In one of the most often cited passages fromSylvia Plath’s 1963 novel, The Bell Jar,Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood,

reflects upon the potential paths her lifemight take and her ultimate inability to makedecisions about her future:

I saw my life branching out before melike the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fatpurple fig, a wonderful future beckonedand winked. One fig was a husband anda happy home and children, and anotherfig was a famous poet and another figwas a brilliant professor, and another figwas Ee Gee, the amazing editor, andanother fig was Europe and Africa andSouth America, and another fig wasConstantin and Socrates and Attila and apack of other lovers with queer namesand offbeat professions, and another fig

The Feeding of Young Women”:Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar,Mademoiselle Magazine, andthe Domestic Ideal

Caroline J. Smith

Caroline J. Smith is an assistant

professor in the University

Writing Program at The George

Washington University. She is

the author of Cosmopolitan

Culture and Consumerism in

Chick Lit (2007).

“

was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs weremany more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, justbecause I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. Iwanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all therest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and goblack, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. (Plath 1971,62-63)

The passage is a favorite among literary scholars who consistently relate itssignificance to the larger themes of Plath’s novel. Some critics, like SusanCoyle in “Images of Madness and Retrieval:An Exploration of Metaphor inThe Bell Jar,” see the passage as a metaphor for Esther’s psychological deteri-oration; Coyle notes that Esther is “‘starving’ not simply from indecision butalso from an increasing sense of alienation from self and alienation from theworld and her potential goals” (1984, 165). Critic Marilyn Yalom in “SylviaPlath, The Bell Jar, and Related Poems” explores the way in which the figs inthe novel are used as “traditional symbols of female fecundity” (1985, 170)while LindaWagner-Martin inThe Bell Jar:A Novel of the Fifties, grounds herreading historically, noting that “Esther believed firmly that there was no way,in the American society of the 1950s, that a talented woman could success-fully combine a career with homemaking” (1992, 38).

Most notably, in this passage, Plath draws upon Stanley Sultan’s “TheFugue of the Fig Tree,” published in The Kenyon Review in 1952 and laterincluded in the 1953 collection, The Best American Short Stories.1 The storythat Esther reads and Plath relates, like Sultan’s story, is about a fig tree thatgrows between a Jewish man’s house and a convent.The man and a nun meeteach day to pick the fruit and slowly develop a relationship.The fig tree fromthis story is the fig tree that Esther imagines in the passage above. However,perhaps an even more interesting, and less direct, connection is to HelenEustis’s article, “How to Get Anything You Want,” in the September 1953edition of Mademoiselle magazine. Like Plath’s passage, Eustis’s article isfraught with the narrator’s attempts to make sense of how the world aroundher works and just what she can do to make herself successful. Eustis’s nar-rator envisions the world through rose colored glasses: “I would sit in thecrotch of the apple tree, munching fruit and throwing cores to the ground,reading books that told of rags-to-riches, books that ended ‘And so they livedhappily ever after,’ books that traced the rise of famous men and women,thinking:Yes, this is how it will be” (1953, 112).Though one might expectthe tale to continue in a positive vein, detailing the narrator’s successes,Eustis’s tale exposes the anxiety of the narrator.While “Sometimes it seemed. . . that creatures existed who were born with the silver spoon of luck in their

2 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

mouths, able to get what they wanted without even thinking of it,” she alsonotes that when these women are asked about the secret to their success theynever seem to have satisfying answers (172).Though others seem quite capa-ble of winning “Nobel Prizes, their Oscars, their executive jobs, their PrinceCharmings” (172), the narrator reflects at the close of the piece:“I cannot getthe absolute anything, the total everything, that I want, and I know it” (174).Like the protagonist of Plath’s novel, the narrator of Eustis’s piece ends upfeeling a sense of dissatisfaction. She, like Esther, is still hungry, if you will, fora desired life that she ultimately cannot achieve.Though she attempts to sus-tain herself, on apples and fairytales, she finds her provisions to be unfulfill-ing in the same way that Esther, in the fig tree passage, finds herself sur-rounded by figs yet unable to decide upon what to consume—an indecisionthat results in her metaphorical starvation.

This strong echo of the mixed messages imparted to readers of women’smagazines is representative of The Bell Jar as a whole. Plath’s novel directlyinteracts with, and is informed by, publications such as Mademoiselle. Plathherself was familiar with these publications.During her high school years, shewrote short stories aimed at acceptance by women’s magazines, primarilySeventeen and Mademoiselle, and received her first success in Seventeen inAugust of 1950 for a story entitled “And Summer Will Not Come Again”(Stevenson 1998, 18). During her junior year, Plath competed and was cho-sen as one of Mademoiselle’s Guest Editors for their August 1953 college issue;in June 1953, Plath, along with nineteen other women from college cam-puses across the United States, traveled to New York City to intern—theevent fictionalized in The Bell Jar (Wagner-Martin 1987, 96). EstherGreenwood’s circumstances parallel Plath’s own experiences that summer inNewYork so much so that Aurelia Plath, Plath’s mother, contended in a 1970letter to Harper & Row, the book’s publisher, that Plath hesitated to have thebook published in America because it would upset those whom she had car-icatured (Butscher 1976, 308). In her journals, Plath records her submissionsto various women’s magazines and notes acceptances and rejections. She alsospends time contemplating marriage, noting an attraction and repulsion sim-ilar to Esther’s. For instance, in an entry for September 1951, she writes,“. . .I could hold my nose, close my eyes, and jump blindly into the waters ofsome man’s insides, submerging my-self until his purpose becomes my pur-pose” (2000, 99). Though Plath claims she could accomplish this task, thispassage immediately follows paragraphs in which she expresses her worriesover her ability to be a successful writer. Plath’s involvement with the mag-azine industry, her intention to write for these magazines, and her publica-tions in these texts imply a familiarity with their content.

3Caroline J. Smith

Plath writes her own ambivalence about the place of women in the1950s, alluded to above, into the character of Esther who operates at anintense level of anxiety throughout the novel—an anxiety which leads to hermental breakdown and suicide attempts. As we see in the fig tree passageabove, Esther is unsure of her “proper” place in society, and she imagines thechoices before her as fruit which she must pick before it shrivels and goesbad. Consistently, in The Bell Jar, Plath expresses Esther’s anxiety throughfood moments. Throughout the novel, Plath surrounds Esther with behav-ioral models, from her mother to her peers to the conflicting domestic ide-ologies purported by women’s magazines such as the fictional Ladies’ Daymagazine for which Esther interns in the summer of 1953. Each modelEsther encounters relays the proper way to prepare and consume food, yetEsther continually finds herself unsure of the best way to nourish herself.

In this article, I consider the way in which Plath uses these significantmoments of eating throughout her novel to underscore the intense hold thatthese behavioral models have on her sense of self. I begin by examining theway in which Plath’s novel interacts with and is informed by 1950s maga-zines, focusing specifically upon 1953 issues of Mademoiselle magazine, theyear in which Plath’s novel takes place.While the publication was not aimedat a demographic seemingly concerned with housekeeping, as its tagline,“The magazine for smart young women,” betrays, Mademoiselle still containedarticles and advertisements that subtly discouraged women’s navigationbeyond the private sphere of the home, encouraging women to pursue thetraditional role of wife and mother. Advertisements for Lenox china (May1953) and articles on cooking (Ann Aikman’s “How To Eat Like Royalty,”April 1953) ran next to articles like “College:Whether to Go,Where to Go”(January 1953) and “The Word Around the World: Jobs in InternationalRadio and Television” (February 1953). Consistently, Mademoiselle presentedreaders with conflicting messages about their place in relation to the home.Reading both articles and advertisements in 1953 editions of Mademoiselleand looking specifically at passages in The Bell Jar that deal with Esther’s eat-ing and housekeeping habits, I assert that 1950s consumer culture—a culturethat encouraged women to navigate beyond the private sphere of the homewhile limiting those options by simultaneously discouraging thatnavigation—is not conducive to Esther’s being properly nurtured—a cir-cumstance that contributes to the metaphorical starvation that Esther envi-sions for herself in the fig tree passage.

Few critics have examined the way in which Plath’s novel is informed by1950s editions of Mademoiselle magazine. Many critics, including LindaWagner-Martin (The Bell Jar: A Novel of the 50s) and Marjorie Perloff (“Iconof the Fifties”), have looked at The Bell Jar in an historical context.And, both

4 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

Marsha Bryant and Garry M. Leonard have examined Plath’s work in rela-tion to women’s magazines of the 1950s. Bryant, in her article “Plath,Domesticity, and Advertising” for College Literature and in a more recent essay,“Ariel’s Kitchen: Plath, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Domestic Surreal,” forthe 2007 collection The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath, examinesPlath’s poetry in relation to the popular women’s magazine, Ladies’ HomeJournal. In “Plath, Domesticity, and Advertising,” Bryant notes “[Plath’s] writ-ing prompts new ways of thinking about American advertising” (2002, 17).“Ariel’s Kitchen” expands upon this earlier essay, drawing rich and complexconnections between Plath’s poetry and the domestic ideologies of theadvertising included in Ladies’ Home Journal, asserting that “the alternativearchive of Ladies’ Home Journal has the potential to challenge widespreadassumptions about Plath, domesticity, and poetry” and “enables a recovery ofcultural configurations,” which Bryant defines as “the surreal domesticity ofAriel’s kitchen” (2007, 212).Yet, Bryant’s articles focus primarily upon Plath’spoetry, looking at it in relation to the advertising of the time period. In fact,Garry M. Leonard’s article,“’TheWoman Is Perfected: Her Dead BodyWearsthe Smile of Accomplishment’: Sylvia Plath and Mademoiselle Magazine,” isthe only substantial scholarship on the direct correlation between The Bell Jarand Mademoiselle. Leonard explores the ways in which Plath’s poetry and fic-tion responded to 1950s commodity culture. He asserts that Mademoisellecontained “socially constructed guidelines for femininity,” and he considersthe impact that these guidelines might have had upon Esther Greenwoodand Plath herself (1992, 63). While Leonard discusses the guidelines thatMademoiselle imparts to readers, he looks specifically at consumer cul-ture—whether it be articles like “There’s Nothing Like It” where author“[Bernice] Peck writes of a bath as though it were a religious sacrament” (67)or an advertisement for a bra which indicates that “’It’s a matter of morale tohave those curves that make such a difference in your clothes’” (64). Leonardilluminates Plath’s work with these readings of Mademoiselle, but he does notlook at the more implicit messages that Mademoiselle imparts to readers aboutthe domestic.

Pairing Plath’s novel with Mademoiselle magazine, as Leonard has done,seems logical for several reasons.As mentioned above, Plath was familiar withthese publications, a fact which justifies the pairing of these two texts.Yet, Iwould argue that Mademoiselle magazine and The Bell Jar also beg a thematiccomparison, especially in regard to the sometimes confusing messages themagazine imparts to women readers, such as Esther and Plath, regarding theirplace inside (or outside) of the home. In For Her Own Good: 150Years of theExperts’Advice on Women, Barbara Ehrenrich and Deirdre English examine avariety of women’s advice manuals, including magazines such as

5Caroline J. Smith

Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Mademoiselle, noting how these pub-lications’ “experts wooed their female constituency, promising the ‘right’ andscientific way to live” (1978, 4). Yet, Ehrenrich and English encouragewomen readers to be wary of the messages imparted, noting that the adviceoffered was not always the best advice to follow. Magazine historians, such asNancy A.Walker in Shaping Our Mothers’World:American Women’s Magazines,have also focused upon the messages that these magazines contain, particu-larly in so far as domestic ideologies were concerned. Walker notes: “Onepoint that will become clear is that at no time during their histories havewomen’s magazines delivered perfectly consistent, monolithic messages totheir readers” (2000, vii).

While Walker focuses on women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journaland McCall’s, her observations hold true for magazines like Mademoiselleaimed at a younger demographic as well. Like most women’s magazines, thepages of the 1953 issues of Mademoiselle contain a mix of articles and adver-tisements aimed at its target audience—“smart young women.” There arefashion spreads showcasing the most fashionable winter coats or summerwear, depending upon the season, and advertisements for tampons, bras, andgirdles.There are profiles of colleges and universities and advice columns forbrides-to-be. In 1953, there were several consistent columns, which appearedthroughout the year. Fashion and beauty were often a focus such as in HelenaRubenstein’s column about make-up, the monthly spread “ShoppingShortcuts,” or the reappearing feature,“Scoops of the Month,” which show-cased a Mademoiselle reader who not only modeled the latest clothing but alsoshared her accomplishments with other readers. Mary Parker contributed atravel column, highlighting trips to Mexico and Canada, and the column “ToAmuse Ourselves” written by GeriTrotta focused on dining out in cities likeNewYork and London.Additionally,Ann Aikman wrote several columns oncooking, sharing a story with readers and following with a recipe.Photographs of featured silverware patterns accompanied each of her pieces.

Embedded within the content from this year are discordant messagesabout a woman’s “proper” place in society.The reccurring columns from thatyear, listed above, point to this divide.Women were, on one hand, encour-aged to travel to Mexico while, on the other hand, they were admonished tostay home and learn the best way to cook a chicken (Ann Aikman’s “TheComing of Age of a Chicken,” March 1953).While Mademoiselle magazine’spages were packed with “How To” tips for its dedicated readers, promisingwomen all the answers with these instructional articles, at the same time,these articles would often provide their readers with dual messages, encour-aging women to be self-sufficient while also offering them limited optionsfor achieving self-sufficiency.

6 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

The September 1953 issue of Mademoiselle dedicates itself to both “Fallfashions” and “How to” tips (“How to/get a job/get a man/get anything youwant”); one of its articles,“21 Jobs for the Liberal Arts Graduate” reveals theconflicting messages the magazines often purported.This article details boththe “Future for the dedicated” (women presumably willing to sacrifice a fam-ily for their job) as well as the “Future for the Divided” (women who wantboth a promising career and a family) (“21 Jobs” 1953, 121). For those ded-icated women seeking to become a Language Specialist for the NationalSecurity Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency, one is promised,“Careerservice, but promotion requires specialization, e.g., a year of travel or work inCambodia. Graduate study (perhaps at night) international trade, geog. orecon. Pay might go to $5,940; very rarely to $11,800 for women” (121). Inthe next column over, entitled “Future for the divided,” Mademoiselle warnsits readers, “Husband faces FBI investigation too. Officially, his wife shouldkeep details of her day at the office secret. Maternity leaves. But finding anursery school in Washington can be a hard job” (121).

This particular article and the information provided for the readers arerepresentative of Mademoiselle’s content from 1953 on the whole. Here,despite the fact that upon skimming column headings Mademoiselle attemptsto provide its readers with options (women can obtain jobs outside of thehome, even combine those jobs with family duties), the magazine under-mines its own “progressiveness” through the text included underneath thesecolumns.Though purportedly, there is a future promised for those “divided,”the text implies that, in actuality, there is not. As a language specialist, awoman may take a maternity leave, but mentioning the fact that there are nogood nursery schools in Washington may make a that same woman thinktwice about her choice. Furthermore, taking a job with the FBI may causeconflicts with one’s husband. Similarly, in the other jobs detailed, there seemsto be discouraging advice lurking in the “Future for the divided.”Those hop-ing to be a research or analysis trainee have “Little chance for part-time workabove clerical level,” while those wishing to be group leaders face “Evening,weekend assignments [which] make full-time, regular jobs rough on mar-rieds” (“21 Jobs” 1953, 121). Though attempting to provide readers withchoices, Mademoiselle simultaneously limits those choices and, at times, seemsto discourage women’s navigation beyond the private sphere.

In part, the mixed messages of these magazines often arise from the con-struction of the magazine itself.While magazines consist of articles developedby the magazines’ editorial staffs, they also rely heavily on advertisements cre-ated by advertising agencies that are not directly affiliated with the magazineitself. Advertisers may develop marketing schemes that they believe meshwith the needs of a magazine’s particular target audience, yet what they

7Caroline J. Smith

attempt to sell is not always what the audience intends to buy, whether liter-ally, in the form of a product, or figuratively, in the form of a lifestyle. As aresult, there are sometimes discrepancies within the magazines themselves.The frequent advertisements for Gorham silver patterns, which declare “Offto a beautiful start . . . with love and Gorham silver,” for instance, may notimmediately interest a woman who is intending on enrolling in college inthe near future (“21Jobs” 1953, 26). Instead, she may be more concernedwith reading one of the profiles of “outstanding colleges and universities”that Mademoiselle contains (Felker 1953, 128).

The fact that Mademoiselle’s articles and advertisements, especially interms of the domestic, seem to be at odds points to the fact that, during the1950s, the domestic “rather than a prescribed and stable” space was actuallyone “contested and negotiated” (Walker 2000, vii). As the title of ArleneSkolnick’s Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertaintyimplies, the actuality of the 1950s was oftentimes in opposition to the idealimages representative of that time period. Historian Elaine Tyler May, inHomeward Bound:American Families in the ColdWar Era, agrees; in her chapter“Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth,” she discusses theEisenhower administration’s emphasis on “the virtues of the American wayof life” (1988, 16), yet she also acknowledges the very real problems facingAmericans by becoming more insular, asserting that the home, at this periodin time, was “a fragile institution” (22). In Shaping Our Mothers’ World:AmericanWomen’s Magazines, Nancy A.Walker also discusses the historical cir-cumstances following World War II that confused American perceptions ofdomesticity. She explains:

World War II made Americans acutely conscious of involvement with therest of the world, while the Cold War that immediately followed fosteredinsularity, both politically and within the family. Attitudes toward propergender roles changed dramatically in some parts of the population duringthe war, and that change continued to affect women’s lives into the 1950s.. . . Increased postwar prosperity focused the attention of white America onsocial-class mobility, while the civil rights movement forced recognition ofpolitically sanctioned inequality. New appliances and convenience foodsflooded the market. . . . (Walker 2000, 29)

Walker’s historical summary shows the ways in which America itself was filledwith contradictions—at once aware of the world at large yet insular, bothconscious of white America’s prosperity while also acknowledging inequality.In her article “DoWomen Like to Cook?” Laura Shapiro further addresses thechanges in women’s relationships with their kitchens and cooking and theeffect that those developments had on women’s relationships with theirhomes, noting that “the advent of packaged and semi-prepared foods [made

8 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

it] possible to put meals on the table while doing very little actual cooking”(1995, 155).These historical situations contribute to the conflicted domesticideologies deployed by women’s magazines, which “in the period from 1940to 1960 conveyed not a unitary but instead a multivocal concept of thedomestic world during a period when that concept was being contested andexpanded.The magazines at times celebrated women’s primary role as home-maker and at other times subverted that ideology” (viii-ix).

An advertisement for L’Aiglon clothing from the September 1953 edi-tion of Mademoiselle illustratesWalker’s point perfectly. Here, in this ad, we seea woman, meticulously clothed in a coatdress of Lorette (“55% Orlon, 45%wool”), black hat atop her head (“L’Aiglon” 1953, 34). A microphone withthe letters “ABC” intersects the ad from the top, partially obscuring a viewof the left side of the woman’s head. In her left hand, she holds an egg; herright hand clutches an eggbeater that rests inside a bowl on the table in frontof her.The image is arresting because the woman appears clothed for some-thing other than beating eggs, a potentially messy task. Here, our concept ofdomesticity is challenged; the woman we see associates herself with a tradi-tionally female task (that of cooking), yet her personal appearance impliesthat she participates in important activities outside of the home.The text ofthe advertisement may further confuse our perceptions. It reads: “She’s thefood editor on a well-known home magazine . . . the food expert of a happyfamily in Chappaqua, NewYork. She’s an expert on Chinese art with a cura-tor’s job at the museum . . . an expert on American fashion who looks toL’Aiglon for smart clothes like this coatdress of Lorette” (34).The text impliesthat this woman before us is every woman, capable of being any one of themany things listed above her; the choices, however, at once celebrate thewoman’s role as homemaker (“food expert of a happy family”) while alsochallenging that role (“expert on Chinese art”).

It is advertisements like those for L’Aiglon clothing that seemingly hauntPlath’s protagonist. Though this advertisement ostensibly promises readers“the absolute anything, the totally everything” that they may want, the pho-tograph seems to contradict that promise (Eustis 1953, 174).The juxtaposi-tion of the woman’s clothing—the “coatdress of Lorette”—and the egg, eggbeater, and mixing bowl seems almost ridiculous.The subtext of the adver-tisement, then, is that such an achievement is not easy; in fact, it’s almostabsurd, the image seems to conclude. Simultaneously achieving such dis-parate roles as “food editor,”“food expert,” and “expert on Chinese art” is asdifficult to accomplish as reconciling such impulses as having “a husband anda happy home and children” and becoming “a famous poet” or “a brilliantprofessor” (Plath 1971, 62). Moreover, both the advertisement and Esther not

9Caroline J. Smith

only seem to question the possibility of such an achievement but also whichversion of the “proper” woman is more appropriate.

Throughout The Bell Jar, Esther preoccupies herself with performing“appropriately.” For Esther, the only way to be accepted by others is to con-form to what society thinks a woman in the 1950s should be.As a result, shedevotes much time throughout the novel to watching other women performfemininity—a femininity prescribed, yet simultaneously confused, bywomen’s magazines. Garry M. Leonard explores the relationship that Estherhas with other women in the text as well as the messages that she seems toingest in terms of society’s views of women—a message that becomes mostapparent after Esther watches a film in which the hero, torn between twowomen, eventually chooses the “nice blond girl” over the “sexy black-hairedgirl” (Plath 1971, 34).“The implicit message in the film,” writes Leonard,“isthat a woman must first divide herself and then banish the sensual half.A girlis either ‘nice’ or she is not; she is either loved for denying her needs, or sheis abandoned as punishment for exploring the world on her own, for usingher unprecedented emotions and desires as a guide” (1992, 70). Leonard’scomment points to the fact that mass media of the time period, in his exam-ple film but I would also argue in the form of women’s magazines, oftendepicted women as either acceptable or unacceptable in the eyes of society,as either “good” or “bad” girls.

These distinctions, for Esther, are often directly linked to the way inwhich women in the novel relate to or interact with their food. Esther’smother and her boyfriend’s (Buddy Willard) mother perform the roles of theideal 1950s housewife. Both can cook, and both, when discussed in the novel,are characterized by this ability. Upon first returning home after her experi-ence in New York, Esther is awakened by the sound of her mother makingjuice (“the buzz of the orange squeezer sounded from downstairs”) and thesmell of “coffee and bacon” (Plath 1971, 94). Instead of being awakened byher mother’s voice, Esther is awakened by the sounds of proper domesticity;Esther’s mother cooks for her daughter and cleans up the kitchen (“Then thesink water ran from the tap and dishes clinked as my mother dried them andput them back in the cupboard”) (94). Though she cannot directly see it,Esther envisions her mother’s neat and orderly housekeeping. Likewise,Buddy Willard’s mother is the type of woman who keeps a neat house andproperly feeds her family.When Esther and Mr.Willard visit the sanitariumwhere Buddy is staying for his tuberculosis, Esther mentions that the two“parked in an icy turnoff and shared out the tunafish sandwiches and the oat-meal cookies and the apples and the thermos of black coffee Mrs.Willard hadpacked for our lunch” (71). Plath’s repetition of the word “and” here indi-cates the excessiveness of Mrs.Willard’s gesture. Instead of just packing sand-

10 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

wiches, Mrs.Willard packed a complete lunch, one with cookies, apples, andcoffee, an act that points to her effectiveness as a homemaker. Mrs.Willard’shomemaking is so effective, in fact, that it transcends the physical boundariesof her home and follows her family into the outside world.

At one point in the novel, Esther despairs over the tasks that she is unableto do. Not accomplishing these tasks, Esther feels, makes her different fromthose women who can perform effectively. She reflects:

I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.

I began with cooking.

My grandmother and my mother were such good cooks that I left every-thing to them.They were always trying to teach me one dish or another,but I would just look on and say,“Yes, yes, I see,” while the instructions slidthrough my head like water, and then I’d always spoil what I did so nobodywould ask me to do it again.

I remember Jody, my best and only girlfriend at college in my freshmanyear, making me scrambled eggs at her house one morning. They tastedunusual, and when I asked her if she had put in anything extra, she saidcheese and garlic salt. I asked who told her to do that, and she said nobody,she just thought it up. But then, she was practical and a sociology major.(Plath 1971, 61)

Again, Esther compares herself to others around her. Unlike Jody, who makesdelicious, experimental scrambled eggs and is “practical and a sociologymajor,” Esther sees herself as deviant for not being able to cook and wantinginstead to become a writer. Esther’s anxiety becomes even more under-standable when looked at in relation to Mademoiselle magazine’s recurringcolumn on cooking. As noted earlier, Mademoiselle presented a short articleon cooking, accompanied by a silver pattern in many of the issues from 1953.The September 1953 column, entitled “The Feeding of Young Men,”instructed women on how to cook. Though the article opens by saying,“Whatever your mother may have told you, the way to a man’s heart is devi-ous and complicated and not usually through his stomach,” it continues inthe next paragraph to say, “Still, it is almost impossible to go around withanyone for any length of time without once giving him something to eat”(Aikman 1953, 58). Mademoiselle explains that though “you naturally want togive him something more or less impressive. It needn’t be elaborate” (58).Youcould, it advises, just scramble him some eggs.Despite the fact that the begin-ning of the article instructs young women how to keep it simple, the end ofthe article presents the reader with a full-scale dinner, either sauerbraten or, ifyou’re not as daring, guinea hens. This article presents its reader with anunclear message about cooking. Do you need to cook something elaborate toensnare a man or not? Will scrambled eggs really do? In Esther’s case, neither

11Caroline J. Smith

sauerbraten, guinea hens, nor scrambled eggs are an issue, for she is unable tocook anything at all—a fact that increases her anxiety about being seen bywomen like her mother, Buddy Willard’s mother, and Jody as unacceptable.

Esther’s observation here distinguishes her not only from women of hermother’s generation but also from her contemporaries, like Jody.While otherwomen she knows may be dreaming of the perfect silver pattern or life inthe suburbs, Esther fears that she does not want all that married life maypromise her. She notes:

It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon andtoast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’dleft for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then whenhe came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, andI’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed,utterly exhausted. (Plath 1971, 68)

Esther believes that marriage would imprison her in the kitchen, makingfood as her mother and Buddy Willard’s mother do. Articles such as “TheFeeding ofYoung Men” and “The Eternal Appetite,” compounded this anx-iety. While Aikman’s first article stresses the importance of being able toimpress with a good meal, in “The Eternal Appetite,” she alludes to thenever-ending labor that goes into keeping a man fed, asserting, “A husbandmay not eat as much as an elephant but he eats almost as often; no soonerhave you got the last meal off your mind than he looks up and remarks pleas-antly, ‘Gee I’m hungry’” (1953, 28).Articles such as these reinforced the ideathat men were unable to cook for themselves and reliant upon the women theydated, and eventually married, to do it for them. Read in this context, then,Esther’s inability to cook might not only result in her literal starvation but alsoher metaphorical starvation. Unable to perform the appropriate domesticbehaviors, as exhibited by her mother and Jody, Esther will be unable to feedeither herself or any young man, and the consequence of this action will resultin one of her “fat purple fig[s]” falling, uneaten, at her feet (62).

The act of eating becomes, for Esther, a contested space while food itselfbecomes a way to determine “social meaning” (Mintz 1996, 7). In his bookTasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past,Sidney Mintz describes the way in which eating becomes more than a“’purely biological’” act:

The foods eaten have histories associated with the pasts of those who eatthem; the techniques employed to find, process, prepare, serve, and consumethe foods are all culturally variable, with histories of their own. Nor is thefood simply eaten; its consumption is always conditioned by meaning.(Mintz 1996, 7)

12 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

Mintz’s assertion rings true for Esther who from the onset of the book seessocial meaning connected to the way women of the novel interact with theirfood.Though Esther expresses apprehension regarding her inability to per-form proper, domestic behaviors, the way in which the women of her lifeinteract with their food remains largely consistent. However, upon Esther’sarrival in NewYork, she not only meets women like Jay Cee, her editor, andDoreen, a fellow intern, who defy the roles to which she has grown accus-tomed, but she also sees women eating differently, which further confusesEsther’s relationship to her food.

Doreen, in particular, becomes a woman who fascinates Esther. At first,Esther notices Doreen because of her “bright white hair standing out in acotton candy fluff round her head” (Plath 1971, 4). But before long, it isDoreen’s eating habits that preoccupy Esther. Plath writes: “Doreen wasspooning up the hunks of fruit at the bottom of her glass with a spindly sil-ver spoon, and Lenny was grunting each time she lifted the spoon to hermouth, and snapping and pretending to be a dog or something, and tryingto get the fruit off the spoon. Doreen giggled and kept spooning up thefruit” (10). In this scene, the labor necessary to prepare food is absent, and incontrast to Esther’s mother or Buddy Willard’s mother, Doreen uses her foodto entice the men around her. This experience opens Esther’s eyes to theways in which women might not fit the more conservative model con-structed by Mademoiselle for its readers.

Despite the fact that Esther becomes exposed to women defying thestandards of femininity, she is never fully able to rid herself of the anxiety shefeels about her association with them, and she continually makes attempts todistance herself from them.Though Esther compliments her boss, Jay Cee, onher intelligence, moments later she declares her “plug-ugly;” she at onceapproves and disapproves of her (Plath 1971, 5). Esther’s relationship withDoreen is complicated in such a way as well.While Esther is flattered to haveDoreen take notice of her, at the same time, Esther wishes to disassociate her-self from her. Though Esther accompanies Doreen to Lenny’s apartment,when Doreen appears on her doorstep sick, Esther shuts the door, wishingthat Doreen would go away and hoping that the cleaning lady who broughtDoreen around would know that she “had nothing to do with Doreen” that“It was Betsy [she] resembled at heart” (18, 19). Though Esther may beattracted by a version of the feminine that differs from Betsy’s good-hearted,honest, and pure nature, ultimately she finds herself conflicted, wishing toconform to society’s expectations of her.

The first half of Plath’s novel, which chronicles Esther’s experiences inNew York, is peppered with food moments—moments that continue toemphasize Esther’s anxiety concerning her ability to fit in with the norma-

13Caroline J. Smith

tive world around her, the normative world, that is, which abides by the moreconservative images constructed by women’s magazines. At the Ladies’ Daybanquet that Esther attends in New York during her internship, she revealsher extreme anxiety about her performance in social settings, particularlywhen that performance involves food. Throughout this chapter, we seeEsther contradicting herself, presenting herself as acceptable in the eyes ofMademoiselle readers yet revealing that she sometimes strays from the maga-zine’s prescriptions. Esther proudly proclaims at the start of this chapter,“Nomatter how much I eat, I never put on weight.With one exception I’ve beenthe same weight for ten years” (Plath 1971, 20). Here, Esther is at once claim-ing she never gains weight yet also offering the reader information contraryto that fact. Not only is her statement contradictory, but her declaration alsoseems to reinforce to her reader that she does not stray from the ideal bodytype exhibited in the girdle advertisements that fill Mademoiselle. Despite herexcessive cravings, her size will never increase.

Esther continues, “We were always taken out on expense accounts, so Inever felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other peo-ple waiting who generally ordered only chef ’s salad and grapefruit juicebecause they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New Yorkwas trying to reduce” (Plath 1971, 20). Esther’s use of the term “reduce” callsto mind the jargon used in women’s magazines; in the July 1953 issue,Mademoiselle offered an article entitled “Diet with Dessert: The NewReducing Theory That Lets You Have Your Cake and Figure Too” (Peck1953, 66). Esther shows here that she is conscious of the ways in which sheis different from the other women around her; “Everybody . . . in New Yorkwas trying to reduce,” everybody, that is, except Esther (my emphasis).Again, though Esther claims to feel no guilt, she still attempts to eat her foodmore quickly than the others, presumably so as not to draw attention to thefact that she has ordered excessive amounts of food. Throughout the text,statements such as these reinforce the fact that Esther may not be the mostreliable of narrators. Rather, however, than reading these inconsistencies asa flaw in Plath’s text, I believe that these contradictions point directly to theconflicted nature of Esther’s character. Recalling Walker’s assessment thatdomesticity in post-war America was never “prescribed and stable,” webegin to also see the ways in which Esther herself is never “consistent” or“monolithic;” rather, her conflicted identity is a product of her social andhistorical circumstances (2000, vii).

Perhaps nowhere is Esther’s anxiety regarding the proper performance insocial settings, particularly when that performance involves food, moreapparent than the scene of overeating that occurs at the Ladies’ Day banquetEsther attends. On the one hand, Esther’s experience at the Ladies’ Day ban-

14 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

quet proves to be a liberating one.The food she encounters if dramaticallydifferent from the food that she is used to:

The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It’s notthat we hadn’t enough to eat at home, it’s just that my grandmother alwayscooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of say-ing, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth,“I hope you enjoythat, it cost forty-one cents a pound,” which always made me feel I wassomehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast. (Plath 1971, 21)

The excessiveness of the meals in New York is not something familiar toEsther; the meal’s difference enables her to consciously separate herself fromher home. She delights in the food not only because it is distinct from thefood that she has grown up with but also because the female labor associat-ed with food is absent in these meals. Food again serves as a sign of some-thing more significant in Esther’s life, representing a separation from herhome and the opportunity to leave the expectations of her mother, and theideal 1950s housewife that she represents, at home.

Yet, in this scene, it is clear that even though Esther is delighted by thefood presented to her she is also anxious about how she will interact withthat food and, in turn, how others will perceive her interaction.While at thebanquet, she is concerned about the way in which she eats her chicken andcaviar: “I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chickenslices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a slice ofbread” (Plath 1971, 22).Though she recognizes her eating habits as uncon-ventional, she hopes no one will notice if she consumes her food fastenough. Esther feels compelled to nourish herself; she even schemes in thisscene to be sure to have the largest amount of food:“While we were stand-ing up behind our chairs listening to the welcome speech, I had bowed myhead and secretly eyed the position of the bowls of caviar. . . . I figured thegirl across from me couldn’t reach it because of the mountainous center-piece of marzipan fruit” (21). Esther’s desperation in this scene to feed her-self is reminiscent of her earlier fear in the fig tree passage; it is as if, fearingstarvation, Esther attempts to procure any means of sustenance possible,attempting to disguise her unusual eating habits so as not to draw attentionto herself.

While Esther asserts her lack of guilt about the amount of food that sheeats and the way in which she eats it, ultimately, this scene culminates inEsther’s extreme discomfort—both physically and mentally—in havingoverindulged. Though Esther schemes to have the largest quantity of foodand safely obtains it for herself, later, while watching a movie with the otherinterns, her gorging results in her feeling ill:“I felt in terrible danger of puk-ing. I didn’t know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomachache

15Caroline J. Smith

or all that caviar I had eaten” (Plath 1971, 34).The movie on the screen, theone with both “nice blond girl” and the “sexy black-haired girl,” becomeslinked in Esther’s mind to her greed. Esther’s inability to conform to thestandards set by NewYork society—Mademoiselle’s “How To” tips, the call toreduce—again exhibits her deviation from the behavioral models that sur-round her.

To Esther, purging seems to be the necessary and inevitable result of herdisordered eating. She becomes violently ill in the cab on the way home fromthe movie and again at her hotel. Having stepped outside the boundaries ofsociety, Esther must now be punished for her transgression. Even when, later, anurse reveals to her that her illness resulted from food poisoning, Esther’s anx-iety does not decrease.Though she takes momentary comfort in the affirma-tive answer to her question—“Is everybody else sick, too?”—her anxiety onlyintensifies throughout the remainder of the novel, resulting in her unhappiness,depression, and her eventual mental breakdown (Plath 1971, 38).

Though Esther’s experiences in NewYork City conclude with Chapter9 of Plath’s novel, Plath continues to underscore Esther’s feelings of being anoutsider with moments connected to food.The day she is to leave NewYork,Esther packs her suitcase, which is “empty, except for The Thirty Best ShortStories of theYear, a white plastic sunglasses case and two dozen avocado pears,a parting present from Doreen” (1971, 92-93).The night before, Esther onceagain purged—though this time she cleansed herself from a horrible eveningwith a “woman-hater” named Marco by throwing all her clothes off the roofof her hotel—which accounts for her empty suitcase (87).The collection ofshort stories and the avocados are significant symbols for Esther, and bothseem to be representative of her desire to stand in opposition to the moretraditional, domestic models that she has previously encountered. Given toEsther by Doreen, the avocados remind Esther of her friend; they are anextravagant and untraditional going-away present. However, they are alsofleeting. Even though the avocados may remind Esther of Doreen and theother untraditional female models that she encountered in New York; ulti-mately, the avocados, like these women, are not lasting.Upon returning home,the avocados will rot before Esther has a chance to consume them, andwomen like Doreen will be replaced by women like Esther’s mother and Jody.

The book serves as an equally unsettling symbol.The collection, on onehand, serves as a tangible reminder of Esther’s career goals.Yet, at the sametime, its contents might discourage a young female writer.As mentioned pre-viously, Stanley Sultan’s “The Fugue of the Fig Tree,” was published in TheBest American Short Stories from 1953. In that collection,with which Plath wasfamiliar, there were thirty stories total; while twenty-five were written bymen, there were only five women who were published. Additionally, while

16 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

Mademoiselle published fiction by women and by young female writers likePlath herself, the profile piece that Plath wrote for the August 1953 collegeissue entitled “Poets on Campus” focused exclusively on “Five talentedyoung men” (Plath 1971, 290). For Esther, then, the collection of stories thatshe packed, like the messages imparted by Mademoiselle, both encouraged anddiscouraged her navigation beyond the private sphere.While on the surfacethe collection of stories and the avocados may serve as a reminder of theopportunities open to Esther, these symbols are complicated by the contextin which Plath has placed them.

As Esther becomes increasingly depressed upon returning home fromNew York, Plath continually connects her inability to read, write, and eatwith her deteriorating emotional state. Esther tells her doctors that she’s “notsleeping and not eating and not reading” (Plath 1971, 106).To Esther, read-ing and writing are as essential to her well-being as sleeping and eating, yetshe believes that she is continually discouraged from pursuing these activi-ties. Additionally, in this section of the novel, Esther tries to feed herself butis unsuccessful. On a beach picnic with Jody, Esther’s friend who is knownfor making superior scrambled eggs, Esther attempts, despite her recentdepression, to perform as the others do. She notes,“We browned hot dogs onthe public grills at the beach, and by watching Jody and Mark and Cal verycarefully I managed to cook my hot dog just the right amount of time anddidn’t burn it or drop it into the fire, the way I was afraid of doing.Then,when nobody was looking, I buried it in the sand” (127). Here, Plath signi-fies Esther’s severe emotional distress (earlier that morning she had attempt-ed to hang herself) with her inability to eat anything at all.Yet, even withsuch severe depression, she is still eager to perform as others do, especiallywith the added pressure of Jody’s presence. She buries her hot dog “whennobody [is] looking” in order to keep attention away from her disorderedbehavior. Again, Plath uses Esther’s interactions with her food to not onlysignify her severe psychological distress but to also emphasize how ingrainedher compulsion to mimic expected behaviors actually is.

Unable to deal with the pressure, Esther attempts to commit suicide byingesting a bottle of pills; she is found by her family and hospitalized.Thoughwe might hope that Esther’s hospitalization provides her with a space in whichshe can be free of the more conservative messages that Mademoiselle offers itsreaders, Esther seems unable to escape them. In fact, after her suicide attempt,she awakens to darkness.Moments later “A cheery voice spoke out of the dark.‘There are a lot of blind people in the world.You’ll marry a nice blind mansomeday’” (Plath 1971, 140).And, hopefully, have Gorham sterling.

This comment made to Esther about her blindness is a complex one,especially when looked at in relation to her preoccupation with the ideolo-

17Caroline J. Smith

gies of women’s magazines. If Esther is, in fact, blind then technically she willnot be able to see the depictions of women in magazines such asMademoiselle. Ideally, she may even be able to escape being controlled bythose depictions. Ironically, though, in an instant after Esther hears she isblind, the nurse explodes any hope that she may be free. Her words,“You’llmarry a nice blind man someday,” informed by the discourse of women’smagazines reveal that these domestic ideologies are not easy to escape. Tocomplicate things further, a few paragraphs later, it becomes questionable asto whether a nurse actually visited Esther at all, implying that Esther mayhave imagined this conversation. Regardless of who speaks these words, thewords themselves reveal both the pervasiveness of the ideologies marketed byconsumer culture and Esther’s inability to escape them, and they furtherestablish for the reader just how difficult, if not impossible, it will be forEsther—even in a place of recovery—to escape the domestic models thathave been troubling her so greatly.

In both spaces where Esther’s recovery takes place, she continues to behaunted by the more traditional, domestic ideologies represented by hermother and Jody and in Mademoiselle magazine, and once again, scenes of eat-ing express Esther’s unrest. She spends time at two different institutionsthroughout the rest of Plath’s novel—a state hospital and a private institutionpaid for by her benefactor, Philomena Guinea.At the state institution, Esthercannot relate to the other patients, people like Mrs. Mole who is often seen“yelling and laughing in a rude way” (Plath 1971, 148), and she tries to con-vince those around her that she is different from the other patients by per-forming appropriately. Plath includes a dining scene that eerily parallels thatof the Ladies’ Day banquet—though those present and the food served arevastly different—to again illustrate Esther’s compulsion to perform. Thescene begins with Esther taking responsibility for distributing the food tothose present at the table. Esther’s actions here are far different from herbehavior at the Ladies’ Day banquet where she jockeyed for position closestto the caviar. In fact, the nurse praises Esther for her model behavior,impressed by her compulsion to serve others. Unlike Mrs. Mole, who upsetsa dish of beans, Esther complies with these expected behaviors and sets her-self apart from the other patients who she feels are profoundly more dis-turbed than she. One of the chief ways that she tries to distance herself fromthem, then, is to perform acceptably, imitating the behaviors of women likeher mother, Jody, and her fellow Guest Editors at the Ladies’ Day banquet.The stakes here, though, as Esther sees them, are much higher; rather thanmerely being perceived as an outsider, as she might have at the Ladies’ Daybanquet, her ability to perform properly might not just brand her as “nor-mal” but actually entitle her to a release from the institution.

18 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

Esther sees her behavior as being rewarded when she is moved to theprivate hospital. At Caplan, both the surroundings and the patients moreimmediately call to mind the images from Mademoiselle. Upon entering thisnew institution, Plath underscores its difference from the state hospital:

A maid in a green uniform was setting the tables for supper. There werewhite linen tablecloths and glasses and paper napkins. I stored the fact thatthey were real glasses in the corner of my mind the way a squirrel stores anut.At the city hospital we had drunk out of paper cups and had no knivesto cut our meat. (Plath 1971, 153)

Esther is delighted that at Caplan she will be served in a manner that is morefitting to her expectations. Additionally, the new patients, unlike Mrs. Mole,are more familiar to her. On a tour of the facility, Esther notices a fellowpatient:“I sat down nearValerie and observed her carefully.Yes, I thought, shemight as well be in a Girl Scout camp. She was reading her tatty copy ofVogue with intense interest. ‘What the hell is she doing here?’ I wondered.‘There’s nothing the matter with her’” (Plath 1971, 154).The pervasivenessof Mademoiselle’s ideologies is revealed in Esther’s observations. Again, noteven in the mental institution, a place of recovery, can she leave Vogue and itsversions of normalcy behind.And, in turn, ironically, the only place that shecan recover is one which seems to comply with the standards set forth bythese magazines.

Ultimately, then, Esther seems to discover on her path to recovery thatthe only way to achieve acceptability by society is to comply with the moretraditional, domestic models offered by Mademoiselle magazine. Repeatedly,while in Caplan, she sees acceptability, or normalcy, being linked to eating,and when she transgresses, she is punished. At Caplan and then Belize, towhere Esther is eventually moved, the nurses withhold breakfast from thosepatients who are scheduled for shock therapy. Esther interprets this act tomean that those who are well enough, that those who are “normal,” receivebreakfast and escape shock therapy. Her physical appetite is fueled by an evenmore intense desire to be considered “normal.” Receiving food signifies toEsther that she is recovering, not different from other girls her age, the Jodysand Betseys of the world who happily conform to the gendered expectationsof society.

It is in the last significant act of eating that Esther cements her beliefsthat transgressing society’s carefully scripted boundaries for women can bedisastrous. On one of her sanctioned afternoon outings from Belize, Estherhas dinner with Irwin, a man she is intent on losing her virginity to; she eatsescargot, noting that she was “greedy for butter” (Plath 1971, 186) and drinksglass after glass of wine.Again, like the earlier Ladies’ Day scene where Estherpaved her chicken with caviar, here, she seems to ignore the acceptable and

19Caroline J. Smith

appropriate way to dine. Esther’s overindulgence is again met with devastat-ing results, for after sleeping with Irwin, she hemorrhages and must be rushedto the hospital. Compounding this, she later finds out that Joan, a fellowpatient, has hanged herself. Esther again sees herself as being punished for thisoverindulgence in food and sex, and again, her overeating is linked totragedy—a fact that serves to ingrain in her the belief that disregarding gen-dered boundaries is not just ill-advised but also catastrophic. In the end,Esther seems to have learned that “[She] cannot get the absolute anything,the total everything, that [she] want[s]” (Eustis 1953, 174), and she resignsherself to behaving appropriately as a way to secure her freedom.

It is shortly after this scene that Plath concludes her novel with the sen-tence: “The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guidingmyself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room” (1971, 200).The ending is ambiguous; while on one hand, Esther seems to have recov-ered, finding closure with both Buddy and Irwin, attending Joan’s funeral,and preparing for her exit interview, on the other hand, as readers we mightwonder at what cost.My students, in the first-year composition course whereI teach this novel, long for some sort of resolution, and debate the ending ofPlath’s novel during class. Some students will argue that Esther is “better,”referring to the novel’s opening, citing the passage, “. . . I still have themaround the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week I cut theplastic starfish off the sunglasses for the baby to play with” (3). Others willcounter that Esther’s being married and having a baby stands at odds withwhat the whole book was about—her desire to become a writer, her long-ing to defy the expectations for women so carefully scripted by the timeperiod in which Esther, and Plath, lived. Inevitably, students will bring upPlath’s tragic end. Many will know the story of her death and how her suicidewas connected to the act of eating.As Janet Malcolm explains in her book, TheSilentWoman: Sylvia Plath andTed Hughes, Plath before “she committed suicide,in February 1963, by putting her head in a gas oven as her two small childrenslept in a bedroom nearby” left for them “mugs of milk and a plate of bread”(7). It was as if, in this final moment, Plath, like Esther, was haunted by thedomestic behavioral models that she encountered in her own life.

After ruminating on these facts for a while, I’ll encourage my students toreturn to the text, to focus on what Plath writes about Esther, what clues shegives us about Esther’s future. We’ll go back to the passages where Estherexpresses her intense anxiety about having a husband and children and thework that it will require, and we’ll look very carefully at the final chapterwhere, despite heading to her exit interview, she still can only see “questionmarks,” as she focuses carefully on her “stocking seams,” “black shoes,” and“red wool suit”—the kind of clothes that would appear in advertisement

20 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

from Mademoiselle (Plath 1971, 199). Frustrated, someone will declare thatThe Bell Jar is just as mixed-up and confused as the issues of Mademoiselle thatwe’ve been looking at.

It’s at this point in the conversation where I’ll intervee, calling attentionto the fact that, as a class, we do not need to wrap things up neatly, especial-ly if the author’s prose resists that impulse. Plath’s text doesn’t give the read-er any easy answers because Esther didn’t have any. Rather, I remind the stu-dents of Nancy Walker’s assertion that post-war America, just like magazinesthemselves, was never “prescribed and stable,” and I encourage them to seethe ways in which Esther herself is never “consistent” or “monolithic” (2000,vii).We can read Esther, then, for the character she truly is—a woman witha confused sense of identity, informed by the conflicted, historically rootedmessages she encounters, overcome by a tremendous fear of losing all theopportunities that “beckoned and winked” and ultimately starving to death(Plath 1971, 85).

Notes1 On November 10, 2000, Jim Long contributed this information to the Sylvia

Plath Forum (http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/archives/29.html). On June 23,2009, Peter K. Steinberg posted about the connection on his blog, Sylvia Plath Info.

Works Cited“21 Jobs for the Liberal Arts Graduate.” 1953. Mademoiselle (September): 120-25.Aikman,Ann. 1953a.“The Coming of Age of a Chicken.” Mademoiselle (March): 26.———. 1953b.“The Eternal Appetite.” Mademoiselle (February): 28.———. 1953c.“The Feeding ofYoung Men.” Mademoiselle (September): 58.———. 1953d.“How To Eat Like Royalty.” Mademoiselle (April): 28.Bryant, Marsha. 2007.“Ariel’s Kitchen: Plath, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Domestic

Surreal.” In The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath, ed. by Anita Helle.AnnArbor: University of Michigan.

———. 2002.“Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising.” College Literature 29.3:17-34.

Butscher, Edward. 1976. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. NewYork: Seabury.“College:Whether to Go,Where to Go.” 1953. Mademoiselle (January): 101-13.Coyle, Susan. 1984.“Images of Madness and Retrieval:An Exploration of Metaphor

in The Bell Jar.” Studies in American Fiction 12: 161-74.Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deidre English. 1978. For Her Own Good: 150 Year of the

Experts’Advice to Women. Garden City, NewYork:Anchor Press.Eustis, Helen. 1953. “How to Get Anything You Want.” Mademoiselle

(September):112+.Felker, Leslie. 1953.“Bennington College.” Mademoiselle (September): 128-131,194-

95.Gorham Sterling advertisement. 1953. Mademoiselle (September): 26.

21Caroline J. Smith

L’Aiglon advertisement. 1953. Mademoiselle (September): 34.Leonard, Garry M. 1992. “’The Woman Is Perfected. Her Dead Body Wears the

Smile of Accomplishment’: Sylvia Plath and Mademoiselle Magazine.” CollegeEnglish 19.2: 60-82.

Lenox China advertisement. 1953. Mademoiselle (May): 55.Long, Jim. 10 November 2000. Posting to the Sylvia Plath Forum discussion list.

http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/archives/29.html.Malcolm, Janet. 1994.The SilentWoman:Sylvia Plath andTed Hughes.NewYork:Alfred

A. Knopf.May, Elaine Tyler. 1988. Homeward Bound:American Families in the ColdWar Era. New

York: BasicBooks.Mintz, Sidney. 1996. Tasting Food,Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and

the Past. Boston: Beacon Press.Peck, Bernice. 1953.“Diet With Dessert:The New Reducing Theory That LetsYou

HaveYour Cake and Figure Too.” Mademoiselle (July): 66-71.Perloff, Marjorie. 1985.“Icon of the Fifties.” Parnassus 12-13: 282-85.Plath, Sylvia. 1953.“Poets on Campus.” Mademoiselle (August): 290-91.———. 1971. The Bell Jar. 1963. Reprint. NewYork: Bantam Books.———. 2000. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Edited by KarenV. Kukil. New

York: Random House.Shapiro, Laura. 1995.“DoWomen Like to Cook?” Granta Food Anthology 52: 153-62.Skolnick, Arlene. 1991. Embattled Paradise: The American Family in the Age of

Uncertainty. NewYork: BasicBooks.Steinberg, Peter K. 23 June 2009. “Sylvia Plath: Did You Know.” Sylvia Plath Info.

http://sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com/.Stevenson, Anne. 1998. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. New York: Houghton

Mifflin.Sultan, Stanley. 1953.“The Fugue of the Fig Tree.” In The Best American Short Stories,

ed. Martha Foley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Wagner-Martin, Linda. 1992.The Bell Jar: A Novel of the Fifties. NewYork:Twayne.———. 1987. Sylvia Plath:A Biography. NewYork: Simon and Schuster.Walker, Nancy A. 2000. Shaping Our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines.

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.“The Word Around the World: Jobs in International Radio and Television.”

1953.Mademoiselle (February): 156+.Yalom, Marilyn.“Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, and Related Poems.” In Coming to Light:

AmericanWomen Poets in theTwentieth Century, ed. DianeWood Middlebrook andMarilynYalom.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

22 College Literature 37.4 [Fall 2010]

Copyright of College Literature is the property of College Literature and its content may not be copied oremailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.