Being young and well educated does not help Esther much either. She knows enough to be bright and idealistic, has seen enough to be a bit cynical, and yet she has not had enough experience to temper this knowledge into wisdom. Worst of all, there are no survivors of the sort who can inspire her to struggle on. There are, unfortunately, no slightly batty, older, creative-type women around to tell her that there are lots of dangerous, interesting things one can try before deciding to commit suicide. Thus, Esther's idealism and cynicism only feed the "sour air" of her bell jar. They never lead to any truly outrageous acts or adventures. The loss of Esther's virginity is a dull, passionless event, safe within the confines of a math professor's apartment. One can only conclude that youth is certainly wasted on the young and that, yes, it is painful, but it is more a sickness of youth than a tragedy of youth because there is no Romeo and Juliet rashness of passion here. There is mostly just a loss of vision. Esther is no Joan of Arc. Nor in her sarcasm can she rise to the heights of a truly cynical youthful rebel. Even her "degeneracy" takes the form of just not bathing.
This barely trickling outlet of feeling is why Esther/Sylvia seems unable to come to terms with what her bell jar really means. Esther never truly affirms herself, and she never truly yields to herself either. She never says, "Here I am — take me or leave me" to anyone, and certainly never to herself. And she never accepts the ways in which she is like her mother, for example. (Of course, we must add, it is hard to affirm what one is when everyone is telling you to be something else. And why should a young rebellious girl yield to herself when she is so often forced to yield to other forces — the electro-shock therapy, for example?)
It is this superficiality in dealing with the underlying philosophical problems that actually feeds Esther's illness. And one of the major parts of this problem is not having control over her body, and not yet coming to terms with her body as a physical, animal entity that must be accepted. This is why the purchase of a diaphram is so important to Esther: it will allow her to be free of the fear of unwanted babies. But this simple purchase, fraught as it is with moral and social conflicts, does not ultimately solve or resolve the dilemma of how Esther feels about babies, nor how she feels about the purpose and destiny of her biological self. When she hemorrhages so badly from the loss of her virginity, we see that, indeed, the body is not always under one's control, and its functions and processes can easily extinguish one.
