In the Amazon, as Esther lies in bed recovering from food poisoning, she picks up a magazine story which revolves around a fig tree. It’s a tale where a Jewish man and a nun meet under a tree, touching hands as they watch a bird hatch. When their relationship ends, and Esther comes to the end of the story, Esther draws a similarity between her relationship with Buddy Willard and the two characters of the story: “We had met together under our own imaginary fig-tree, and what we had seen wasn’t a bird coming out of an egg but a baby coming out of a woman, and then something awful happened and we went our separate ways.”(Plath 55) However, her version is already corrupted: the magazine story depicted new life emerging gently, whereas Buddy showed Esther a clinical and traumatic childbirth. In a sense, her “fig tree” was poisoned from the beginning. A couple of pages later into the story, as Esther sits in the UN building surrounded by people she perceives as genuinely talented, the fig tr...