forget about growing up.
In the first chapter of Little Women, Meg, the eldest, tells Jo, “You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine…you should remember that you are a young lady.” Meg is sixteen. Jo, who is fifteen, replies:
“I’m not!…I hate to think I’ve got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys’ games and work and manners!…and it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!”
In more recent books, there’s much more space around this question. Girls don’t feel the same instinctive trepidation about adulthood when its norms are less constrictive. In Anastasia at This Address (1991), the second-to-last book in Lowry’s series, Anastasia does worry about marriage—not that it will curtail her freedom, but rather that she might end up marrying the first person who’s really interested in her. “First of all,” her mother tells her, cracking a beer, “what makes you so sure you want to get married at all? Lots of women never do and are perfectly happy.”
But the instinctive aversion that our childhood heroines feel about the future dissolves eventually. When we see them grow up, they do so according to the tidy, wholesome logic of children’s literature. Laura Ingalls, Betsy Ray, and Anne Shirley all find husbands that respect them. Their desires evolve to fit their life.
* * *
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For the heroines that we meet in adolescence, the future is different—not natural and inevitable but unfathomable and traumatic. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), an extended study of this shift and its reverberations, nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood keeps encountering the void. “I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue,” she thinks. Her physical sight blurs as she counts telephone poles in the distance. “Try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”
The Bell Jar, published pseudonymously in the UK a month before Plath committed suicide, introduces us to Esther in the middle of her summer internship at the magazine Ladies’ Day. She lives in the Amazon, a fictionalized version of the Barbizon, the famous all-women residential hotel on the Upper East Side. The interns are having a whirlwind summer, posing for photo shoots and going to parties while trying to impress their editors and secure a professional future. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life,” Esther thinks. She “should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
Previous to this internship, Esther had constructed her identity around her intelligence, and the new worlds it broke open for her. But this era of precocity is coming to an end. She feels “like a racehorse in a world without racetracks.” She imagines her life “branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked….I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death.” Stuck at home, rejected from a writing seminar, she deteriorates. She gets electroshock therapy. She takes sleeping pills and crawls into a cubbyhole in the basement; they find her a few days later, barely alive.
As much as The Bell Jar is about a specific experience of paralyzing depression, it’s also about how swiftly the generalized expectations of female conventionality can separate a woman from herself. Early on, Esther dissociates when confronted with basic social processes. She watches a bunch of girls get out of a cab “like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.” She has a “terribly hard time trying to imagine people in bed together.” On her last night in New York, she goes to a country club dance, where a man named Marco leads her into a garden, shoves her into the mud, and tries to rape her; after she hits him, he wipes his nose and smears the blood on her cheek. Later on, she makes a bid for normality by deciding to lose her virginity. She gets fitted for a diaphragm (“A man doesn’t