It was a time when "women were discouraged from attending college" (Nash 612), and use of any education was merely to "influence [a] husband and children in the direction of rationality" (Steiner 80-81). Voicing dissatisfaction with the role of mother and homemaker could result in being labeled "mentally disordered, unfeminine, or both" (Nash 612). Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique published in 1963, identified the struggle and sense of dissatisfaction that many women suffered during the period when Esther was coming of age (Nash 614). Plath expresses her longing for escape from the confinement and inevitable fate of being molded into an ideal woman through Esther's sad and heart-wrenching tale of the bell jar enclosing her.
The Bell Jar is set during a six month period in 1953, beginning with Esther's brief stay in New York while working as a guest editor for a fashion magazine. Although unconventional in her thinking from the beginning, it is quickly revealed that the fateful edges of the bell jar are increasingly pushing down around her and she is losing her grasp on reality. Rather than being glamorous and wonderful, her one month visit to New York proved to be empty and exploitative to Esther. The month "serves to repress" her as she "finds herself uncomfortable, drunk and sick, frightened, and attacked by Marco [a blind date]" (Wagner-Martin 72). Again, just as she experienced detachment from the girls in her college dormitory, Esther lacks camaraderie with the other guest editors in New York. She is in a "quandary about Doreen and Betsy," the two girls who want to befriend her. Esther is confused about her own identity and cannot answer the question of whether she wants to be a bad girl or a good girl - "sexual and defiant like Doreen, or "law-abiding and kind like Betsy" (Wagner-Martin 74). When Hilda, another guest editor comments about that she is "so glad that [the Rosenbergs are] going to die," Esther uses her knowledge of Jewish folklore to compare Hilda's voice to a "dybbuk," (the soul of a dead sinner) which Esther experienced in a play (100).
