The friends and family Esther comes across test her disposition to deny the sexist influence of the 1950s. The men that Esther meets put her down and make her defiant towards having a submissive nature. Through out the novel, Esther brings up her friend Buddy, whom she shared a shaky relationship with. His meninistic nature wakes Esther up to the double-standards society sets on men and women and the pressures for her to become a stereotypical housewife: “He [Buddy] becomes the means through which she discovers make refusal to take female aspirations seriously, her own deep fears about motherhood, and the hypocrisy of the double standard” (Malmsheimar 23). Buddy attempts to suppress Esther’s want to be a writer and a free woman by bringing up his traditional values that he associates with her. He wants for Esther to accept her fate of being a housewife, but it takes him…show more content… All the stress forcing Esther to become a wife and mother builds up and causes her mental health to decline. Esther starts to lose her sanity and becomes swallowed by the madness around her similar to the many others: “The Bell Jar is about the way this country was in the nineteen-fifties and about the way it is to lose one’s grip on sanity and recover again. It is easy to say that insanity is the only sane reaction to that America…” (Scholes 4). Esther’s mental illness begins to become the only way for her to cope with the time period. She has so many restrictions and expectations put on her that she cannot handle all of it. Like others, Esther has the chance of recovery, but it builds into a fight to get to her goal of independency from societal pressures. Esther turns into a symbol of hope as she continues to fight the pressures surrounding her and shows part of the effects of these pressures, including maternity, on
