I’m sure by now we’ve all encountered Sylvia Plath’s iconic fig tree metaphor, drawn straight from the pages of The Bell Jar and endlessly recycled into Pinterest graphics and TikTok audios. “I saw my 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,” the quote begins.
It’s no surprise that Plath’s metaphor continues to resonate so widely with young women, even 63 years after the novel’s initial publication. Particularly in a generation of infinite choice and endless scrolling, the fear of letting life pass you by seems to be universal. I often find myself worrying that as time passes, I may be letting my own “figs” rot at my feet.
However, there is an important distinction between relatability and romanticization.
Recently, there seems to be an increasingly common blurring of the lines between finding comfort in Plath’s words and using her suffering as a trend. Somehow, between Lana Del Ray lyrics and constant movie cameos, The Bell Jar has become “pop culture’s code for female sadness.”
This romanticization of Plath’s work, often more tone-deaf than celebratory, is exactly why the announcement of a new Hollywood Bell Jar adaptation felt… ill-advised.
Set to be directed by Sarah Polley and starring Billie Eilish, it seems unfathomable that the film will capture the complicated, often tormented inner dialogue of Esther Greenwood, which permeates the narrative.
But more importantly: should it?
Since seeing the headlines about Polley’s adaptation, I’ve found myself wondering more and more about which stories truly need to be transformed into blockbusters, and which don’t.
Though on paper Eilish and Polley read as the perfect duo of female melancholy (from Eilish’s distinctly dark pop music to Polley’s work on films such as Women Talking), the production risks not only sanitizing Plath’s work but also inappropriately romanticizing it.
Esther, a largely autobiographical character based on Plath’s own life, is defined by her visceral, unglamorous reality. She experiences the depths of clinical depression and undergoes shock treatments. All in all, the novel is an expressly unromantic account of a young woman’s mental illness, which at its core is incompatible with the conventionally packaged aesthetics of today’s media.
Trying to translate the source material into a “watchable” visual medium is not only a misguided pursuit, but one that has failed previously.
Ultimately, The Bell Jar doesn’t need a glamorous upgrade. It doesn’t need a soundtrack, a red-carpet premiere, or an A-list celebrity as the new face of Plath’s tragic character. The novel’s power and enduring relatability lie in its ability to inhabit the unromantic, uncomfortable space between the page and its reader.
Sometimes, the most respectful thing we can do as fans of a story is to let it exist in its original form. Not every fig needs to be picked. Some are meant to remain on the branch, just out of our reach.