Infancy and Innocence: The Bell Jar In the Context of Pacifiers and Toy Rattles Meghan Edwards College

Babies: cute pink hats and shoes that seem unimaginably small and that new baby smell that signifies the beginning of a lifelong journey of parenthood and family. The birth of a new child can be the happiest occasion in a person’s life; however, to Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, it represents much more. Esther uses the image of a baby to paradoxically signify her attraction to death. Babies symbolize pure, new life (in Esther’s case, life beginning anew rather than a literal person being born into a new life) and Esther associates with it as such — she craves the pure, new existence that a baby’s birth signifies and consequently, the current, tainted, life she leads throughout the novel does not satisfy her, causing her to desire an end. Esther recalls the image of a baby in tangency to people and activities that she associates with purity such as baths and Buddy Willard and it is through this focus on the pure in her life that she not only craves it but feels isolated from society for not possessing it, altogether contributing to her deteriorating mental state.

To Esther, babies represent the thing she has the most complex relationship with: purity. Babies are new and fresh to the world,...