#the bell jar sylvia plath

[thebookdragonshoard]

alright, y’all. i just finished The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and it’s time to discuss this fig tree analogy.

buckle up cause we’re gonna be properly capitalizing. it’s that serious.

If you’re unfamiliar with The Fig Tree analogy, let me quote it for you, so you can feel the pain I felt the first time and for contextual purposes.

“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 Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was and Olympic lady crew champion, and 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 and plopped to the ground before me.” - The Bell Jar, chapter 7

First of all, uhm OW SYLVIA?! I did not need to be called out like that right before bed, but here we are anyway.

Basically, if you don’t get it (and it’s perfectly okay if you don’t!!), Esther (the main character) likens the different paths in life available to her as figs on the branches of a fig tree she sits in. However, she doesn’t know which life to pick (i.e. which fig to eat) because, to her, picking one life means losing access to all the others. And because she finds herself unable to choose one life, they all start withering away before her as time goes on until there are no lives left to pick from, symbolized by all the figs blackening and falling to the ground.

And while this is already a beautiful and profound analogy, humor me by allowing me to take it a little further by looking at it from a different perspective.

What about gluttony???

Hear me out, folks. Imagine that Esther, instead of being paralyzed by indecision, instead tries to take a bite from every fig on the tree, therefore trying to live every life available to her? If she can’t choose just one, why not choose all of them?

But, as she’s trying to live all of these different lives and taste all of these figs, she only has the time to take a bite or two from each fig, leaving them half-eaten around her. She can only enjoy small portions of each life available to her, unable to sit back and fully enjoy the sweetness that life can offer her.

And so, as she tries to live all of these different lives and taste each of the figs, by the time she manages to taste each fig, they’ve all begun to rot anyways. But now, instead of just falling to the ground beneath her and rotting away, they’re rotting away in her hands and all around her. And now she’s suffocating under the sickly sweet stench of their decay. The sickly sweetness of all the lives she tried to live, how she only manage to enjoy a portion of each of them. And at the time, it was fun and she was enjoying living this way. But now, she’s suffocating under the weight of these nice, sweet lives she lived that are now taking their toll on her because we as humans are not meant to do so much at once.

And because she was gluttonous and greedy, she is now too full from all the bites of fig she consumed, consequently giving her a stomach ache from overconsumption. And so, the body’s natural reaction is to get rid of the extra in some way.

By choosing all of the figs, she consequently still ends up choosing none of the figs because they now all rot around her and her body cannot keep them down, leaving her with no figs whatsoever instead of the one she could have had if she had found a way to make a single choice.

Does this make sense?? I hope it does. All I know is I came up with this last night, texted it to my book bestie, and then she was Unwell the rest of the night.

[hopesandheartache]

I love food more than just about anything else. No matter how much I eat, I never put on weight. With one exception I've been the same weight for ten years.

— Sylvia Plath, "The Bell Jar"

[pandoras-prison]

[metamorphesque]

— Sylvia Plath, "The Bell Jar"

[qbabydollv]

girls who think too much's dinner 🎀

(credits to gardiency on Pinterest!!)

[lux-noxaurea11]

- Sylvia Plath

[do1li3]

[stellablahh]

made by me

[rahabq]

[floralbabie]

[gossamerg1rl]

[thebookdragonshoard]

as soon as i get the words and feelings in my brain to form coherent sentences, i most certainly will be discussing the fig tree analogy from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (my current read).

it is consuming the vast majority of my brain cells right now and BOY OH BOY DO I HAVE THOUGHTS. I THINK. I PONDER.

i love a good analogy y’all, and this one yanked me off the sidewalk, blindfolded me, duct taped me, tossed me in the trunk of its car, ran over said car with a monster truck, and then tossed the wreckage into the mariana trench. and i’m here for every second of it, i’d let it do it again.

[jun3buggz]

[coldcoffee18]

𝘍𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘴𝘩

[heavenswaif]

[sleeparalys1sdemon]

don’t worry about it mom