On 24 June 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), the landmark decision which ruled, on the basis of privacy, that a pregnant woman had a constitutional right to an abortion. Reversing 50 years of legal precedent, this deeply regressive political event has stripped millions of women of their bodily autonomy and their right to determine the course of their own lives. It has taken away their right to choose.

Freedom of choice is vital to the physical and mental health of women. It is also a complex liberty, as it often involves making painful decisions that cut women off from possibilities and potentialities in their lives.

In The Bell Jar (1963), published a decade before Roe, Sylvia Plath imagines female choice as a fig tree, full of ripe fruit representing the myriad roles a woman might pursue. The protagonist, Esther Greenwood, an aspiring academic, struggles with the cultural expectations of women in her time. Hearing a story of a doomed love between a Jewish man and a nun, who meet under a fig tree, she envisions the tree as a metaphor of possibility:

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 fig, for its plump shape and the rich, seeded texture of its pulp, is traditionally associated with fertility and abundance. The fruit holds symbolic significance in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as Adam and Eve clothe themselves in fig leaves (Genesis 3:7) after eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, leaving open the possibility that the fruit—first eaten by Eve—was not an apple, but a fig.

As Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar is widely regarded as a roman-à-clef, in which similarities between Esther’s voice and Plath’s biography are evident. In the passage, Esther laments that ‘choosing one meant losing all the rest’—a line encapsulating the reality of women’s lives before second wave feminism began to increase their opportunities and their capacity to navigate a life in which they might pick multiple ‘figs’. Plath, whose legacy of fierce talent and severe depression looms large in literary culture, lived and died with the constraints of womanhood without choice, committing suicide at the age of 30 in her kitchen as her children slept in neighbouring rooms. In the novel, Esther recovers her mental health and is freed from an unwanted engagement; the early stages of the novel indicate that she later has a child—one of the figs she wanted.

While is difficult to know, from Esther’s character trajectory, what figs Plath might have chosen, it is certain she would have wanted to be able to choose more than one—and, most importantly, on her own terms.