody . . . in New York
was trying to reduce,” everybody, that is, except Esther (my emphasis).
Again, though Esther claims to feel no guilt, she still attempts to eat her food
more quickly than the others, presumably so as not to draw attention to the
fact that she has ordered excessive amounts of food. Throughout the text,
statements such as these reinforce the fact that Esther may not be the most
reliable of narrators. Rather, however, than reading these inconsistencies as
a flaw in Plath’s text, I believe that these contradictions point directly to the
conflicted nature of Esther’s character. Recalling Walker’s assessment that
domesticity in post-war America was never “prescribed and stable,” we
begin to also see the ways in which Esther herself is never “consistent” or
“monolithic;” rather, her conflicted identity is a product of her social and
historical circumstances (2000, vii).
Perhaps nowhere is Esther’s anxiety regarding the proper performance in
social settings, particularly when that performance involves food, more
apparent than the scene of overeating that occurs at the Ladies’ Day banquet
Esther attends. On the one hand, Esther’s experience at the Ladies’ Day ban-
 Caroline J. Smith 15

quet proves to be a liberating one. The food she encounters if dramatically

different from the food that she is used to:
The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It’s not
that we hadn’t enough to eat at home, it’s just that my grandmother always
cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of say-
ing, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth,“I hope you enjoy
that, it cost forty-one cents a pound,” which always made me feel I was
somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast. (Plath 1971, 21)
The excessiveness of the meals in New York is not something familiar to
Esther; the meal’s difference enables her to consciously separate herself from
her home. She delights in the food not only because it is distinct from the
food that she has grown up with but also because the female labor associat-
ed with food is absent in these meals. Food again serves as a sign of some-
thing more significant in Esther’s life, representing a separation from her
home and the opportunity to leave the expectations of her mother, and the
ideal 1950s housewife that she represents, at home.
Yet, in this scene, it is clear that even though Esther is delighted by the
food presented to her she is also anxious about how she will interact with
that food and, in turn, how others will perceive her interaction.While at the
banquet, she is concerned about the way in which she eats her chicken and
caviar: “I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken
slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a slice of
bread” (Plath 1971, 22).Though she recognizes her eating habits as uncon-
ventional, she hopes no one will notice if she consumes her food fast
enough. Esther feels compelled to nourish herself; she even schemes in this
scene to be sure to have the largest amount of food:“While we were stand-
ing up behind our chairs listening to the welcome speech, I had bowed my
head and secretly eyed the position of the bowls of caviar. . . . I figured the
girl across from me couldn’t reach it because of the mountainous center-
piece of marzipan fruit” (21). Esther’s desperation in this scene to feed her-
self is reminiscent of her earlier fear in the fig tree passage; it is as if, fearing
starvation, Esther attempts to procure any means of sustenance possible,
attempting to disguise her unusual eating habits so as not to draw attention
to herself.
While Esther asserts her lack of guilt about the amount of food that she
eats and the way in which she eats it, ultimately, this scene culminates in
Esther’s extreme discomfort—both physically and mentally—in having
overindulged. Though Esther schemes to have the largest quantity of food
and safely obtains it for herself, later, while watching a movie with the other
interns, her gorging results in her feeling ill:“I felt in terrible danger of puk-
ing. I didn’t know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomachache
16 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

or all that caviar I had eaten” (Plath 1971, 34).The movie on the screen, the
one with both “nice blond girl” and the “sexy black-haired girl,” becomes
linked in Esther’s mind to her greed. Esther’s inability to conform to the
standards set by New York society—Mademoiselle’s “How To” tips, the call to
reduce—again exhibits her deviation from the behavioral models that sur-
round her.
To Esther, purging seems to be the necessary and inevitable result of her
disordered eating. She becomes violently ill in the cab on the way home from
the movie and again at her hotel. Having stepped outside the boundaries of
society, Esther must now be punished for her transgression. Even when, later, a
nurse reveals to her that her illness resulted from food poisoning, Esther’s anx-
iety does not decrease.Though she takes momentary comfort in the affirma-
tive answer to her question—“Is everybody else sick, too?”—her anxiety only
intensifies throughout the remainder of the novel, resulting in her unhappiness,
depression, and her eventual mental breakdown (Plath 1971, 38).
Though Esther’s experiences in New York City conclude with Chapter
9 of Plath’s novel, Plath continues to underscore Esther’s feelings of being an
outsider with moments connected to food.The day she is to leave NewYork,
Esther packs her suitcase, which is “empty, except for The Thirty Best Short
Stories of theYear, a white plastic sunglasses case and two dozen avocado pears,
a parting present from Doreen” (1971, 92-93).The night before, Esther once
again purged—though this time she cleansed herself from a horrible evening
with a “woman-hater” named Marco by throwing all her clothes off the roof
of her hotel—which accounts for her empty suitcase (87).The collection of
short stories and the avocados are significant symbols for Esther, and both
seem to be representative of her desire to stand in opposition to the more
traditional, domestic models that she has previously encountered. Given to
Esther by Doreen, the avocados remind Esther of her friend; they are an
extravagant and untraditional going-away present. However, they are also
fleeting. Even though the avocados may remind Esther of Doreen and the
other untraditional female models that she encountered in New York; ulti-
mately, the avocados, like these women, are not lasting. Upon returning home,
the avocados will rot before Esther has a chance to consume them, and
women like Doreen will be replaced by women like Esther’s mother and Jody.
The book serves as an equally unsettling symbol.The collection, on one
hand, serves as a tangible reminder of Esther’s career goals.Yet, at the same
time, its contents might discourage a young female writer.As mentioned pre-
viously, Stanley Sultan’s “The Fugue of the Fig Tree,” was published in The
Best American Short Stories from 1953. In that collection, with which Plath was
familiar, there were thirty stories total; while twenty-five were written by
men, there were only five women who were published. Additionally, while
 Caroline J. Smith 17

Mademoiselle published fiction by women and by young female writers like

Plath herself, the profile piece that Plath wrote for the August 1953 college
issue entitled “Poets on Campus” focused exclusively on “Five talented
young men” (Plath 1971, 290). For Esther, then, the collection of stories that
she packed, like the messages imparted by Mademoiselle, both encouraged and
discouraged her navigation beyond the private sphere.While on the surface
the collection of stories and the avocados may serve as a reminder of the
opportunities open to Esther, these symbols are complicated by the context
in which Plath has placed them.
As Esther becomes increasingly depressed upon returning home from
New York, Plath continually connects her inability to read, write, and eat
with her deteriorating emotional state. Esther tells her doctors that she’s “not
sleeping and not eating and not reading” (Plath 1971, 106).To Esther, read-
ing and writing are as essential to her well-being as sleeping and eating, yet
she believes that she is continually discouraged from pursuing these activi-
ties. Additionally, in this section of the novel, Esther tries to feed herself but
is unsuccessful. On a beach picnic with Jody, Esther’s friend who is known
for making superior scrambled eggs, Esther attempts, despite her recent
depression, to perform as the others do. She notes,“We browned hot dogs on
the public grills at the beach, and by watching Jody and Mark and Cal very
carefully I managed to cook my hot dog just the right amount of time and
didn’t burn it or drop it into the fire, the way I was afraid of doing. Then,
when nobody was looking, I buried it in the sand” (127). Here, Plath signi-
fies Esther’s severe emotional distress (earlier that morning she had attempt-
ed to hang herself) with her inability to eat anything at all. Yet, even with
such severe depression, she is still eager to perform as others do, especially
with the added pressure of Jody’s presence. She buries her hot dog “when
nobody [is] looking” in order to keep attention away from her disordered
behavior. Again, Plath uses Esther’s interactions with her food to not only
signify her severe psychological distress but to also emphasize how ingrained
her compulsion to mimic expected behaviors actually is.
Unable to deal with the pressure, Esther attempts to commit suicide by
ingesting a bottle of pills; she is found by her family and hospitalized.Though
we might hope that Esther’s hospitalization provides her with a space in which
she can be free of the more conservative messages that Mademoiselle offers its
readers, Esther seems unable to escape them. In fact, after her suicide attempt,
she awakens to darkness. Moments later “A cheery voice spoke out of the dark.
‘There are a lot of blind people in the world.You’ll marry a nice blind man
someday’” (Plath 1971, 140). And, hopefully, have Gorham sterling.
This comment made to Esther about her blindness is a complex one,
especially when looked at in relation to her preoccupation with the ideolo-
18 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

gies of women’s magazines. If Esther is, in fact, blind then technically she will
not be able to see the depictions of women in magazines such as
Mademoiselle. Ideally, she may even be able to escape being controlled by
those depictions. Ironically, though, in an instant after Esther hears she is
blind, the nurse explodes any hope that she may be free. Her words, “You’ll
marry a nice blind man someday,” informed by the discourse of women’s
magazines reveal that these domestic ideologies are not easy to escape. To
complicate things further, a few paragraphs later, it becomes questionable as
to whether a nurse actually visited Esther at all, implying that Esther may
have imagined this conversation. Regardless of who speaks these words, the
words themselves reveal both the pervasiveness of the ideologies marketed by
consumer culture and Esther’s inability to escape them, and they further
establish for the reader just how difficult, if not impossible, it will be for
Esther—even in a place of recovery—to escape the domestic models that
have been troubling her so greatly.
In both spaces where Esther’s recovery takes place, she continues to be
haunted by the more traditional, domestic ideologies represented by her
mother and Jody and in Mademoiselle magazine, and once again, scenes of eat-
ing express Esther’s unrest. She spends time at two different institutions
throughout the rest of Plath’s novel—a state hospital and a private institution
paid for by her benefactor, Philomena Guinea.At the state institution, Esther
cannot relate to the other patients, people like Mrs. Mole who is often seen
“yelling and laughing in a rude way” (Plath 1971, 148), and she tries to con-
vince those around her that she is different from the other patients by per-
forming appropriately. Plath includes a dining scene that eerily parallels that
of the Ladies’ Day banquet—though those present and the food served are
vastly different—to again illustrate Esther’s compulsion to perform. The
scene begins with Esther taking responsibility for distributing the food to
those present at the table. Esther’s actions here are far different from her
behavior at the Ladies’ Day banquet where she jockeyed for position closest
to the caviar. In fact, the nurse praises Esther for her model behavior,
impressed by her compulsion to serve others. Unlike Mrs. Mole, who upsets
a dish of beans, Esther complies with these expected behaviors and sets her-
self apart from the other patients who she feels are profoundly more dis-
turbed than she. One of the chief ways that she tries to distance herself from
them, then, is to perform acceptably, imitating the behaviors of women like
her mother, Jody, and her fellow Guest Editors at the Ladies’ Day banquet.
The stakes here, though, as Esther sees them, are much higher; rather than
merely being perceived as an outsider, as she might have at the Ladies’ Day
banquet, her ability to perform properly might not just brand her as “nor-
mal” but actually entitle her to a release from the institution.
 Caroline J. Smith 19

Esther sees her behavior as being rewarded when she is moved to the
private hospital. At Caplan, both the surroundings and the patients more
immediately call to mind the images from Mademoiselle. Upon entering this
new institution, Plath underscores its difference from the state hospital:
A maid in a green uniform was setting the tables for supper. There were
white linen tablecloths and glasses and paper napkins. I stored the fact that
they were real glasses in the corner of my mind the way a squirrel stores a
nut.At the city hospital we had drunk out of paper cups and had no knives
to cut our meat. (Plath 1971, 153)
Esther is delighted that at Caplan she will be served in a manner that is more
fitting to her expectations. Additionally, the new patients, unlike Mrs. Mole,
are more familiar to her. On a tour of the facility, Esther notices a fellow
patient:“I sat down nearValerie and observed her carefully.Yes, I thought, she
might as well be in a Girl Scout camp. She was reading her tatty copy of
Vogue with intense interest. ‘What the hell is she doing here?’ I wondered.
‘There’s nothing the matter with her’” (Plath 1971, 154). The pervasiveness
of Mademoiselle’s ideologies is revealed in Esther’s observations. Again, not
even in the mental institution, a place of recovery, can she leave Vogue and its
versions of normalcy behind. And, in turn, ironically, the only place that she
can recover is one which seems to comply with the standards set forth by
these magazines.
Ultimately, then, Esther seems to discover on her path to recovery that
the only way to achieve acceptability by society is to comply with the more
traditional, domestic models offered by Mademoiselle magazine. Repeatedly,
while in Caplan, she sees acceptability, or normalcy, being linked to eating,
and when she transgresses, she is punished. At Caplan and then Belize, to
where Esther is eventually moved, the nurses withhold breakfast from those
patients who are scheduled for shock therapy. Esther interprets this act to
mean that those who are well enough, that those who are “normal,” receive
breakfast and escape shock therapy. Her physical appetite is fueled by an even
more intense desire to be considered “normal.” Receiving food signifies to
Esther that she is recovering, not different from other girls her age, the Jodys
and Betseys of the world who happily conform to the gendered expectations
of society.
It is in the last significant act of eating that Esther cements her beliefs
that transgressing society’s carefully scripted boundaries for women can be
disastrous. On one of her sanctioned afternoon outings from Belize, Esther
has dinner with Irwin, a man she is intent on losing her virginity to; she eats
escargot, noting that she was “greedy for butter” (Plath 1971, 186) and drinks
glass after glass of wine.Again, like the earlier Ladies’ Day scene where Esther
paved her chicken with caviar, here, she seems to ignore the acceptable and
20 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

appropriate way to dine. Esther’s overindulgence is again met with devastat-

ing results, for after sleeping with Irwin, she hemorrhages and must be rushed
to the hospital. Compounding this, she later finds out that Joan, a fellow
patient, has hanged herself. Esther again sees herself as being punished for this
overindulgence in food and sex, and again, her overeating is linked to
tragedy—a fact that serves to ingrain in her the belief that disregarding gen-
dered boundaries is not just ill-advised but also catastrophic. In the end,
Esther seems to have learned that “[She] cannot get the absolute anything,
the total everything, that [she] want[s]” (Eustis 1953, 174), and she resigns
herself to behaving appropriately as a way to secure her freedom.
It is shortly after this scene that Plath concludes her novel with the sen-
tence: “The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding
myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room” (1971, 200).
The ending is ambiguous; while on one hand, Esther seems to have recov-
ered, finding closure with both Buddy and Irwin, attending Joan’s funeral,
and preparing for her exit interview, on the other hand, as readers we might
wonder at what cost. My students, in the first-year composition course where
I teach this novel, long for some sort of resolution, and debate the ending of
Plath’s novel during class. Some students will argue that Esther is “better,”
referring to the novel’s opening, citing the passage, “. . . I still have them
around the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week I cut the
plastic starfish off the sunglasses for the baby to play with” (3). Others will
counter that Esther’s being married and having a baby stands at odds with
what the whole book was about—her desire to become a writer, her long-
ing to defy the expectations for women so carefully scripted by the time
period in which Esther, and Plath, lived. Inevitably, students will bring up
Plath’s tragic end. Many will know the story of her death and how her suicide
was connected to the act of eating.As Janet Malcolm explains in her book, The
Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Plath before “she committed suicide,
in February 1963, by putting her head in a gas oven as her two small children
slept in a bedroom nearby” left for them “mugs of milk and a plate of bread”
(7). It was as if, in this final moment, Plath, like Esther, was haunted by the
domestic behavioral models that she encountered in her own life.
After ruminating on these facts for a while, I’ll encourage my students to
return to the text, to focus on what Plath writes about Esther, what clues she
gives us about Esther’s future. We’ll go back to the passages where Esther
expresses her intense anxiety about having a husband and children and the
work that it will require, and we’ll look very carefully at the final chapter
where, despite heading to her exit interview, she still can only see “question
marks,” as she focuses carefully on her “stocking seams,” “black shoes,” and
“red wool suit”—the kind of clothes that would appear in advertisement
 Caroline J. Smith 21

from Mademoiselle (Plath 1971, 199). Frustrated, someone will declare that
The Bell Jar is just as mixed-up and confused as the issues of Mademoiselle that
we’ve been looking at.
It’s at this point in the conversation where I’ll intervee, calling attention
to the fact that, as a class, we do not need to wrap things up neatly, especial-
ly if the author’s prose resists that impulse. Plath’s text doesn’t give the read-
er any easy answers because Esther didn’t have any. Rather, I remind the stu-
dents of Nancy Walker’s assertion that post-war America, just like magazines
themselves, was never “prescribed and stable,” and I encourage them to see
the ways in which Esther herself is never “consistent” or “monolithic” (2000,
vii).We can read Esther, then, for the character she truly is—a woman with
a confused sense of identity, informed by the conflicted, historically rooted
messages she encounters, overcome by a tremendous fear of losing all the
opportunities that “beckoned and winked” and ultimately starving to death
(Plath 1971, 85).

Notes
1 On November 10, 2000, Jim Long contributed this information to the Sylvia
Plath Forum (http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/archives/29.html). On June 23,
2009, Peter K. Steinberg posted about the connection on his blog, Sylvia Plath Info.

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