Popular Culture In The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath follows the mind of Esther Greenwood, a bright young woman with academic promise and ambition. Esther’s ambition is much too excessive to suit a woman in her society because she dreams beyond the expected life of a woman, which is limited to the docile life of a wife and mother. Esther builds a sense of alienation and craze deriving from the expectations placed upon her in the American popular culture surroundings because of social expectations, her self-critical attitude, and her ambition being constantly shot down.
Popular culture is defined as the entirety of ideas, perspectives, and attitudes that are mainstream of a given way of life of a group of people. The popular culture of 1950’s America consists of women expected to remain pure and obedient to men and to conform to the social expectations that they must find success through a husband, rather than independently. Cultural surroundings affect Esther because she finds herself in a dilemma of following her social order or pursuing her need for independence, driving her in the end to insanity. Esther’s self critical attitude becomes destructive when men’s inability to view her as a separate, intellectual being becomes her own inability. Esther …show more content…
Society views Esther’s ambition as mad, and traps that madness into a bell jar, disconnected from the outside world. The cultural surroundings and affects of society on Esther Greenwood illuminate popular culture’s tendency to create subconscious destruction when societal standards are compared to reality, and the insane unforgiveness one may bind their self to. At the end of the novel, the bell jar is lifted when Esther forgives herself from unnecessary madness and sadness, but she sense that it waits to drop again at any unpredictable