5 minute read
Figs, Freak Outs and Flirting With the Future
FIGS, FREAK OUTS, & FLIRTING WITH THE FUTURE
A RESPONSE TO "THE BELL JAR" AND ITS LOOK AT OVERWHELMING POSSIBILITIES Written by Olivia Peters, Social Media Manager
Sometimes, when I’m lucky, I’ll come across a novel that truly speaks to me by outlining a shared experience or feeling. Those novels are special. There are so many books out there: it’s a mere chance to pull one off the shelf that you form a connection to. Yet I had never read a novel that has reached beyond shared experience and at times felt like I was reading my own sentiments on the page. That was until I read “The Bell Jar” by Slyvia Plath. I was grasping onto every word of her cautionary tale. Plath’s fully developed thoughts seemed to be based on my current musings about life and the decisions that come toward the end of college. I felt that her words were meant to teach me at exactly the right transitory moment in my life when I needed their guidance. Slyvia Plath was born in 1932.1 She was a gifted writer her entire life, publishing poems as early as high school to earn a college scholarship. She eventually received a graduate fellowship at Cambridge. She was married and divorced, had two children and ultimately committed suicide in 1963. She received the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1982 for “Collected Poems.”2
“The Bell Jar” was Plath’s only published novel. Although it’s fictionalized, it was heavily influenced by her life. Ester Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist, receives a writing scholarship to attend college. The summer after her junior year, Ester goes to New York to become a guest editor on a magazine, just as Plath had. Ester leaves this experience feeling lost, and tries to kill herself, as Plath had. She’s put in an asylum where she eventually recovers. The novel describes Ester’s descent into mental illness and depression, as well as her recovery. It’s haunting to read, knowing that although Ester turns out okay, Plath did not. Ester has her whole life in front of her as she finishes her internship in New York. As an extremely intelligent and beautiful woman, she succeeds in almost all she puts her mind to. There’s a point midway through the story where Ester is being photographed and asked by her boss what she wants to be when she grows up. She can’t find the words and breaks down in tears. This is when readers recognize the depth of Esther’s struggles. It’s hard to understand at first because everything is going so well for her until she begins to go dark. To me, Ester’s tears were reassuring. This summer I completed a rigorous marketing internship, working long hours and living in a small town near corporate. I met my parents for dinner two weeks before the end of the internship. Things were going well at work. I was being told I’d end the summer with a job offer. I was achieving my college goals, exactly on the trajectory that I envisioned going into my senior year. My parents were surprised to see me crying across from them at the restaurant when I told them about my expected job offer. I couldn’t quite articulate between breaths why I felt
Sometimes marketing feels like what I’m supposed to do. I’m good at it, and it offers a stable career. Still, I often daydream about writing my own novel or being a columnist for a magazine. Some days, I’m so anxious that I think instead of any modern career, I should move to a small town and open a coffee shop to live simply. Other days, I wake up and I start Googling MBA programs at Oxford and Stanford and I wonder how far I could rise within a company if I tried.
For our generation, to be successful means you must be driven from a young age: spread yourself thin in high school to get into college, and thinner in college to get an internship. Once you get the internship and your degree, what comes next? We’re programmed to look forward to achievement. What happens when we reach a good place? I don’t think we’re able to just stop being driven, to stop reaching for the next big accomplishment as we have been for the last 10 years. How do we sit still in our successes and the possibilities they’ve afforded us? Plath identifies the toxic side of drive and discontentedness in her novel. At one point, Ester loses her footing on reality as her dreams pull her farther away from enjoying her successes and the present: “...beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. 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.”1 I was, and often still am, lost in the possibilities, but I learned from Plath. Her words and Ester’s tale showed me an unhappy path that would come from allowing myself to be pessimistically overwhelmed by the possibilities. I have to see them as opportunities, none final nor binding. How exciting it is to know that there are multiple versions of your future out there waiting for you. I plan to take my time trying some of them on for size, but won’t let them shrivel up before I choose one.
I should smile at where I am and all that’s before me. Although I am overwhelmed on a daily basis, I know that eventually, I will make a decision, and eventually, I will find ways to be content in any stillness that may ensue. Life is too short to live out all of the versions we see before us now. But it’s not too short for growth, frequent change and achieving a few dreams. “The Bell Jar,” while dark, is an eyeopening novel meant to be read by college students whose lives are filled with prospects. It has helped me by lending words to the struggle occurring in my head and making me feel not so ridiculous in this specific sadness. I think it can do the same for a lot of others, and I heavily recommend it to all. ■
