Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar was originally published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and became tangled up almost immediately in the drama of her suicide. Writing during a time when stirrings of a greater feminist consciousness had just began to emerge, Plath exposes the realities and tensions problematizing women’s subjectivity and social agency. Told with blistering honesty and a vivid attention to detail, The Bell Jar offers readers and critics an unromantic yet bold perspective invaluable to achieving a better understanding of mental illness and its effects on the female psyche. It is a raw, unsettling book with flashes of brilliance drawn from Plath’s very own experiences as woman. Plath’s essential theme, is the protagonist Esther’s obsession with death linked to a worsening depression and abjection of others which she compare to suffocating under a bell jar. Esther’s predicament, more generally, is how to develop a mature subjectivity, as a woman, and to be true to that self rather than to conform to social expectations defined by the opposite sex. It is this quest that inspires and motivates me to explicate, through discourse, Plath’s introspective critique on arbitrariness of patriarchal value systems and the traumatic effects they incur female subjectivity and autonomy.