What is in the spring of your life if the spring of a life refers to your first twenty years of your life? The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel by Silvia Plath, describes Esther Greenwood's harsh spring in her life. Narrating in the first person, Esther recounts her experience of mental breakdown in descriptive language, helping readers visualize what she sees and feel her emotions. The novel is set in New York and Boston in the early 1950s, when women's roles were limited to that of servants. The repression of the role of women in American society during the 1950s and other influences such as her lack of self-confidence, her hesitations, her mother, and her feminist viewpoint seem to affect her mental breakdown. Like most young adults, Esther, a nineteen-year-old student for a year, also struggles to choose her career after college due to the repressed social conditions for women and her lack of confidence in her. In chapter seven, she adds up the things she's not good at. Plath uses symbolism to demonstrate what Esther is unsure about. She doesn't know how to cook unlike her grandmother and mother. As cooking represents domestic work and women were expected to do housework especially in this era, she expresses her uncertainty about being a good wife and mother. Plus, she doesn't know shorthand, which means hands-on work. Esther mentions that her mother kept telling her that she needed to learn shorthand to get a job despite having a bachelor's degree in English, because women found it difficult to succeed as professionals in their careers at that time. Widowed and raising two children, her mother had to manage the family finances. Therefore, her mother emphasizes a practical point of view in terms of ca...... middle of paper ......... quite due to the clouds of her life as a widow, emphasizing the practicality of career and the acceptance of irregularities in society. I saw a dandelion in full bloom between the cracks in the concrete. A dandelion's spores look like a large flower if seen from a distance, but a dandelion embraces many spores. This makes me think that a dandelion breaks its body into several pieces to survive. Again, I saw success in the spores overcoming the pains of torturing their own bodies despite a harsh environment. Esther resembles Plath because The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical novel. However, even if Plath ends up committing suicide, no one can say that Esther will follow the same path as Plath. Esther can become that of a full-fledged dandelion. Works Cited Plath, Silvia. The bell. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Print.