“It’s giving Fig Tree”, says a woman known and loved for producing tragic art about the female experience. Not Sylvia Plath, but Lana Del Rey. Lana was talking to journalist Hannah Ewens for her recent Rolling Stone cover. On her track “Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd?”, she returns to the line “When’s it gonna be my turn?” on the chorus, using it as a jumping off point to explore the pressure on young women to decide what they want out of life – a career or a family? Artistry or motherhood?
“It’s giving Sylvia Plath,” Lana says in that interview. “So many figs and if I don’t pick one first, they’ll all wither away and then there will be no figs to choose from”.
This is a very Gen Z retelling of a passage in Plath’s seminal book The Bell Jar; the part in which her protagonist, overwhelmed by the future unfolding in front of her, crumbles under the weight of expectation and possibility. Imagining herself looking out onto the metaphorical tree of life, Plath wrote: “I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
The 19-year-old protagonist of the bildungsroman, Esther Greenwood, laments her uncertainty over her future while on a summer internship in New York City. She later returns home and falls into what would today be considered a major depressive episode. The Bell Jar, the poet’s only book, turned 60 this January, while February marked 60 years since her death. But rather than becoming a relic of the distant past like some other contemporary youth culture books from the era which haven’t aged in quite the same internet friendly way – like Mary McCarthy’s The Group, or Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto – or relegated to ‘hidden gem’ status purely due to the passage of time (Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, for example), The Bell Jar remains an online cult favourite.
The fig tree analogy though, out of everything Plath wrote, has recaptured the attention of a new generation of readers. A lot of this – inevitably – has happened on BookTok. #figtree has 26 million views on TikTok, where creators post about their metaphorical life “figs” – the jobs and life paths they might take – with captions like “I’m afraid I’ll choose wrong and regret my life” or “I’m gonna take a bite from every last fig I can reach even if it kills me”. Others use the quote as a sound for slightly uncanny get ready with me videos, or break down the passage in close-readings to camera. (In the interest of full disclosure, there are also a lot of videos about actual fig tree maintenance.)
The cult status of the fig tree isn’t solely reserved for TikTok though. It also appears in tattoo form. Maybe you’ve seen it on an Instagram poetry account. It received a welcome boost last year, when Plath would have turned 90 (she died at 30), and a swathe of articles promoted her work to a younger, more online generation. LitHub explored the book’s autofiction legacy, a sort of precursor to XOJane personal essays and Annie Ernaux winning the Nobel Prize, and lamented that its creator had not lived to see its phenomenal, generation-spanning success. Read this novel if you’re “young and unhappy”, advised The Times.
But the latter is, unfortunately, what the fig tree, The Bell Jar and Plath herself have become, at least in the online world: a sort of Sad Girl patron saint. The writer and her work has become an aesthetic figure that lives in the realms of “female rage” scream compilations, femcelism and ironic trad Catholicism. To love Sylvia Plath on the internet is, a lot of the time, not an actual literary opinion, but a way to be seen as algorithmically tragic and beautiful. Since her death by suicide, she has always been seen less as an author and poet and more as a sort of chic-but-sad influencer. She has stans. Last year, around the anniversary of her death, an exhibition, Poets in Vogue, opened, showcasing an otherwise unremarkable plaid knee-length skirt she wore in Paris in the 50s.
But there are a growing number of fans trying to push back on Plath’s Saint of Sadness reputation, one that the algorithm is continuing to feed by turning the fig tree into internet shorthand for a general late capitalist feminist ennui. In October, to celebrate her 90th birthday, 300 fans gathered in Hebden Bridge for the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival to celebrate the writer’s work but, more importantly, to challenge misrepresentations of her heritage. In between writing workshops were discos playing Lana Del Rey and Stevie Nicks songs and – bizarrely – seances, as readers made the pilgrimage from across the world to discuss “over glasses of wine how the poet’s reputation might be rescued from stereotypes of the crazy, suicidal woman”, reports the New Statesman.
There’s an argument to be made that there’s nothing inherently wrong with seeing Plath’s work through this lens, if it gives younger women struggling with their own mental health someone to look to, somewhere to see their feelings reflected back at themselves and feel less alone — so long as we recognise it’s also so much more than that. The problem though, is finding the line between representation and misrepresentation, between solidarity and glorification.
“It’s not a book that romanticises mental illness, though. It doesn’t glamorise sadness,” writes Charlotte Arlin, discussing how the fig tree has been misinterpreted by the internet for Bustle. “The Bell Jar shows us immense pain, but it also shows us recovery. It’s ultimately hopeful. And yet we’re always quoting it out of context.” She discusses how, whilst the fig tree analogy is obviously relatable, it captures the crux of Esther’s depression in one paragraph. But that paragraph is then condensed even further by the FYP, and in the process loses all of its original meaning. “Because Plath’s work has become synonymous with pain and suffering, her name is watered down to nothing more than a tragic figure instead of one that, despite her suicidal tendencies, possessed profound hope,” Far Out Magazine says of the author’s online sad girl reputation.
The original meaning, which admittedly occasionally does crop up on TikTok being explained by BookTokkers, is also complicated by the fact that, in the book, Esther talks about the fig tree when she’s hungry. Once she eats, she’s much less dramatic and overwhelmed by life. She’s actually fine, tbh. Which is perhaps the most relatable part of the book. Once Plath’s protagonist takes one decision (to eat) and has a sandwich, she’s fine.
Even if we push past the overwhelming misunderstanding of the analogy, it would be easy to take our enduring love of the fig tree as depressing evidence that women are still pressured to be perfect and will always fall short of the impossible expectations society presses on them (this is Sylvia Plath after all). But there’s another way to look at it too. When The Bell Jar was published in the 60s, women were pushing the boundaries of newly felt freedoms, challenging the archaic gender roles they’d grown up with. The fig tree resonated with them because the world, more than ever before, was opening itself up to young women.
Six decades on, things are a little more complicated. The free love and equality of the 60s feels like a long-dead pipe dream. Today, the rights won by our predecessors are instead being rolled back and infringed upon. But that reality hasn’t left today’s young women jaded or browbeaten. The popularity of the fig tree shows that rather than being apathetic and content to accept our lot in life, we’re still a generation reaching out for more and yearning to grow, even if the future seems so overwhelming, we’re frozen under the fig tree. While Plath’s heroine might have despaired at the paths in front of her, today her conundrum has inspired a different kind of appetite for growth. A generation who will bite and discard every fig until they find one that tastes right, even if it takes a lifetime.