Dedalesther

So far a lot of people have been talking about the connections between Esther Greenwood and Holden Caulfield, which makes sense. After all, the two characters have very similar experiences of alienation in New York City at around the same time, and they describe many of the same problems. However, I also think it might be worth looking at the ways in which Esther compares to Stephen from Portrait, because despite their different settings I think their personalities have a lot in common. More specifically, both of them are academic prodigies who must find a way to reconcile themselves to the end of their formal education, and the social independence to come. In particular, they are different from Holden in that both struggle more (or at least tell us more about their struggles) with their internal identity than with the failings of the outside world.

It would be an understatement to say that Esther and Stephen have difficult relating to the people around them. Neither character is able to have anything like an easy rapport with even their supposed friends -- Esther seems to have nothing to say to Betsy and is mostly interested in Doreen as an observer, while Stephen mostly takes social interaction as an opportunity to lecture (at least once he's grown up). Both of them yearn for a real connection with others, but have difficulty expressing their "true" selves, in part because they are afraid of the social consequences of revealing their reservations about the conservative society around them. Together with the fact that writing is what has always come naturally to them and what has earned them praise since they were young, this perceived inability to express themselves authentically to others may be what leads them to seek expression through art, and to identify themselves as artists.

Despite the probable similarities in motivation for Stephen and Esther to identify as self-consciously "artistic," the ways in which the two characters express this identity are remarkably different. The obvious example is the fact that Joyce feels free to proclaim his character as an artist in the very title of his book, and to draw connections with such famous artists as Lord Byron and Dedalus. His belief in his own nature is expressed loudly and ecstatically, on almost every page of the last few chapters, and the book closes with Stephen at the cusp of finally living up to the ideal to which he has compared himself for the entire novel, with fully-defined aesthetic beliefs and the journal entries which presumably began the process of writing Portrait itself. By comparison, Esther is much more hesitant to call herself a poet. Despite having created what appears to be a much larger body of work than Stephen's by the time of The Bell Jar, and clearly harboring the desire and talent to write professionally, she has difficulty seeing herself outside of the preconceived "figs" for which she has been prepared. In contrast to Stephen's driving devotion to poetry, Esther's dreams seem to take one of two: either she gives up literature entirely to live as a housewife, or she is allowed to engage with it only the academic setting, as a professor writing long essays about Joyce (interestingly enough). Unlike Stephen, who feels empowered to do as he pleases, and define himself however he wants, Esther feels hemmed in by existing norms. While her collapse towards the end of the book is probably attributable to many causes, one of the biggest must be her inability to imagine a future in which she actually gets to do the one thing she actually wants to do, and the way in which her very ability to do so is slowly taken from her as she loses her ability to read and write.