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Key Symptoms and Manifestations

Esther’s mental health struggles are depicted through a series of escalating symptoms:

• Emotional and Existential Detachment: Esther experiences a profound sense of anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure or excitement. She feels emotionally numb and disconnected from her surroundings, describing the world as being viewed through a distorting “bell jar” that traps her and stifles her ability to breathe. This metaphor is central to her experience of a suffocating depression.
• Loss of Function: She loses the ability to perform basic tasks she once excelled at. Her once-sharp mind becomes dull, she can no longer read or write, and she struggles with simple day-to-day activities like bathing and eating. This loss of function is particularly crushing for Esther, whose identity is tied to her intellectual and creative prowess.
• Insomnia and Fatigue: One of her earliest and most persistent symptoms is severe insomnia. Despite being exhausted, she is unable to sleep, which further exacerbates her mental and physical deterioration.
• Suicidal Ideation and Attempts: As her depression deepens, Esther’s thoughts turn to suicide. She makes several half-hearted attempts, such as attempting to drown herself in the ocean. These are followed by a more serious, calculated attempt to overdose on sleeping pills.
• Apathy and Hopelessness: Esther becomes increasingly apathetic about her future and sees no purpose or direction in her life. She is plagued by a sense of hopelessness and feels immense pressure to choose a path in life, but feels paralyzed by all the options, famously comparing them to figs on a tree she is unable to reach.

Contributing Factors

While her struggles are presented as a genuine illness, they are profoundly influenced by her environment.

• Societal Pressures: Esther feels immense pressure to conform to the contradictory expectations of women in the 1950s—she is expected to be intelligent and ambitious but also virginal, submissive, and domestic. This conflict between her own identity and societal norms contributes to her feelings of alienation and fragmentation.
• Trauma and Grief: The unresolved grief from her father’s death, which occurred when she was a child, is a background element that resurfaces throughout the novel, contributing to her heightened vulnerability to later disappointments.
• Disillusionment: Her experience as an intern in New York City, a world she initially idealized, proves to be unfulfilling and disappointing, leading to a sense of profound disillusionment that serves as a tipping point for her descent into madness.