When looking at the protagonist and narrator of The Bell Jar, Ester Greenwood, we can see that she is from a very privileged background and on the socio-economic scale upper or middle classed. Ester is a college student and is on a month internship writing for a magazine. Her and eleven other girls are staying in a luxury hotel where the sponsors of the trip fine dine and wine them and shower them with presents. She knows she should be having the time of her life but starts to question her abilities and pretty much everything.
From a Marxist perspective the way she starts to feel and why she experiences her massive downward spiral is down to how the economy is organised. She begins to feel the pressures that the sexist society in 1950's had on women. She was worried she didn't have enough ability and was worried but also unsure as to whether she would ever get married.
What's interesting about the book is that Sylvia Plath is actually writing about her experiences at college with an exaggerated fictional twist. Sylvia Plath, like her character Ester was very middle/upper class. This proves Marxist's theory that our social existence determines are consciousness because she is writing about herself and how her socio-economics effected her; the character.
