But her future and her female role are not clearly laid out for her. Esther Greenwood has achieved success in her academic endeavors and has won prizes for her writing. The year is 1953, before the popularity of the birth control pill, before women's liberation, and before all the major social movements of the 1960s. Finally, she is a mental patient.Įsther lives in New England she grows up in the 1930s and 40s, arrives in New York City just before her last year in college, and works on an apprenticeship for a fashion magazine.

Esther Greenwood: she is a college girl, a good student, a talented writer, and a fashion magazine contest winner she is the well-bred oldest child in a typical family with two children, a clever games player, a semi-liberated budding intellectual, and a sexually confused late adolescent. It is probably this vacuum in American literature that made The Bell Jar's protagonist so popular. If we are to understand the American female, using the idea that women themselves tell us what their lives are like and how they think and feel, we certainly need more fictional characters with more candor and insight and the courage to reveal themselves. There were, in short, no women writers creating women characters who spoke their minds we had no parallels to Jane Austen's Elizabeth no American women were telling their readers what it is/was like to grow up in this vast and complex culture. But there were no women counterparts to Huck Finn there were no women Gatsbys or Holden Caulfields, or Christopher Newmans. Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers gave us memorable figures, but who were they in relation to their authors? Perhaps the most personal, intimate insights to come from an American woman author had come from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and from Kate Chopin in her novel The Awakening, a piece relegated to obscurity until recently. Cather gave us Ántonia, but this heroine seemed to be an idealized romantic 'other' of Cather herself. We had Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Faulkner's and Sherwood Anderson's young girls and women Hemingway left us the unforgettable Bret Ashley, but none of these characters came from the pens of women. Until the 1970s, American literature did not have a great many female heroines in its works of fiction, and too few of them had been created by women authors.

The bell jar writer