Long Story Short // Looking at the fig tree

In “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, the novel’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, describes a fig tree, where each fig showcases another life. Through each fig, she sees a different future for herself — one with a husband and a good home, one with a famous poet, one with an Olympic lady crew champion and countless other ones she just couldn’t see. By choosing one life, it would mean losing a future with the rest. Spending too much time deciding, all the figs wrinkled, and she was left with none. 

When I first read this passage in high school, I was grappling with college decisions as each one meant a different city and a new life. However, now as a second-year student, the fig tree metaphor seems to loom over my existence, as I have to make decisions about the rest of my life in only a couple of years. 

With such a classic yet devastating quote, I have seen so many people understand that feeling, bearing the weight of these decisions we have to make so young. The character of Esther Greenwood crumbles from pressure after realizing that although she wants to be a writer, she is consciously aware that for a woman in the 50s, unless she is incredibly talented at writing, she will be either stuck in a career that she doesn’t want or made to be a housewife. 

After the character’s spiral, she goes to dinner the next day, eating a hearty meal and immediately feeling better — “I don’t know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”

While her metaphor was valid, as it represented her true, innate, fears, at the end of the day, she just needed to do something that seemed small, like eat, in order for the overwhelming anxiety to go away. 

“The Bell Jar” was very much based on Sylvia Plath’s own life as she interned at the magazine Mademoiselle as a 19-year-old college student and dealt with many of the same problems her character is facing. The depression and suicide attempts made in the novel further serve as reflections of Plath’s life, as she eventually died by suicide, which is arguably what she is most known for. 

Due to this, people so often see Sylvia Plath and “The Bell Jar” as this depressing monument, something that crumpled under the pressure of societal expectations for a woman. Yet, at the end of the novel, Plath wrote the quote — “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”

Greenwood comes to terms with her identity and that she is not responsible for the crushing weight she feels navigating the world. Stepping into a review board to see if she can go out of the mental hospital, she recognizes that although she suffered so much pain, she lifted herself out of the bell jar she felt suffocated under, and was ready to experience life as it comes. 

Readers know that the bell jar eventually came back to Plath, resulting in a fatal irony. While the novel does have its devastating moments, I found the real power of it didn’t necessarily lie in the heavy times, but when despite her struggles, Greenwood recognizes the power they had over her and managed to find the value in all that was lost. 

Throughout “The Bell Jar,” Greenwood is haunted by her inability to choose, along with figuring out her identity as a woman in a male-dominated world. With recent political events, as someone who has always wanted to go into law/politics, there was this inherent part of me that felt so shattered, leading to me completely questioning my decision and whether as a woman, if I could ever truly succeed in my career. 

This feeling has always been a little part of me — a voice saying that I need to be insanely talented and hardworking to be successful. I have so many passions, each representing a part of who I am and what I love, but it leads to me constantly questioning whether I’m on the right career path. It’s a complicated feeling, debating if law would even be worth the struggle, in a society that might just never let a woman succeed. 

Yet, despite everything, I look to Sylvia Plath’s words as inspiration — to find hope in such despair. The novel’s final sentence — “I am, I am, I am,” reminds readers that despite the pressure we may feel from ourselves and society, sometimes all we can do is make the courageous act to breathe deeply, and agree to not only move forward but embrace life for all its uncertainty. 

In another life, I may be a journalist, an architect, an actor, a doctor or who knows what else. It’s so difficult to not feel the need to rush and figure it out — remind myself I’m on the right path. I often get trapped thinking about what-ifs. However, just by doing little basic things in my routine — call a friend, clean my room, read a book or just eat a snack, I can take a pause, and just breathe, only focusing on what’s right in front of me. Although I might not have all the answers, I am taking the next step and feel peace being me.