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