The Bell Jar Coming Of Age Novel

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is not the first novel that would come to mind when thinking of a coming-of-age story. However, when looked at closely, it truly is for quite a few reasons. Esther spent what is normally considered one's formative years locked in a stagnant world, without enough experience to consider questioning the expectations placed upon her and women in general. Even though Esther is not a teenager, The Bell Jar is a coming-of-age novel because it explores her attempts to find herself in a society that wants to restrict women from doing so. During her teenage years, Esther was taught what is expected of a woman and how she must act once she gets older, and this disturbed her. Esther’s mother mailed her a magazine article called “In Defense of Chastity,” which said that men “...would try to persuade a girl to have sex...but as soon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her…”(81). From an early age, Esther’s mother ingrained in …show more content…
When thinking about the expectations for marriage, she talks first about how she would have to dote constantly on her husband, and says “So I began to think it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state” (85). She finds this societal norm of marriage as incredibly unpleasant, and uses words such as “brainwashed” and “slave” to represent the feeling of helplessness she would have if married, not in control of her own actions. While the novel seems to focus on her depression as opposed to her coming-of-age, this mental illness is only a side effect of society keeping her locked inside this youthful box of what she can and cannot do, her inability to grow leading to hopelessness. She was unable to question these expectations at a younger age, not until she escaped to the modern world of New