There is contrast between what Esther inner voice is thinking and what she is saying. For example when she talks to Doctor Gordon and her voice reflects on her experience but her inner thoughts are completely different.**
Plath reveals and challenges the values of American society in several ways, these include; the sarcastic tone that Esther uses when talking about, ‘All American things’ challenges what is all American. The fig tree where Early in the novel, Esther reads a story about a Jewish man and a nun who meet under a fig tree. Their relationship is doomed, just as she feels her relationship with Buddy is doomed. Later, the tree becomes a symbol of the life choices that face Esther. She imagines that each fig represents a different life. She can only choose one fig, but because she wants all of them, she sits paralyzed with indecision, and the figs rot and fall to the ground and finally though the characters Buddy and Doreen. Buddy is the ‘All American man’. Doreen comments a lot about the norms of society and expectations of women.
A contemporary reviewer of The Bell Jar once observed that Buddy Willard is a perfect specimen of the ideal 1950s American male. By the standards of the time, Buddy is nearly flawless. Handsome and athletic, he attends church, loves his parents, thrives in school, and studies to become a doctor. Esther appreciates Buddy’s near perfection, and admires him for a long time from afar. But once she gets to know him, she sees his flaws. In what was considered natural behaviour in men at that time, Buddy spends a summer sleeping with a waitress while dating Esther, and does not apologize for his behaviour. Esther also realizes that while Buddy is intelligent, he is not particularly thoughtful. He does not understand Esther’s desire to write poetry, telling her that poems are like dust, and that her passion for poetry will change as soon as she becomes a mother. He accepts his mother’s conventional ideas about how he should organize his domestic and emotional life. Buddy’s sexuality proves boring—Esther finds his kisses uninspiring, and when he undresses before her, he does so in a clinical way, telling her she should get used to seeing him naked, and explaining that he wears net underwear because his “mother says they wash easily.” Finally, he seems unconsciously cruel. He tells Esther he slept with the waitress because she was “free, white, and twenty-one,” acts pleased when Esther breaks her leg on a ski slope, and, in their last meeting, wonders out loud who will marry her now that she has been in a mental institution.
In some ways, Buddy and Esther endure similar experiences. They both show great promise at the beginning of the novel, and at the novel’s end have become muted and worldly. Buddy’s time in the sanatorium during his bout with tuberculosis parallels Esther’s time in the mental institution. Both experiment with premarital sex. Still, they share few character traits, and Esther must reject Buddy because she rejects his way of life. She will not become a submissive wife and mother and shelve her artistic ambitions. I think Esther’s relationship with Buddy echoes the power of men in the 1950’s. She is trapped by the over-powering force of men.
Esther’s sense of alienation from the world around her I think, comes from the expectations placed upon her as a young woman living in 1950s America. Esther feels pulled between her desire to write and the pressure she feels to settle down and start a family. While Esther’s intellectual talents earn her prizes, scholarships, and respect, many people assume that she most wants to become a wife and mother. The girls at her college mock her studiousness and only show her respect when she begins dating a handsome and well-liked boy. Her relationship with Buddy earns her mother’s approval, and everyone expects Esther to marry him. Buddy assumes that Esther will drop her poetic ambitions as soon as she becomes a mother, and Esther also assumes that she cannot be both mother and poet.
Esther longs to have adventures that society denies her, particularly sexual adventures. She decides to reject Buddy for good when she realizes he represents a sexual double standard. He has an affair with a waitress while dating Esther, but expects Esther to remain a virgin until she marries him. Esther understands her first sexual experience as a crucial step toward independence and adulthood, but she seeks this experience not for her own pleasure but rather to relieve herself of her burdensome virginity. Esther feels anxiety about her future because she can see only mutually exclusive choices: virgin or whore, submissive married woman or successful but lonely career woman. She dreams of a larger life, but the stress even of dreaming such a thing worsens her madness.
They go skiing, and Buddy tries to help her, even though Esther thinks that what he suggests is foolhardy. But, having suicidal thoughts, she decides to try to go down a big hill even though she doesn't know how to zigzag. She seems easily influenced to self-destructiveness. Thus she flies to the bottom of the hill and is "doing fine until the man stepped into her path." She breaks her leg in two places and believes that Buddy is really quite happy about it. Throughout the story, Esther is "doing fine" until something or someone—a man usually—steps in her path. Then things go awry, and she always ends up as a crumpled mess. In college, the chemistry class stepped in her path, and in New York City, violent sex stepped into the crowded streets in the guise of Lenny. Later, when Esther goes home, we discover that the letter of non-acceptance for the male instructor's writing course had arrived; this letter ruins Esther's summer plans. We recall, then, when Esther was nine: her father died unexpectedly, ruining her idyllic life. Esther seems bent on rushing towards her projected goals, and she doesn't know what to do when the plans are changed, especially when they are changed by a force outside her, usually a man.
Esther reaches maturity in the early 1950s in an America where women's roles were rigidly assigned. Basically, American women fell into two groups: the good girls and the bad girls. Good girls married well and had 2.5 children, possibly more but not too many more. They kept nice houses, cooked proper, nutritious, and economical meals, went to PTA meetings, and, in general, were dutiful "wives." If they were successful in life, they became very much like Mrs. Eisenhower, or Mrs. Nixon, or Doris Day. The bad girls, in contrast, were sexy, bosomy, probably blonde, and they did not marry proper lawyers and doctors and politicians. They might, if they were clever, become lesser Marilyn Monroe types. Then there were also a group of women who were not really considered women. These were the spinsters and librarians and social workers and old maid school teachers. These intelligent women, these Ethel Rosenberg’s (cited by Esther in the first paragraph of the novel), were doomed in society. They were not classified as good or bad because they did not "play the game" for male attention.
Thus, the good girls and the bad girls were classified and identified in terms of their relationship to men and society; they were not given value in terms of their own personalities, talents, and endeavours. Esther Greenwood is terribly aware of this problem of being shoved by society into an "either/or" situation. This dilemma is portrayed in New York City through the characters of Doreen (the "bad" girl) and Betsy (the "good" girl). The one startling characteristic that Esther has is that she intends to defy any role or life path that will pigeonhole her into being one kind of woman or another. Esther Greenwood wants to be herself, and to be an individual. She wants her American birthright, which is why she keeps saying over and over, "I Am I Am I Am."
The language, form and structure of the novel is carefully devised I think so we as an audience get an insight into Esther’s entrapment. The novel is broken up into a first person narrative and the presentation of characters helps us have a wider understanding of the novel. For example Plath uses characters such as buddy Willard, using a clever writing technique to show his relationship with others, how people viewed him, his actions and physical description. Through Buddy we can have a better understanding of Esther’s situation. Plath uses the technique of flashback for suspense and to delay the plot. A lot of similes and metaphors are used to contribute to imprisonment. For example similes reflecting the 1950’s ‘yellow as cinnamon’.
Overall, I think that Plath is trying to convey the idea that women were being placed in a constricted role in society live as if in a bell jar, able to see the outside world of exciting work and self-determined men, but unable to live it. People suffering from emotional illness are also living as if under a bell jar, isolated from others and unable to escape the distortions of their view of the world.
