Esther's Complicated Relationship with Scholarships
Success is a big theme throughout Esther’s entire academic career. She is often at the top of her class and receiving large amounts of scholarship money or participating in prestigious internships. The book starts out in New York City, where Esther has a summer internship editing a fashion magazine. Esther attends Harvard University during the school year and tells stories of acing physics tests for example while the rest of her class is struggling. Despite Esther’s great academic success, she often feels over her head or out of place in these prestigious environments. She describes being uncomfortable with Doreen’s adventures in New York, or with the extravagance of The Ladies Day Banquet. Beyond just feeling out of place in the big city, Esther feels as if she’s not even qualified to participate in this internship: she doesn’t have the same certainty about her career and future that so many of the women around her do. Esther’s boss at the magazine, Jay Cee, only makes Esther more uncertain about her path to becoming a writer. She is intimidated by all of the requirements and questions if she can handle another year in school.
The pressure placed on Esther by her scholarships and opportunities that she can’t afford to lose heavily weigh on her in school and in New York. By this point in the book she has placed all of her self worth in her academic success and in the hands of various admissions committees. Esther leaves New York without the sense of direction that she would have wished to have gained. She still carries her obligation to please the scholars like Philomena Guinea, who have invested in her potential, although now she has no idea what she can do to achieve this.
Everything falls apart when she returns home, to the suburbs of Boston, and finds that she has been rejected from the Harvard summer writing program that she had applied to. This was one of Esther’s first times facing a big rejection. Her mental state and lack of direction after New York, combined with this rejection were devastating. New York only left her more uncertain as to her future as a writer, and so she had placed all of her trust into her reliable academic success. Esther had counted on getting into this program, and facing the realization that she would be stuck at home, in the motionless suburbs for the rest of the summer, left her at a new low point. Esther placed all of her self worth into this program and had put so much pressure on herself to make the most of these once-in-a-lifetime scholarship opportunities that these very scholarships were the direct cause of her depression.
Skipping forward a little, Esther is now in a pretty fancy, private mental hospital, under the scholarship of poet Philomena Guinea, the same person who had sponsored her college education. In the past, the pressure from this scholarship, and the need to make the most of it would have been extremely overwhelming. With Esther’s scholarship to the mental hospital, it was different, she felt a sort of numbness to it that she never had before. Near the start of chapter 15, Esther says “I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat–on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok–I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air”. Esther realizes that this obligation she feels to please people like Mrs. Guinea is what places the Bell Jar onto her. Esther feels trapped by everyone's expectations for her to be something that she’s not. A big step in Esther’s path to recovery and her coming of age is the creation of a healthy relationship with her academic success and scholarship.
Hi Sahnan! I definitely see the connection between Esther's attachment to scholarships and her eventual mental decline. I think this is a problem in the modern day as well: people derive their sense of self-worth through academic accomplishments, which is unhealthy and unsustainable. For better or for worse, Esther seems to have detached herself from the academic attachment.
ReplyDeleteIt might seem a trivial distinction, but I think it's important to note that Esther does not attend Harvard as an undergraduate--although she does get to go to the Yale prom, thanks to Buddy Willard. The summer writing program she'd applied to and been rejected by is at Harvard, and she has to cancel her plans to share an apartment with her friend Jodi in Cambridge (which is probably how Harvard got into your mind). Plath never specifies the college Esther attends, but it's clearly an all-women school--Plath herself attended Smith, and most readers have viewed her college in the novel as a thinly veiled version of Smith College. Given Esther's sense of herself as "sheltered" in her artificial bubble at college ("Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort"), and the consequences we see throughout the novel of this gender-segregated education (as with Holden), it's important to be clear that she goes to school in an all-female environment. For example, she is dismayed when she first learns of Buddy's (and society's) hypocrisy when it comes to women's sexuality--and "all the girls" on her dorm floor just tell her that's how it is and there's nothing she can do about it. She feels no particular "sisterhood" or solidarity with other women at college--the culture at Smith, and in the country at large, was just on the cusp on some major changes in the 1960s and 1970s, but we have to understand Esther's experience as grounded in the pre-second-wave-feminist 1950s.
ReplyDeleteSahnan, you do a great job of illustrating how Esther's success and the pressure she feels from her achievements weigh heavily on her. It’s interesting how you show that, despite excelling academically, she struggles with uncertainty and feels out of place. I think you captured well how her identity becomes entangled with these external expectations, and how that creates a lot of internal conflict for her. The way you explain her realization about the pressure she places on herself is a compelling part of her journey. It’s a thoughtful analysis of how success, when tied too tightly to self-worth, can be more destructive than empowering. Well done.
ReplyDeleteIt's ironic that what should be Esther's biggest source of pride becomes one of the factors leading to her mental deterioration. I think it's a sign that Esther especially ties her self-worth to external validation, especially with the rapidly approaching crash after she was rejected from the summer writing program. It also ties in with the general trend of traditionally "helpful" things harming her.
ReplyDeleteHey Sahnan, nice job describing how scholarships weigh heavily on Esther. It's interesting that Esther feels such a desire to pursue them, as Esther herself notes that the public university that her mother teaches at is in some ways better than the prestigious school she goes to. Esther could have gone to that school and lived a more stress free life while also getting a good education. I wonder whether Esther's drive for getting scholarships and feeling that she is on the top was from herself or her parents, as I wonder what stopped her from following this alternative path. Nice post!
ReplyDeleteHi Sahnan! I really like how you followed the entire story through Esther's scholarships--it really goes to show how prevalent they were in Esther's life. I think this aspect of the story is particularly interesting because many Uni students can relate to Esther's continuous chasing of academic excellence and Esther's story acts as a warning to those going too deep.
ReplyDeleteHey Sahnan, I really liked how you highlighted the connection between Esther’s academic success and her sense of self-worth, especially how the pressure from scholarships and expectations pushes her deeper into her depression. The contrast you pointed out between Esther’s reaction to the scholarship for college versus the one for the mental hospital was great. Good post!
ReplyDelete