Study Guide to The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath

Not only must she wrestle with the difficult choice between a career or marriage and motherhood; she suffers, too, from an intolerable consciousness of “double standards.” She resents bitterly the burden of purity women must carry; she can’t “stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.” In

But Esther, in addition, is female and so distinguished from all her male precedents by her particular sexual crisis

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce,

black comedy, a macabre perception of all that is ugly and painful.