In chapter seven of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), protagonist Esther Greenwood imagines her life branching out before her like a green fig-tree. Each individual fig on the branches represents a different “wonderful future” – a family, a successful career, romance, travel, fame, etc.
High-achieving Esther has innumerable figs she can choose from, yet she envisages herself “starving to death” in the crook of the tree because she can’t make up her mind on which of the figs she should choose.
Her indecision stems from the knowledge that choosing one wonderful future means losing out on the other, equally appealing opportunities. She wants to experience all of them, but knows she cannot, and, in the end, spends so long deciding that every single fig rots and falls to the ground, dead.
