Woman Beneath Glass: How Esther Greenwood Revealed the Many Deaths of Womanhood

I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath in my twenties, and no piece of writing has ever felt more like home to me. I don’t recall every minute detail of the story, but I remember how I felt reading it—the emotions it carried, and the emotions within myself that it seemed to recognize. I carried those feelings with me for years, but most of all, I carried you, Esther Greenwood, describing your descent into madness and your eventual ascension out of it.

I saw myself in both versions of you—when you were unravelling, and when you were whole again. Even more painfully, I saw myself in the journey between those two states: the numbness, the alienation, the feeling of moving through a world that demanded performance while something inside you quietly fractured—like walking through a long, doorless and windowless corridor of pain, waiting to be shut inside it again.

I let the pages of The Bell Jar consume me; I felt a kinship with every word. It felt less like reading a novel and more like discovering my own thoughts transcribed onto paper.

Reading your words, I felt as though I could have written them myself.

Esther, I am you, and you are me. We are the same, caged beneath a bell jar, trying desperately to breathe.

Trying desperately to feel something beneath the crushing weight of existence.

But, what I did not understand then was that this feeling was not unique to me—or even to you—but part of a larger pattern of womanhood shaped by expectation. 

“I am,

Or rather, we are, because it was never only you I recognized—it was what your story revealed about all of us.

About womanhood. 

This painfully human account captures what plagues us most: the suffocating feeling of being starving yet uncertain of which fig to pick from a tree. 

Staring at your future, branching into countless possibilities: wife, mother, poet, professor, lover. Each fig represents a different life you might live. Yet rather than choosing, you remain frozen, watching the fruit wrinkle and fall.

I also stare at my fig tree, its large black figs ripe and ready to be picked. Yet I remain motionless, watching them swell beneath the weight of expectation until they split and begin to ooze. One by one, versions of myself fall to the ground.

Every choice requires the death of another self. 

To choose one fig is to watch the others rot. 

You walked through rooms full of expectation—women smiling politely, acting as though adulthood is a perfectly mapped-out road. Yet you saw the cracks in it, and you searched for the places where something real might still grow.

Maybe that is what makes you so enduring. You do not simply descend into madness; you expose the unbearable performance of normalcy surrounding you. Your suffering is real, but so is your clarity. You say the quiet parts aloud. You reveal the exhaustion of carrying womanhood like a role written for you before you were even born.

Through you, we are forced to confront the expectations we internalize.

Forces us to confront our deaths.

As women, we must endure metaphorical deaths before we can become who we are meant to be.

Some of us die over and over again. 

Esther, you understood this long before any of us could even name it.

In the violence of becoming, we bury the obedient daughter, the desirable woman, the version of ourselves built entirely from expectation. We grieve identities we once mistook for destiny because survival demands reinvention.

These deaths do not occur in isolation; they are shaped and repeated by the cultural, social, and historical structures that define what women are allowed to be. 

I am not afraid to die.

I have buried versions of myself in cold, hard ground only to rise from it anew. But no matter how many times I die and resurrect, I remain rooted beneath my own glass bell jar—growing, changing, reaching toward the light, while still pressing against the invisible barrier above me.

I am,

Rereading The Bell Jar now in my thirties, it speaks to me differently. The intensity of the initial reading remains, but age and experience have afforded me a second understanding—one I was not prepared for.

In my twenties, I understood your story as personal collapse. Madness contained within one mind. But rereading it now in my thirties, I no longer think the tragedy is yours alone, but the tragedy of the world that created you—the tragedy imposed upon us all. 

The bell jar that is imposed on us all.

I understand now that it was speaking to something far larger: the repeated deaths required of women to survive as themselves.

I may have initially fallen in love with your story because your bell jar resembled mine—a seemingly invisible glass encasing me in my world of depression and anxiety. But what about those who are not afflicted by what pains us most?

Are they uncaged? 

No, I believe there is no existing outside the bell jar. It exists around each of us, though its transparent dome takes on a different meaning for everyone beneath it.

What differs is not whether it exists, but how it is constructed and enforced in each life. 

We are all trapped beneath one—some of our own making, some genetically inherited, others imposed upon us by the society into which we were born. Some are built from ambition, perfectionism, motherhood, beauty, silence, and grief. Others are built from systems so old and invisible that we mistake them for inevitabilities.

The glass ceiling and the bell jar—an invisible architecture of expectation pressed upon women so quietly and persistently that we mistake it for air itself.

Both operate as mechanisms that quietly define the limits of possibility while making those limits feel personal rather than imposed. Their power lies not in open force, but in persuasion—revealed in the moment we can no longer distinguish our own desires from the expectations placed upon us.  

And like you, Esther, many women spend years believing they are failing individually, when in reality, we are suffocating collectively.

That is what startled me most in rereading The Bell Jar as an adult woman. The novel no longer felt like the story of one woman’s descent into madness. It felt like an indictment of the conditions that create it.

Esther, your story is not only about your unravelling, but about the quiet, repeated unmaking of women under systems that shape who they are allowed to become. 

Perhaps that is why this novel speaks so widely: because so many women know what it means to suffocate quietly.

To die repeatedly.

To live beneath glass.

I am” (Plath, 243).

Work Cited

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.