Sylvia Plath’s Fig Tree Analogy Goes Viral on TikTok
- Melchior Antoine
- Jul 28
- 3 min read
Sylvia Plath’s famous and rather morbid fig tree analogy from her novel The Bell Jar (published in 1963) has made its way to the TikTok algorithm. Apparently young people, in particular Generation Z, are attracted to the quote.
It first featured on TikTok in 2023; however, it was in 2024 that it reached a peak with trends such as “my fig tree.” This involved users writing their future life hopes and dreams on a fig branch image and reading them out loud. Here is an example of a fig tree analogy TikTok video:
So what is The Bell Jar quote about anyway? It presents a young female protagonist by the name of Esther Greenwood being paralyzed by life choices presented to her in the form of a bountiful fig tree.
Each fruit represents an equally attractive choice for her future life — writer, wife, traveller, Olympic athlete, etc. She doesn’t know which one to choose from as choosing one fruit means losing out on the other equally fair choices.
She watches in horror as each fruit overripes, become black, and fall off the tree one by one, while she sits at the root of the tree, starving to death. Here is the direct quote from the book:
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. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. 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 novel is about a young woman who suffers from depression. Jo Adetunji from The Conversation believes that the viral TikTok trend, which has turned the quote into a cutesy TikTok meme misses that point. The vast majority of those participating in the meme have a positive take on it.
They miss the point of the novel, which is that of a young lady feeling her life being closed in by mental illness. Even the cover art and title of the book suggests this depressing sense of things closing in. The cover image of the novel in some editions shows a young lady in silhouette trapped under a bell jar.
The fig tree analogy reflected Plath's own suicidal ideation
This type of cover art is a brutal metaphor showing how mental illness restricted the life of the protagonist Esther. This had disturbing parallels to the author’s own life, who suffered from mental illness and who ended her life by suicide shortly after the novel was published. If this wasn’t evidence enough to show that the bell jar fig tree quote isn't nearly as sunny as TikTok suggests, then you should consider the possible biblical allusion that inspired the metaphor from Mark 11:12-25:
The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. 13 Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. 14 Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it.
In short, it’s a poor fig tree that has been cursed by Jesus himself because Jesus was hungry and gets upset when the tree has no fruit. This suggests that Sylvia Plath’s protagonist and, by extension, Sylvia Plath herself felt her life being oppressed by a curse that could not be lifted.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, July 28). Sylvia Plath’s Fig Tree Analogy Goes Viral on TikTok. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/sylvia-plath-fig-tree-analogy |
