Until the 1970s, American literature did not have a great many female heroines in its works of fiction, and too few of them had been created by women authors. We had Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Faulkner's and Sherwood Anderson's young girls and women; Hemingway left us the unforgettable Bret Ashley, but none of these characters came from the pens of women. Cather gave us Ántonia, but this heroine seemed to be an idealized romantic "other" of Cather herself. Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers gave us memorable figures, but who were they in relation to their authors? Perhaps the most personal, intimate insights to come from an American woman author had come from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and from Kate Chopin in her novel The Awakening, a piece relegated to obscurity until recently. But there were no women counterparts to Huck Finn; there were no women Gatsbys or Holden Caulfields, or Christopher Newmans.
There were, in short, no women writers creating women characters who spoke their minds; we had no parallels to Jane Austen's Elizabeth; no American women were telling their readers what it is/was like to grow up in this vast and complex culture. If we are to understand the American female, using the idea that women themselves tell us what their lives are like and how they think and feel, we certainly need more fictional characters with more candor and insight and the courage to reveal themselves.
It is probably this vacuum in American literature that made The Bell Jar's protagonist so popular. Esther Greenwood: she is a college girl, a good student, a talented writer, and a fashion magazine contest winner; she is the well-bred oldest child in a typical family with two children, a clever games player, a semi-liberated budding intellectual, and a sexually confused late adolescent. Finally, she is a mental patient.
