Appearances and The Bell Jar
Just skimming through some of my classmates' post, I see there are a lot of arguments of whether Esther is a character that one can sympathize with or not. I find it very hard to be able to sympathize with her because of her indifference towards those she encounters and her indifference towards herself. I admit that going through her suicidal thoughts connects me more to Esther as a mentally sick character and her plight but I cannot feel sorry for her condition or her circumstances.
It is very clear that Esther never seems like she is in control of her life or in the direction her life is going. She fears marriage because she doesn’t want to play housewife to a man that gets the freedom to do as he pleases; she turns away from a structured, routine way of doing things. Normalcy is not a way of life for her. She plays with suicide as the grounds for convincing herself that she is in control.
I was really intrigued by the fig tree analogy when it came to mapping out how the decisions she makes now determine her life forever. She is so indifferent to exactly what she wants to do that her dreams begin to die away. She doesn’t want to settle for just one profession or way of living, but the more time she waste on not making a definite decision, the more her dreams move away from being real, concrete possibilities. I was really intrigued by what the significance blood could play in the book as a whole. In the beginning of chapter 10, Esther wears Marcos’ blood in resemblance to a war mask of an American Indian. Blood is somewhat of a theme, again, in chapter 12 when she goes back to Dr. Gordon’s office, this time with two band-aids on her calf. It seems that the act of suffering, hurt, and pain are the initiators of autonomy and blood is the personification, the physical evidence that one has achieved that autonomy of one’s self. Esther feels in control of herself and her life because she is the one that is causing herself to go through an experience that only she has the power and restraint to control.
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Very promising lead, Ciara. Esther's hemorrhaging at the end ("I can fix it, all right," says the emergency room doctor) is the beginning of a new life for Esther (though not for Joan, who proceeds to kill herself). Blood somehow indicates authenticity. I find it interesting that--as she states in chapter 11--she "hates the sight of blood." Esther says that she wants all the figs at the same time--but does she really "want" them? A husband and children, a famous poet, a lover with a foreign-sounding name....all these are "accomplishments" and not so much reflections of an inner need (which is where the blood comes in, maybe).
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