The American Dream In The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

"I 'm desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I 'm a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?". The women of the 1960’s lived to serve their husbands and children but women wanted more beyond domestic tasks, inspiring a second wave of feminism that demanded more than just the vote. At the time women were oppressed in almost every way the expectation was that a girl should marry by her early 20s, start a family and then dedicate her life to domestic duties. As Stephanie Coontz, a writer of the time, put it, "The female doesn 't really expect a lot from life. She 's here as someone 's keeper — her husband 's or her children 's." Women were at the mercy …show more content…
In her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar she vividly describes the oppression of women 1950’s America, in doing so she undermines the familial values associated with the American dream. Esther, the book 's protagonist notices a gap between the expectations society held about her experiences and the reality of her experiences. As she is living the American Dream, society expects that she should be happy and confident meaning that Esther feels the need to oppress her natural cynicism and dark humor in order to meet the demands of society. Her self inflicted oppression causes her to slip into a manic depression which eventually results in a suicide attempt. Esther 's sense of alienation stems from the oppression she has endured as a women of the 1950s, we witness her internal struggle as her desire to become an independent career women conflicts with the expectation that she should, ‘settle down’, marry and have children. At it’s core, The Bell Jar serves to challenge the social norms of the 1950s, and challenges the prevailing notion that women were dependent on and inferior to men. Esther struggles with the expectation that she should abandon her hopes and dreams for motherhood and a career in domestic duties. The novel also questions the idea that motherhood is the ultimate in femininity through grotesque images of pregnancy and birth, Esther sees the birthing room as a oubliette describing the birthing bed as “some awful torture table”. Esther notices that her worth is based on her ability to have children: “You oughtn 't see this,” Will muttered in my ear. “You 'll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn 't to let women watch. It 'll be the end of the human race”. Esther is unsatisfied with the idea that she may only live to be a mother and a wife and strives so to be a professional poet, similarly in The Feminine Mystique written by Betty Friedan convinces women that