51 pages • 1 hour read
The Bell Jar
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
At the banquet, Esther uses a fingerbowl to clean her hands. She recalls the first time she ever saw one, at the home of her benefactress Philomena Guinea, a famous novelist whose scholarship money pays Esther’s way through college. At the time she mistook the small bowl of warm water and flowers for soup and drank the entire thing.
After the banquet Esther attends a movie premiere with the other interns but begins feeling sick. She leaves with Betsy, and by the time they reach their hotel both girls are throwing up. Esther shuts herself up in the bathroom and vomits until she faints. When she wakes up a nurse informs her that all of the girls who attended the banquet have food poisoning. The nurse puts her to bed and gives her a sedative injection. Esther wakes up for a second time to find Doreen by her bed. Doreen, perfectly well, tells her that all of the crabmeat salad at the banquet was contaminated with ptomaine.
Chapter 5 Summary
At seven o’clock the next morning Esther is awoken by a phone call from a man named Constantin, a simultaneous interpreter at the UN. Constantin is a friend of Mrs. Willard, the mother of Buddy Willard, Esther’s boyfriend. He offers to show Esther around the UN and take her out for lunch, and she reluctantly accepts. As she waits for lunchtime, Esther thinks of Buddy, a medical student who is currently in the Adirondacks recovering from tuberculosis. They grew up in the same neighborhood and she used to admire him from afar, but now that he wants to marry her, she thinks he is a hypocrite and is waiting until he recovers to end their relationship.
Esther reads a short story about a beautiful fig tree growing on a lawn between a convent and a Jewish man’s house. Each day the Jewish man and a nun from the convent meet at the tree to pick the figs, until one day they see a baby bird hatching on one of its branches. As they watch the bird emerge, their hands briefly touch. After that, a different woman comes out to pick the figs.
Esther is moved by the story and sees it as an allegory for her relationship with Buddy. She imagines them meeting under their own fig tree, but instead of a bird hatching they see a baby being born. She thinks of Buddy in his sanatorium in the Adirondacks and feels guilty. He has been writing her lots of letters about how doctors and writers can get along, but she recalls that two years ago he told her that poetry was nothing more than dust.
Esther remembers how her relationship with Buddy began. Their mothers are good friends, and one day he stopped by her house to tell her that he would visit her at college one day. In March he came by her dorms to say hello on his way to take another girl named Joan Gilling to a dance. Stung, Esther pretended that she had a date with two men from Dartmouth. Buddy gave her a letter asking her to Yale’s junior prom. At the dance, Buddy treated her with respectful neutrality, like “a friend or a cousin,” (61) but afterward he took her up to the Yale chemistry lab and kissed her. Esther was bored by the kiss but excited to tell the other girls in her dorm building about it.
Chapter 6 Summary
Esther recalls visiting Buddy at Yale Medical School over a long weekend. She stays calm while he shows her cadavers and the preserved bodies of fetuses but is disturbed by watching a live birth. The woman giving birth, Mrs. Tomolillo, is sedated with a strong painkiller and has to be cut open to deliver her son. Esther thinks that it’s “just like the sort of drug a man would invent” (66), one designed to make a woman forget the pain of childbirth and trick her into getting pregnant again and once more opening up a “long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain” within her body (66).
Back in his dorm room, Buddy asks Esther if she’s ever seen a man naked. She says no, and he asks if she would like to see him. She agrees and he takes off his pants and underwear. Looking at his genitals, Esther feels disgusted and depressed. She asks him on a whim if he’s ever slept with a woman, expecting the answer to be no. To her shock Buddy admits that while working as a busboy the prior summer a waitress named Gladys seduced him. Esther freezes up on the inside. She is less upset by the fact of Buddy’s sleeping with someone else than she is by his hypocrisy in presenting himself as a pure, innocent virgin. After returning to college she asks her fellow students what they would do if their boyfriends confessed to sleeping around, but they all reply that there isn’t much a girl can accuse a man of unless they’re pinned or engaged.
Esther asks Buddy what his mother thought of Gladys. Mrs. Willard is a traditionalist who often says things like “a man is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from” (72). Buddy’s confession makes Esther decide to dump him, but before she can do so he calls with the news that he has TB. Esther is relieved at not having to see him and tells the girls in her dorm building that she and Buddy are “practically engaged.” When she stays in the dorm to study on Saturdays, they all treat her kindly, impressed at her stoicism.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters further explore Esther’s feelings on social expectations, individualism and sexuality.
During her visit to Yale medical school, Esther watches is horrified by the way the birthing mother, Mrs. Tomolillo, is drugged and cut open. The whole process seems barbaric and patriarchal; Esther’s disgust highlights her skepticism of the traditional female role as wife and mother. The idea that women have a “corridor of pain” locked away inside them deeply disturbs Esther (66). The image of stored-away pain ties into Esther’s depression—her body, like Mrs. Tomolillo’s, has the capacity to make her feel blinding, all-consuming pain. Although Esther’s depression stems from brain chemistry, her experiences are also related to the way she is treated as a young woman in the 1950s. She sees femininity as tied to suffering and servitude because of the misogyny she witnesses all around her.
Esther’s feelings about Buddy approximate her feelings about the social expectations placed on women. Buddy presents himself as the perfect husband—intelligent, kind, and on his way to becoming a wealthy doctor. Based only on appearances, marrying Buddy should be a no-brainer. Indeed, Esther had idolized him from afar, but once he pursued her she was left feeling cold. Buddy fundamentally cannot understand Esther. He wants marriage and children and has little interest in Esther’s life beyond her ability to perform in the role of girlfriend and wife. He treats her desire for freedom as a passing phase and assumes that she will enjoy marriage and motherhood once she submits to convention. Esther believes that marrying Buddy would mean sacrificing her individuality. She holds him at a distance because he represents a path of conventionality that she both desires and scorns. Esther views domesticity and freedom of choice as mutually exclusive options. Although she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, she adamantly desires the freedom to choose her own path.
In addition to their emotional disconnect, Esther and Buddy lack sexual chemistry. When he gets undressed in front of her he does so in a dispassionate and detached way. Neither of them feel any particular desire to have sex with each other. Buddy is extremely close to his mother and wants Esther to mimic her passivity and unconditional support. By casting Esther in a matronly role, Buddy neutralizes her sexuality. Yet he is more than willing to sleep with Gladys, the “easy” waitress who he has no intention of pursuing seriously. This dynamic introduces the Madonna-whore complex. The Madonna-whore complex is a concept in Freudian psychology, the idea that men view women in one of two categories: the “Madonna,” a woman who is pure and lovable, but not a sexual being, and the “whore,” a woman who is sexually desirable but unworthy of respect or love. To Buddy, Esther is the Madonna, someone to be idolized but not desired. This idea will recur in Esther’s encounters with men and in her own view of femininity.
Esther harbors complex feelings on sexuality. She despises the double standard that allows men like Buddy to sleep around while holding women to strict standards of purity. Although she is a virgin, she enjoys feeling sexy and worldly around Buddy, and wants to claim ownership over her body and sexuality. She wants to defy social norms, but after she finds out about his affair, she feels betrayed and foolish, and her virginity begins to feel like a burden. She views her virginity as a defining factor of her selfhood and losing it before marriage as a way of cementing her identity and defying double standards. For Esther and all young women in the 1950s, sex comes with physical risks as well as social ones. An unintended pregnancy would be disastrous for Esther, who has no desire for children and can’t even take care of herself in her distressed state. Nothing is easy or fun for Esther—every aspect of her womanhood seems riddled with traps designed to rope her into an unhappy life.
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