In 2020, with the world as it is, there is little time to read a book twice. Most of us can hardly fit the book in the first time around, so in the precious pockets of time that you might get free, it’s worth knowing the stories that are worth reading. Some recommendations in our forthcoming fortnightly books column will be new, and many of them will be classics, all chosen to be still as relevant in your midlife as they were when you first heard of them. Whether new or old, they all will be time well spent.

This week, we’re starting with one that can get overlooked; and one that is more relevant to the woman in her midlife than ever.

The Book:

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (pseudonym Victoria Lucas)

Publication:

1963

Why it should be read:

To be frequently cited as a ‘millennial read’ dismisses Plath’s extraordinary insight into modern women and the challenges they forever come up against. On the surface, the book follows protagonist Esther Greenwood, a college student from Massachusetts, who travels to New York to work on a renowned magazine for a month. Slowly then, she descends into mental illness.

It’s only as you delve deeper into the life of Esther, a young woman in the 1950s bound by societal rules and restrictions regarding her gender you realise her story could have been written in any era – for a woman of any age – and thus, remains relevant.

Accomplished and intelligent; she never felt good enough among her peers, never felt she fit in. All the girls she knew were educated in fancy secretarial schools, waiting for rich husbands. Esther is Plath herself. She was expected to marry, her ambition to only take her so far as to secure a marriage with her life to revolve around family and the children she would have. Esther/Plath resented the limitations presented to her based on her gender in the 1950s. She was furious that men were held up to different standards – as they continue to be now.

She would never ‘have it all’ (dangerous as that narrative is) – she wouldn’t even be given that choice. And this, she wholly resented. She was to be one thing only. The indecisiveness of this most certainly contributed to her mental illness.

The Fig Tree

It’s only as I became much older (than the 18-year-old me who first read the book) I realised the potency of her ‘Fig Tree’ metaphor.

Esther finds herself “starving to death'“ when she is unable to choose which metaphorical ‘fig’ to reach for in life: should she choose tranquil domesticity and family life (as she feels is expected of her), a life of travel or a career as a poet and writer? She cannot decide. Eventually, every fig rots and falls to the ground. Therefore, all her options slowly wither and die out, and she along with them.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor… and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions… I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet”

As it was then, it is a metaphor still now for the pressures that women face today. The ‘expected’ path still is children and family with everything else – career, ambition – assumed to flow around it. It’s still, to a degree, a linear expectancy, though, in 2020, we are working harder than ever to change this.

What if you want an entirely different fig altogether? Why should you have to choose any of the options in front of you? Or choose at all?

You won’t be able to help but see yourself as Esther tries so very hard to break free of the bell jar in which she feels she has been placed.

There is an Esther Greenwood/Sylvia Plath in each of us. Her constant challenging of sexism and stereotypes merged with her refusal to be anything less than the woman she is, is why her story deserves a place on your bedside.

Jennifer McShane, July 2020.

What classic books have you enjoyed reading lately?
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